Stupid finds a way.
Do you know about memes? They’re a way that the YOUTS communicate with one another, here, on-line. In the process of putting together this silly post—my RUH-SEARCH—I stumbled upon the fact that some people who are very acquainted with the concept of memes are also, somehow, not at all acquainted with how to pronounce “memes.” This has nothing to do with the rest of the post at all, it’s just that it made me laugh a bunch.
Here, for instance, is a woman on the Judge Judy program, trying to say “meme” approximately 143 times in seven seconds:
She was, notably, not holding a photograph of Mimi Rogers.
This one is far less cringe-inducing and more purely enjoyable, because it features someone who just signed a contract to play baseball for 12 years and $330 million who is also, by most appearances, something of a douchebag:
And then there’s Jim Nantz, saying “meme” wrong with all the clueless, confident bombast of a guy who has definitely also recently described his teenaged grandson’s haircut as “fly,” or his new “crib” as “tight,” and then the grandson smiled and smiled and wanted to die.
There is, of course, only one way to pronounce meme, you dolts!
Don’t @ me, bro.
Anyway, none of that is why we’re here. We’re here to discuss something much more important—a SpongeBob meme. Not just any SpongeBob meme, but one in particular: Mocking SpongeBob.
The above image is a freeze frame from a moment in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, wherein it is discovered that whenever SpongeBob sees plaid, he starts acting like a chicken. So the above image is supposed to be SpongeBob-as-chicken, but it also very much looks like something else—it looks like SpongeBob is being kinda…derpy. But there’s something about the hand—bent at the wrist and placed on his waist at just such an angle—and the way he’s leaning forward, that makes it look like SpongeBob is being performatively derpy. So while in the context of his show, SpongeBob may be involuntarily chicken-ing, out in the wide, wild internet, SpongeBob is pretending to be extra dumb while repeating what you just said in a dumb voice. He’s Mocking SpongeBob, and he thinks you’re stupid.
I look at this meme, and I just see SpongeBob acting retarded. I mean, that’s clearly what he’s doing. I’m not saying that to be transgressive, that’s just my frame of reference for the image. SpongeBob is mocking, yes. And in another era—the era of, say, ten years ago, or so—SpongeBob would be calling you retarded. I’m not here to pine for the good ol’ days. This isn’t some long whine about how things were better when we could just call things “retarded” with impunity. But it seems clear to me that Mocking SpongeBob is a perhaps slightly-evolved iteration on a theme—the theme of calling other people stupid, something a lot of us used to do with “the r-word.”
Aside: This is not to say that the prescriptivists trying to police every little bit of innocuous language out of the lexicon, such that all communication is reduced to lightly making spoon-indentations in cooling oatmeal, are correct in their efforts. Just that shifting linguistic mores are mostly natural and fine, and less strictly-speaking “progressive” than naturally cyclical. Most of the examples in the linked post are—if you can find it in your heart to forgive me the expression—absolutely batshit crazy.
There’s a clever little shift at work in the deployment of this meme that I think takes some of the potential politically-incorrect sting out of its usage, that essentially allows it to pass through one’s conscience without setting off any of the WOKE alarm bells. And that’s the fact that the person speaking in the alternating-caps SpongeBob voice is reliably the one being the moron or the jerk.
So while SpongeBob may well be doing the mocking, the meme is usually deployed in such a way that the person doing the mocking is the subject of the derision of the meme. In this way, the meme inoculates itself against any charges of doing the thing it is clearly doing. SpongeBob mocks, but the meta-audience is laughing at SpongeBob—SpongeBob is the one using derp-face, he is the one acting retarded, he is the one recognizably transgressing in a way that we no longer find acceptable, all in service of being a jerk.
We’ll always find a way to call stupid things stupid. Calling stupid things stupid is a moral imperative, a way to reinforce the things we want more of and disempower the things we don’t. It’s good! Sometimes it’s mean, sure, but what are we going to do, end mean? If we can point out stupidity without unnecessarily, or even inadvertently, hurting a bunch of people, all the better. But I think it’s worth pointing out the light hypocrisy at work just below the surface, almost as a way of trying to bridge the considerable gap that exists between the empathy-ravaged PC police—worried that every distinction noted is a micro-aggressive act of othering violence—and the loudest jackasses you know, who think their freedom of speech is abridged because they don’t feel comfortable screaming “RETARD” whenever they want to.
When I look at Mocking SpongeBob, there’s a “retarded” thing going on, there. (Good for you, if the thought has never occurred to you, I guess!) The light hypocrisy—which I think is barely legible—is the feeling that underlies the popular use of the meme, that “It’s ok to do the thing, as long as we’re not actually saying out loud the thing that we’re doing.” It may be unfair, it may not hold up to examination, but I think there’s something important there, something that speaks to a truth that exists in the minds of the anti-PC crowd. Something that says, “we all do it, you just don’t say it out loud, and you’re no better than me.” To borrow from myself:
I think this comes out of a peculiar sort of reductive nihilism—a specific sort that I first noticed in very redneck-y poor white people, but I recognize more and more elsewhere, now. They believe they have discovered the absolute base, terrible nature of our true humanity, and have no illusions about it. Everyone is just another shit-stain human being. None of us are any better, all of us are utter shit with nothing to redeem us. To pretend otherwise is just the false, politically-correct nonsense of “putting on airs.”
“You ain’t no better than me, because none of us is any better than our absolute worst selves,” they believe. All of us just crabs in a big ol’ bucket.
“So don’t tell me I can’t use the word retarded, while you’re out here using a derp-faced sponge to say the same thing,” they’re saying. Do I need to point out the ways I think they’re wrong? The way the vague, cultural, unspoken hypocrisy I’m seeking to identify is utterly subsumed and overrun by their bleating absurdity? Fine.
But what makes it especially weird is the seeming contradiction that even in the self-induced forced word-belchings of unvarnished “truth” that come pouring forth whenever he is in front of a microphone, he is often speaking around whatever it is he is really trying to say, allowing his audience to fill in the final (usually terrible or absurd) blank for themselves. How is this anything but the same cutesy political bullshit we’ve come to expect from the same politicians he and his supporters rage against, but dialed back to the intellectual rigor of a third-grader? Trump isn’t some bold teller of great truths--he walks right up to the unspeakably dumb thing and then doesn’t say it, and scoffs at you later for appropriately finishing his sentence. Trump is a bleeped expletive, spelled f**k on the page for all the delicate sensibilities in the audience, then ostentatiously, performatively offended when you read his unedited words aloud back to him. For a man who claims to be offended by political correctness, he is stridently politically correct, usually leaving out the wherever or the whatever or the whoever, letting what’s left just unsaid fester in the angry and aggrieved boils of his audience. He has taken the admonition of “protesting too much” as a schoolyard challenge, assigning his own worst tendencies and insecurities to the enemy, whoever it might be for the moment. Crooked Hillary says I don’t have the temperament to be Commander in Chief, he’ll say, well let me tell you, Hillary Clinton is the one that doesn’t have the temperament, he’ll roar, flushed.
It’s a weird lie, that Trump tells the truth, because he doesn’t even pretend to adhere to it, just treats it like a self-reinforcing identity--that he tells the truth because he is a person that just tells the truth, so what he says must be true. Except when it isn’t, when he’s obviously joking, when you just took him too seriously, when you didn’t catch the obvious sarcasm. He didn’t mean that Megyn Kelly was bleeding from her wherever, but just her nose. Honest. He wasn’t really stroking the infantile insurrectionist fantasies of over-armed man-babies, he just thinks they’re an impassioned bunch that should use their guns to exercise their First Amendment rights, nothing more. Honest. He doesn’t really think Barack Hussein Obama founded ISIS, you idiot, even when he says that’s precisely what he means, over and over again, after being given the opportunity to walk it back, over and over again. Honest.
Now to leap from the firm outer edges of this half-baked take and into the gooey, uncooked center—remember the Republican primary debate stages, way back in 2015? Imagine if Rick Perry or Rand Paul or Rick Santorum or some other hopeless, never-going-to-be-President idiot on that stage, after Trump got done with 90 seconds of incoherent “truth” telling, the crowd’s astonished laughter dying down, imagine if one of them had scoffed into his hot mic, “this fuckin’ retard.” Trump never would have been president. Perry or Paul or whoever wouldn’t be president, either (and rightly so), but the stupid balloon would have been punctured, the air let out by a simple, ugly truth everyone knew but none dared speak in the language he and his supporters would hear. Instead we got snooty liberals calling him Drumpf, and snooty conservatives like David Frum and David Brooks wringing their hands and declaring themselves oh-so-scandalized. There will always be a nicer way to call someone stupid. Sometimes nicer doesn’t get the point across.
This goddamn meme is undefeated, and undefeatable.
