By Colby Malsbury
I had an illuminating experience on Twitter not too long ago.
In keeping with the site’s ongoing mission to be your go-to source for 24/7/365 narrative incubation, I tweeted out the statement ‘I’ve never heard of Ivermectin causing a stroke or heart attack.’ Said entirely in earnest, mind. It was apparently received as such, as it garnered over a hundred likes, if that kind of facile approval means anything to you.
Well, an elderly woman took umbrage with that….though not in the way you might expect.
She proceeded to tell me to ‘laugh if I want’, but Ivermectin had brought her elderly husband back from the embrace of terminal Covid a mere four hours after he ingested it, with nary a symptom since. She then told me to ‘stuff your skepticism and smart remarks.’
You can understand my initial confusion.
I assured her that no skepticism nor smart remarks were intended, that I had been promoting Ivermectin use for the sick for a long time, and that the posts on my profile would back me up on that.
She apologized, and then delivered the kicker that explained everything:
‘Sorry….but your comment is what I hear from naysayers all the time.‘
What could I say to that? Only that I understood, and that it was getting harder and harder to tell sarcasm apart from sincerity these days.
And great sufferin’ cats, ain’t that the truth and a half?
Hey, we all appreciate a good punchy meme. Not the least of which because the old canard is true: the Left truly can’t meme. Those with a vested interest in keeping the narrative afloat have never shown the slightest grasp of the nuances of satire, and never will. And if you can’t talk back to the current state of the world MST3K style, you’re going to pop a valve. I get that.
But being a herald of snide commentary is insufficient if you don’t have a clear idea of what alternative you wish to see in place of Babylon Redux. This is something the online alt-rite is likely never to accomplish. The very structure of the medium argues against it.
Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism ‘the medium is the message’ gets more and more relevant with each passing year. And in the case of the internet, especially in its current iteration, that medium based message is only one thing:
Pornography.
After all, the net’s initial popularity was largely based on salaciousness. Why waste valuable time rewinding your John Holmes VHS tape to get to the “good” parts, when you have a variegated and instantaneous source of filth at your fingertips with the click of a mouse? Beats relating to anybody, doannit? Once social media came along, it was quickly discovered that that same visceral thrill – releasing oh-so-succulent hits of dopamine into the bloodstream – could be obtained merely by receiving a few ‘likes’ or ‘LOLs’ on a post. Facebook learned this well, but Twitter mastered the process by coming up with the even more cracktacular ‘followers’ concept. ‘C-list celebrity is now following me, and retweeted my meme???? Reeeeee!!!!! Wait till I tell the gang on Instagram about this!!!!!’ In such an environment, the snappy attention-grabbing bon mot became an essential tool to maintain your ever-threatened ‘visibility’.
Easy-peasy way to maintain that visibility. Just be sarcastic. All the time, every time.
Cool theory, bro. Well…in theory, anyway. For the reality is: once you adopt perpetual snark as your avatar, your Swiftian Modest Proposals begin taking on an air of decided Immodesty.
This especially rings true if you are a leftist, and thus don’t quite get the whole ‘humor’ thing to begin with, but you know other people use it, so you figure you’d best learn how to do the same in order to fit in and eventually get an opportunity to devour their brains. Take the case of Tribal Theocrat’s favorite bete noire, Joel McDurmon, as an example. He’s a cheeky imp, but increasingly his cheek consists of his responding to right wing critics in the following manner:
‘Yes, you’re so totally right. I was co-opted by George Soros back in 2015 and am now his willing slave. He pays very well. Also, I hate whites and want to see them all dead. Nailed it, dude!!!’
Bravura performance, Ward of Gary North. Or…..is it a performance? Y’see, the tree is known by its fruit, and you’re describing your own particular cluster of figs quite nicely here. Couldn’t be that you’re Revealing a little of the Method, knowing you can easily dismiss it later on account of your world-renowned ‘edge’, could it? Of course not. That’s tinfoil-hat stuff, like totally obviously.
This is annoying piffle when an individual non-entity engages in it. But it becomes considerably more grave when ‘respected’ organizations and ‘established’ governments do the same thing.
When do they ever do that? Been following the news since about March 2020? That’s when.
When governments and corporations so shamelessly change the Scarybug narrative seemingly every hour on the hour to gain yet another modicum of politico-investment gain, so blatantly refuse to conform to the same standards they have inflicted upon the peonage, and so inexplicably keep doubling, tripling, even quadrupling-down on policies that have so obviously failed, and even revel in doing so, what are we to infer? Either that they are the single most incompetent tyrants in all of recorded history – there were times when even Stalin found it in his best interests to take the morale of his captive hundreds of millions into temporary consideration – or that they are playing this whole thing as one great big spoof – the global iteration of Candid Camera or Jackass that we aren’t allowed to unsee, much like Alex undergoing radical behavioral rehabilitation in A Clockwork Orange. ‘Ha ha, can’t you take a joke?’ is going to be a mighty feeble defense when they’re eventually hunted down like the dogs they are, but that’s a problem for another day, I guess.
The other nice thing about chronic irony, too: you’re relieved of responsibility for actually building anything. I don’t remember the Greek chorus in a classic drama ever jumping in to rescue the damsel in distress from rampaging Spartans or whatever. Tis far easier and more lucrative to tear stuff down without having a telos to build upon afterwards. Conservatism, Inc understands this very well. Their entire modus operandi is based upon the system ever crumbling, so that they can bitch and moan about how terrible everything is becoming, and ensure that they’ll keep raking in the dough from fellow malcontents. If societal regeneration ever began occurring in earnest, that would screw up their business model, and we can’t have any of that. And when the only skill set you ever manage to acquire is the artful comeback, well, sorry kids, but you’re gonna wind up becoming a total bore way before your time. The best satire is always built upon hard-won life experience and a cynicism that is therefore earned. Without that essential ingredient, you might as well trade scatological barbs with Seth Rogen on a sterile unionized movie set somewhere on Wilshire Boulevard, and leave relevance to the experts.
And yea gads – if the relatively vanilla internet is this ironic, what in blue blazes is the much-vaunted metaverse going to be like??? Supposing I can’t find my keys, so I go running over a fantasy hilltop in my living room to ask an avatar owl where they are, and he tells me ‘Oh, go totally that way. For sure. Can’t miss em!’ and I then go running off to the east and fall into a fantasy precipice located somewhere by my couch? This is a legitimate concern. And supposing my self-driving electric putt-putt of a glorified golf cart won’t take me to the digital Comic-Con because it isn’t able to properly read the tone of my verbal command…am I joking, or not? System reboot required. This, too, is a legitimate concern.
The internet was tolerable when it basically functioned as one gigantic bulletin board. It was a lot simpler to have ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ then, and the undeniably brilliant bits of satire that have appeared therein over the years could be enjoyed in their proper context – not the least of which as a much-needed frustration vent. But when everyone and everything online wants to be The Onion, that sense of perspective is utterly lost, and the end result can only be described as thoroughly depressing. Not to mention that it succeeds in increasing frustration levels – the supreme irony of this most ironic of mediums.
The internet wishes to go all ‘meta’, does it? How apt. Because a hopelessly sarcastic internet approximates nothing so much as a metastasizing cancer cell.