Meme! Meme! Meme!

Memes are perfect for the extremely limited things they can do.

Or as my Da usedta say, prolly swiping from mid-20th century comedian Benny Youngman Berle, they’re in pretty good shape for the shape they’re in.

If they weren’t limited they wouldn’t be easy and if they weren’t easy they wouldn’t be common and as they are both easy and common let us affirm the consequent and say they’re also limited.

They can do one or more of a few things and usually just one:

  • bumper stickery — ‘gladda meetchya’ quick joke rabbit pellets
  • cuteness — generally benign, but there is a problem with cute
  • political — literally stupidest, least welcome, mostly offensive
  • repurposed — and repeated (Willy Wonka, McKayla Maroney)
  • aphoristic — my preference to give and receive; possibly useful

Have heard it said memes are political compass tests only, unedifying, mere novelty, and coincident with tooth decay. One of those is made up but cd be harder than you think to pick which. The knock seemed to be they are not academic papers, which is, to be sure, true.

I prefer as I say the aphoristic — memes as visual aphorisms — and at first I wanted to say that those types are better in that form and I think those are the most interesting but this is because I want to see stuff from 87 diff angles and an aphorism helps me do that.

Aphorisms are more illustration than explanation (and then you have the other limitations of the meme — not lease of which are the other uses they can be put to, which can besmirch this highest and best use). Meme as a visual aphorism encapsulates a thing or moment but does not, mainly in the mathematical sense but also in an explanatory one, comprehend it. It’s a way of succinctly capturing some aspect but brevity a’course leaves a lot out.

The specific meme that brought these comments out was this one — — and the discussion that ensued got a bit boggy on whether this was a full version of the truth of the matter (it isn’t) and whether that’s a bad thing about memes (sorta, but only if you don’t accept ‘em for what they are, on which, q.v. the bulleted list above).

So, OK, yes. They’re highly limited. They’re memes.

Welcome to Manhattan.

+
The second key to memes — after accepting their limitations, as we do with other things we enjoy like parents and money and life — is whether one sees them as a conversation starter or ender.
The political ones are supposed to be an ender. The bumper stickers and cutesies are really neither but certainly no conversation is sought or expected, except possibly a bit down the line with the bumper stickers where one is allowed to ask, so what’s up with that knife forge your building in the garage? The cute ones just get an LOL as if this must said. Repurposed ones eventually become clichés and die out … replaced by others … which then die out … to be replaced by … OK? If we’re to hate those let’s start with written clichés as well and go postal on all of ‘em.
+
Memes as conversation starters are as good as any other and for the other uses are on our interweb social media world simply the toll we pay to ride the information superhighway.
So … the conversations.
Well, those carry their own freighted weight and, as with discussions per se can reveal cracks in our connectivity and that‘s not a 5G issue. Cracks can become fissures can become fractures or they can let the light in. Fractures can do that too, even.
Memes can themselves be connective but sometimes they are somewhere in the Venn dealio of a group monthly birthday cake at the job, bumping carts at Costco, and standing in line at the post office. The first you get rooked or don’t want store-bought icing not even for people one is vaguely aware of; the second you’re something like together but yeah it’d be good if everyone knew how to do it as well as you; the third, you’re all in it together but no one is having fun.
Then, too, we often send memes to people we already know — rendering all except the conversational aphoristic one moot … and it can still go wrong because if we know the person or hope they know us or at least what we are meaning here — for instance that the 7 Deadly Sins meme is about telling a story not writing a technical manual, may the latter’s tribe, or at least it’s online equivalent, increase, when the lovely red Kitchen-Aid breaks down or something goes wrong with the company’s content management system.
And telling only part of a story at that.
But fissure king-making and -toppling here can make for disconnect or at best irrelevance as well, and this does happen. If we know these folk we want to interact deeply or at least want to want to and memes might not be an way to go on that goal, swell as they can be.
It cd be that two Imagi Dei discussing the nature of deadly sin (the meme) and current cultural habit (the meme sending) seems axiomatically good and perhaps it even is.

But solo tangos suck.

 

 

Image: Wikimedia Commons by King of Hearts

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Functionally Illiterate Christian

Every few years I realize how wrong I’ve been. People who know me are faster on that, and even temporary acquaintances pick up the signals pretty quick, and I do the same for them. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again, the line goes. But this time it happened in …

Read More »

Sign Posts

The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm. The art consists in three things — the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician

Read More »

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

Duo

… More then says because he’s in prison and only has a coal with which to write he can’t respond fully to the view that one ought harm an evil man lest he cause even greater harm to such as are innocent and good. But He counsels us that even if it be our formal office to punish an evil

Read More »

Related

Covidomatic Libs

  Dear _____ , (supporter, donor, customer, friend, co-afflicted) In these _____ (unprecedented, challenging, dangerous, difficult) times, we know you’re _____ (standing strong, bearing up well, getting ripe, fingering the edge of the cleaver and gazing at your partner’s neck) and miss our _____ (plums, belly dancers, unmatched selection of fine wines, engine repair tutorials)

Read More »

Metered Sins

Poetry’s a sneaky bastard. All the time sidling up to one on false pretenses — ‘It’s just the one’ … ‘We won’t intrude’ — and they’re all lies damn one’s eyes! Lies-damned-lies and no need for statistics and the pile of warm laundry does not diminish and soon loses its warmth and begins to glower

Read More »

No Words

Silence is faith. Before God Before others When I was quiet with G___ and B___ and J___ — that was faith. When I am silent it is that. Silence before M___ or D___ on C___. Contentment in solitude Acceptance of opposition Okayness in life going ‘other’ No wife or woman Prayer. These are faith. + Faith not:

Read More »

More Research Necessary

A report from the lab — She’ll talk sometimes, make an endless series of noises with inflections and rhythm and pauses. Or she’ll just scream for as long as she can. — this from my son, the father of the girl in question, and questioning. Hmm, I said, I still do that. But for she,

Read More »