Notes on the End of the Second Decade

“The Meme Decade” doesn’t ring from the mountainsides but it’s better than “the one when the terrorists knocked down those buildings in New York and we went to permanent war in two countries.” Also, emo. And screamo. American Idol. What a waste of ten years. We did much better this time around.

Check me out, coming in without a warning that I’m going to be talking about recent history, current events, and other volatile subjects in the course of this series of micro-essays. So let’s change the subject to a recent trend on Twitter that I find as silly as it is annoying, namely, “Leave a .GIF describing your [current mood, writing project, highest aspiration, etc.]”

Will it ever end? Maybe I should give up and start collecting these things so I can play along and promote my stuff. These writers’ lifts have helped my traffic, at least more than I’ve been doing to encourage it.

Nah. One thing I learned from my flirtation with doing podcasts is if I’m not 100% into it, it’s not happening. And if it does happen, it will be embarrassingly and insufferably lame. I’ll stick with my non-animated comment response memes. 

I confess. I watched and enjoyed American Idol.  The auditions at the beginning of the season were at times hilarious, pathetic, and heroic all in one-half hour. I rarely stuck around until the end of the season, though. It got boring once the initial contenders were shaken out and they did embarrassing theme weeks. Worse of all was when it became obvious whom the showrunners favored as the winner. It got stupid crazy obvious around the turn of the decade, and the celebrity judges, with the big exception of Steven Tyler—who had the class to be visibly uncomfortable as he watched his fellow judges undermine perfectly good contenders for the pre-selected winner—were worthless.

 

Speaking of collecting things...you can’t call it a “fad” if it’s been going on for nearly 20 years already, but what on earth is up with Funko Pop! big-head vinyl dolls? They took up appalling amounts of retail space in Barnes and Noble and Borders Books in the first decade of this century. Borders was gone in 2011, bless its memory, but those silly little things that look nothing like the characters they presumably depict save for the clothes under their giant, generic heads are still going strong. Why? How? Cabbage Patch Kids and Beanie Babies were better known across the culture and good for maybe a couple of years each before fading away, but these black-eyed, big-headed dolls have been around for over ten years already and show no signs of going away.

It is a persistent weirdness I’m not sure I want to understand. Let’s get out of here; this place gives me the creeps.

I recognized Buddy the Elf because of the costume, but how on earth does that thing on the right resemble Mariah Carey? Carey’s real-life bust and backside are at least as big, if not bigger, than her head, which renders this utterly nonsensical.

I’ve been reading blogs since the turn of the century. I remember having a good smirk at “journalists” for the Big Media outlets putting them down, because bloggers often did what journalists are supposed to do, but often don’t, hence the scare quotes. “Bloggers aren’t journalists,” sniffed the “journalists,” and me and most everyone else said, “Yes, and that’s why we read blogs.”

This stopped towards the end of the first decade when the poor dears finally got a grip on making blogs of their own. Of course, they would have you know they went to a top tier school and they’ve worked for all the name outlets and that’s why their blog is better than yours.

For me, and a lot of people these days, the smart writing is buried among posts on the chan/image boards, in alternating green and black text with a “>” to indicate the beginning of a paragraph. (Spaces in between grafs are profanely mocked and dismissed as “Reddit spacing.” Despite the apparent indifference to capitalization and punctuation, there are rules.) These boards are the descendants of old UNIX and other online “bulletin boards” from pre-Windows 95 times, but that’s not what’s of interest here. The old boards were strictly text-based. These are image boards now, begetting that very thing which defines the 2010s for those of us who spend way too much time online.

This informational graphic uses some of the earliest macros, some of which have managed to remain evergreen.

They’re generally known as “memes,” more technically (and therefore rarely) referred to as “image macros. We’ll stick with memes. From rage comics to the I Can Has Cheezburger kittehs (with their own peculiar spelling rules), to twisted motivational posters to familiar scenes from popular media, the twenty-teens has been the Decade of the Meme.

I always liked the jokes on Overly Attached Girlfriend and Philosoraptor memes. Unlike those two, however, the Condescending Willy Wonka meme in back never died.

As seen in the image just before the one above, they are an evolution of the infographic, with a touch of the one panel comic. Unlike the one-panel comic, though, text and image are inseparable. The image is generally that of commonly recognized scene from a television show or a movie, or, in the case of Bad Luck Brian, an infamously unfortunate photograph. The familiar image supports the text by way of immediately setting us up for the joke. Bad Luck Brian can’t get a break. Chuck Norris is the most absurdly strong human who ever lived. Conspiracy Keanu is going to ask a funny “What if __, and then ____, because _____” type of question.

You can knock these things back like tiny milk chocolate candies all day. I know, I’ve done it.

I regret not having stayed in the workforce long enough to turn in a notice that looks just like this.

The anons (anonymous posters) on the chan boards like to joke how they “memed” the U.S. president into office in 2016 because they had a better grasp of memetic (in the truest form of the word used) humor than their opponents. What makes the joke funny is they’re not entirely wrong. Most people don’t know who Pepe the Frog is, but he did his part. The fact that the humor-impaired “woke” opposition still loses all pretense of composure at the very sight of the cartoon and its spinoffs, Apu, Groyper, and Honkler, says much about the barely managed moral and political hysterics of this age. 

To recap, the 1950s had rock ‘n’ roll and (then new) suburban culture. The 1960s had the civil rights movement, psychedelia and long hair. The 1970s had prog, disco, punk, and New Wave. The 1980s were Reagan, synth-pop, and hair-metal, and computers in the workplace and at home. The 1990s were grunge, hip-hop, and boy bands and Internet shopping. The decade following...well, 9/11 and emo and blogs. 

The 2010s came up with a new way to communicate information, agitprop, and jokes. It’s not much, but it’s no small thing, either.

I’m not drawn to manga or anime, but its a big and fertile field for memes. The sentiment expressed here is close to my heart, so here we go.

As for the next decade, I believe we’re going to see the denouement of the decline of mediums, e.g., print, and worn-out intellectual properties, e.g., Star Wars, etc. It’s a column for another day, and I pick the craziest times to go on beer fasts.