The Left Can’t Meme

The Left Can’t Meme

©2019  Ross Williams

The political cartoon officially dates back to the early 18^th century England, and is associated with the satirical artwork of William Hogarth.  I’d be willing to bet a bottle of my home-made mead, though, that archeologists will eventually turn up a caricature of Akhenaton on some obelisk mocking him for his Ethiopian policies.

Most early political cartoons were self-published.  They were cut from wood or, more commonly, wax, rolled with ink, and pressed onto leaflets ready for distribution among the hoi polloi.  They were slid under the windshield wipers of the day.  The better of these satirists were published in newspapers.

Then the Interwebs happened.  With it came a new form of artwork called the meme, a picture or short video clip over which is superimposed captioning or other images.  The internet meme is, by its nature, self-published.  Like political cartoons, their purpose is to satirize and otherwise mock something or someone, and usually has a political bent.  The internet meme is the 21^st century incarnation of the political cartoon.

Because of the nature of the internet, and the self-involvement of those who play on it, there are − almost literally − a zillion memes.  I don’t meme, myself.  I’m willing to allow the millions of Pepe’s in the Kekistani Army to pull the weight; they’re much better at it.  Though of the half-zillion memes I’ve seen, most are somewhat amusing.  Thousands are actually clever.  A few hundred are profound.

As with political cartoons, to be effective, to sway an audience, a meme must be at least amusing.  Their purpose is to mock.  Mockery requires some form of humor to convey the message.  Without humor, the message is indistinguishable from self-righteous pontification.  Sanctimonious sermonizing alienates the audience targeted for swaying, and annoys all but the acolytes already swayed.  In short, it preaches to an ever-dwindling choir.  Witness late-night “comedy” and its ratings.

But − and this is critical − virtually all of the memes that are minimally humorous derive from what is often, and somewhat disingenuously, described as “the right” side of America’s political spectrum.  This means, as it’s commonly reduced: The Left can’t meme.

There’s a very good reason for that: they don’t have the intellectual tools.

Political satire must use some form of humor.  Doesn’t matter if it’s a hand-carved wax stamp of English Parliamentary foolishness, or a thirty-second video clip of Trump taking out CNN in WWE fashion.  Humor, in order to actually be humor, must be offensive.  Because the Left − with all the piety of a Borgia Pope − views anything offensive as morally out-of-bounds, they are effectively humorless.  They wouldn’t know a joke if it bit them on the ass − and that frequently happens.

And because they live in this sour, frowsy, self-imposed intellectual Elba, they cannot meme.  They come across as whiny and bitchy almost every time they try.  If you can’t take a joke, you can’t give a joke [again, witness late-night “comedy”].  And if you can’t give a joke, you can’t meme.

Being unable to take a joke led CNN to shooting itself in both feet and several other, and far more vital, body parts in the middle of 2017.  How dare someone politically mock the media giant as being taken down by Orangeman?!   Rather than simply acknowledging − ha ha, grrrr − that they and Donnie Combover have been engaging in a Clash of  Narcissistic Titans for the hearts and souls of the American Voter and that President Cheeto was currently winning with his Fake News troll, CNN got its butt firmly up on its shoulders and decided to ‘out’ the creator of the clever video clip.  As extortion by a multi-billion dollar player in the [ahem] neutral press is always seen as good sportsmanship, Kekistan revolted and CNN − to the degree it was still possible − lost even more credibility.

Even when the Left tries to meme, they fail − utterly and pathetically.  Their attempts to meme usually blow up in their own faces.  They couldn’t be mocked better or more effectively had “the right” done it to them.  Citing Poe’s Law, many actually believe that the book at the link just above actually is a “right wing” roast of the morose Left.

Be that as it may, and it truly may, we have a presidential election coming up.  In this election, there will be two camps of the Usual Suspects hectoring and haranguing on behalf of their team.  Both teams will attempt to sway the Undecided, to conquer, as it were, the vast Middle Earth battlefield.  Among the weapons at their respective disposal is political satire.  The solipsistic left has late-night “comedy” with its boring, tautological choir-preaching.  The Right − and everyone else − has the internet.

Judging from the breadth of the satire available to each side, and the popularity it garners, the Right has air superiority.  In modern warfare, that’s just about all it takes.