Skepticism and the Angry Itch

Memetic Election Cycle: A Comparative Analysis

To my valued readers, this blog post will start off as a bit of a departure from the norm. Later, I will be adding some thoughts and reflections on my past two weeks in Montenegro, but first, I think it is wise to warn you that below you will find a very thoughtful and reflective piece on how I have come to understand the 2016 United States Election. Only this will be done by comparing a number of the candidates to our most cherished of U.S. exports: memes.

Exploding Kid

To begin the comparisons, we have the often off-putting yet undeniably eye-catching Donald Trump. Every time I see either Drumpf or the Exploding Kid set down into meme form, I shudder in horror yet cannot seem to avert my eyes. He seems always on the tipping point of combusting, yet each time I look, awaiting to see a Scanners-like head explosion, he remains, only on the precipice, near-explosion yet never erupting. Each time he takes on a new form, tries on a new ideology, he gets increasingly closer to detonation… or so we think. He never seems to. The inhuman disgust we have keeps us watching and waiting… I think I am forgetting for whom this description actually is for.

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Damn, Daniel

This comparison is quite simple. “Damn, Daniel,” albeit a very popular meme, is incredibly annoying. “Damn, Daniel” feels like a meme that has been shoved down our throats by powers beyond our control. It enters into new settings and the topic of conversation can often times change, yet it never fails to just feel like repetition. “Damn, Daniel” is not as harmful on the eyes in the way that “Exploding Kid” is, yet I cannot shake the feeling that I would be better off having not seen it.

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Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer

Here we have the critical fourth wall between meme and man being lowered. Ted Cruz, in his blustery, evangelical, socially conservative and venomous hate-speech masquerading as the moral higher-ground undoubtedly had some skeletons in his closet. Who could’ve predicted that he was, in fact, the Zodiac Killer? Honestly, I think that Ted Cruz being the Zodiac Killer made him more likable.

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Its dat boi, oh shit waddup

There are few tragedies this year greater than Bernie Sanders losing the Democratic nomination. One tragedy that trumps (I promised myself to remove this word from my vocabulary but its a lot harder than one can imagine) Bernie hitting the ol’ dusty trail was the too-short-lived-lifespan of Dat Boi. Dat Boi was appropriated and destroyed by a machine far more powerful than his self-propelled, single-wheeled, catchy-slogan’d campaign. And it happened long before the world could truly understand his brilliance. Dat Boi was with us for such a short time but in that short time he changed us all. He was gone before we had a chance to truly show our appreciation. RIP DAT BOI

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Harambe and Harambe

Which picture above is the true meme? Which one is reality? For those of you not familiar with the man wearing a boot on his head, that is Vermin Supreme, a presidential candidate. He has run for president each election cycle since 2004.  Harambe, the most beautiful of all memes, belongs alongside Vermin Supreme. It is a natural pairing and I have my reasons.

Recently in a piece published in the Atlantic entitled “How Harambe Became the Perfect Meme,” Venkatesh Rao writes on the incapability of Harambe’s death to have any “obvious villain.” Rao writes that “While every party with a legitimate interest in the original episode lost the plot within a few weeks, what was remarkable was that nobody gained control of it.” This quote is aimed at the aftermath of Harambe’s death but seems eerily befitting of the 2016 U.S Presidential Election season, don’t you think?

Rao continues: “No single voice can manage the optics of a rapidly trending story on Twitter And in most cases, there is no single party with the right mix of incentives to even try.” This is why Vermin Supreme has earned the right to be a serious contender for President of the United States: it is less about his platform because his platform is a void; a cipher. Where most candidates offer some narrative woven (in)delicately; some aperture of their truth, Supreme offers a universal inclusion of all narratives by his utter insistence on negating them.

Harambe as a meme is a response to the politicization of each narrative, each storyline, and the entrenched beliefs in the storylines we as recipients are unable to ignore. The callousness of the democratic and republican narratives to offer no overlap in their acidic campaigns has increased tension and incited violence and division in the U.S. In incredibly weirder and weirder times, with strange stories only met by stranger responses, I have to believe that Vermin Supreme will, ironically, restore some normalcy to the world. Harambe and Vermin Supreme are interchangeable in this final quote from the Atlantic:

“Harambe is post-everything. Post-normal, atemporal, post-cultural, post-ironic -choose your favorite descriptor of the zeitgeist. Harambe is an entropic heat death anti-narrative that can mean anything while signifying nothing. And perhaps that’s a good thing: any substantive and creative collective response to the weird, no matter how incoherent, is better than a fearful retreat to the normal.”

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Election season is in the air: both in Montenegro and in the United States. Having just sat through this past weekend’s elections in Montenegro, I became aware of a certain healthy skepticism from the people I have come to know. It is important for me to state that the views expressed in this blog are entirely my own and are not in any way affiliated with the Fulbright Program.

Over the past week, in my classroom, I have been emphasizing the importance of media literacy. We read in class an article on Amy Goodman, the senior journalist for Democracy Now! and her coverage of the North Dakota pipeline protests. Recently, Goodman has been charged by North Dakota for a series of bogus charges all based on the fact that she is not, in fact, a journalist. I used this as a way into discussions about the importance of information and what institutions are supplying us with information.

This lesson was all coming on the tail-end of the election weekend where two interesting incidents were referenced in the news. 1) 20 Serbian Terrorists were arrested in a plot to storm the parliament building over the weekend and 2) the two often-used messaging apps “WhatsApp” and “Viber” were blacked-out on the Sunday of elections for a period of hours. Now, neither of the events will I claim to have any mastery off or expertise on. However, the people who I spoke with, both in and out of the classroom offered similar reflections of blasé disbelief.

“Welcome to elections in Montenegro” one person said. Others were similarly skeptical about the timing of the first news article. It’s not as if these types of events are new to elections around the world. Just look at the U.S. elections and witness the convenience by which stories are released for purely political motives. It is nearly impossible to know what  lies we are meant to believe.

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Other than in the classroom, the past two weeks have been eventful. I’ve had my first two creative writing workshops and a presentation on Hispanic Heritage Month where I made tacos. I have been feverishly responding to emails from students in an attempt to be “available” professor. I have responded to nearly 80 students over the past week with individual comments and recommendations for their upcoming presentations.

Taco Wednesday at the American Corner

My Workshop in progress

I had an interesting conversation the other night with the wife of a man who works at the U.S. Embassy. Turns out, in the rarest of chances, she was an alumni of none other than UMass Boston. But she graduated from the school a long time ago back when the University was small and situated near Mass General. We discussed the issues of diversity in Montenegro and the feigned belief of inclusion.

You see, being an Indian-American, she has been mistaken several times as a Roma (or part of the “Gypsy” population) in the country. Montenegro, for all of its diversity of people from within the surrounding area, is still relatively monochromatic. The Roma population are barely even citizens as you only see them in the city as children begging for money (which you’re told not to give them any as they are merely funding organized crime) or on the outskirts of the cities. Granted, the country is in its own recession but it seems that this population is vastly underserved on what seems to be due to racist and ideological reasons. And they are overwhelmingly ignored. So we came to an agreement of sorts to offer demonstrations on awareness at the University in Niksic at some point in the near future.

I know this blog post is lacking in the flash and flourishes of a man traveling around the region and seeing sights but it has been a very busy two weeks with a lot of improvised adjustments and each day of the week set aside for at least one major project or professional task to accomplish. I will hopefully be traveling to Kolasin in the very near future with some new friends who will show me around and make me a tequila drinker for the night.

I’ll place a few pretty pictures here for your viewing pleasure but I didn’t take all that many these past few weeks.

I don’t think he wrote that…

Montenegro is obsessed with babies. If babies could run for office, they’d win.

Smokey day near my apartment

Until next time!

TM