I hate mean memes and mean meme-makers most of the time. But when they target something I hate even more, I will pivot—without apology.
In 2008, during the Obama v. McCain election, I was writing a blog for The New York Times—and although the campaign had quite a lot of negative advertising back and forth, the meme-o-verse had not expanded from anti-matter into the black hole it is today. Sarah Palin was ready-made for ridicule, yet the satires and insults were, in retrospect, more “civil” than they’ve become today. The word meme had not yet taken over the vernacular, and social media was not yet overrun with deepfakes (as opposed to shallow fakes?).
Back then, renderings of candidates in absurd or embarrassing situations were distributed via email or on websites dedicated exclusively to Photoshop hijinks. By the 2016 presidential election, memes had migrated from listservs and email to the internet and the cloud. Now memes go viral with epidemic fury.
I blame this on Donald J. Trump. His brand of insult campaigning certainly gave many others license to verbalize and visualize malicious idiocy more than during previous electoral brawls. Dirty tricks were not invented by Trump, but the critical mass of Trumpist rhetoric arguably ignited more rabble-rousing vitriol than I can ever recall. Nonetheless, feel free to challenge my (perhaps myopic) historical overview or oversight.
Today, anything can be a meme. I’m still not a fan of memes, per se, but I am a fan of Adrian Wilson’s mischief. He is an A+ trickster, parodist and satirist. He effectively gloms onto a current phrase, word, notion or idea and transmutes it into gags. So, from time to time, I’ll publish his more memorable memes in this space as they strike my (soon to be more discerning) fancy, if only as momentary zingers. These, below, he calls “no-brainers.”
