Finale: Memeoviana
The Great Simulacra Reflector Himself, the first viral image, The Road, and more, in Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs), Part Twelve
[All chapters can be read independently, but the previous chapters are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11]
The nuclear bomb and the N-word figure as mythological objects in the modern panoply. We looked through our Barthesian 3D decoder glasses and saw one of the objects in each lens. As civilizational decay sunk us beneath a certain threshold, however, we felt woozy: our vision blurred and our eyes began to cross. By 2022 the two myths had become almost fully superimposed upon each other.
We react to an insulting word as if it were the end of the world, ensuring that the utterance is at least the end of the speaker’s own little world. We treat our greatest weapons as if they were word games and mere hypotheses. Perhaps if we describe nuclear conflicts as “small” or “limited” it will diminish the power of the atom itself.
But in truth, for fearmongering purposes, this power—this danger—had been exaggerated in the previous century. And in truth, given the circumstances, saying racial slurs isn’t the best exercise of freedom. (Arguments to the contrary always remind me of the Underground Man, when he insisted that a toothache could be a source of pleasure.)
We flail these days, in the prolonged current moment, through confusion and indignance. Depending on the week, and the person, some take succor in blaming Putin while others worry about AI1. The quarreling voices overlap as well, and—in different, arbitrary words—they all begin to sound like they’re saying the same thing: “Nuclear bombs aren’t as destructive as you think.” “Newsflash: the N-word isn’t worth everyone dying over.” “You’re trying to push us toward nuclear war.” “You’re weirdly obsessed with getting chatbots to say naughty words.” Etc.
The arguments themselves, coming as they do from often insincere sources, may not matter as much as the phenomenon of them all sounding similar. Amidst the background babble of our collective onset dementia, very different taboos become conflated.
The great simulacra reflector himself recently picked up on something of this.
In late February 2023 (shortly after I started writing this series of essays), Trump said: “Nuclear is so devastating that we don’t even want to talk about it. […] We have two N-words, neither of which should ever be mentioned.”2
Rather than comparing their potential for different sorts of harm, Trump’s treatment of the two concepts’ similarity takes a more curious turn: he extends the unutterable nature of the one to the other. And in fact this was not the first time he floated the idea of making nuclear an unspeakable term:
“Putin uses the N-word—I call it the N-word—he uses the N-word, the nuclear word, all the time. That’s a no-no, you’re not supposed to do that.” — Trump in late April 2022. He repeated the remark months later, before a crowd, to much amusement.
These were not the first instances of Trump tying the Russian leader to one of the maledictions we’ve been studying. Years earlier, during his first run for president, he implied that Putin used the other N-word to describe Obama:
Putin has said things over the last year that are really bad things, okay? He mentioned the N-word one time. I was shocked to hear him mention the N-word. You know what the N-word is, right? He mentioned it. I was shocked. He has a total lack of respect for President Obama. Number one, he doesn’t like him. And number two, he doesn’t respect him. I think he’s going to respect your president if I’m elected. And I hope he likes me.
Trump has repeatedly brought up the idea of Putin saying the/an N-word. I made a faux-news Instagram meme to similar effect shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The subtext being that only by speaking the most verboten term of all could Putin offend American regime sensibilities more than he already had. This was the only way he could appear even more villainous to Western news consumers:
This entire essay collection can be seen as an unplanned extension of that post. Previous chapters have investigated various matters that the meme referenced.
The fake news that “Transcript of Biden call leaks” recalls how so many N-word-related cancellations (e.g. Michael Richards, Papa John) were predicated on private or bootleg recordings being made public.
“POTUS dares Russian to say ‘the no-no word’”—like how my friend Lee dared me to say the word in grad school.
“One Minute to Midnight” alludes to the Doomsday Clock, which has been mentioned several times above.
“Trump asks context of word use”—because Trump might be the only one gauche enough to ask. As we’ve discussed, the rest of our high-minded society has deemed context irrelevant.
“World on brink”—yes, it certainly still seems so, quite often these days.
And finally “Lawmaker demands nuke response”—which pairs the two N-words together.
Both terms became equated with cataclysm: the one widespread and physical, the other personal and emotional. The media—not just the people in it but the very fiberoptic cables themselves—do their best to spread, popularize, and make every instance of the more personal N-word have as big an effect as possible. Sure, the person who said it may have their life ruined, but in the process the utterance should feel catastrophic to everyone. That seems to be the logic of mass communications technology, perfected now to a torturous art form in the third decade of the third millennium. The artificial society trends toward infinite connections, most of them between complete strangers, many of whom eagerly police each other—with the whole apparatus geared toward enhancing anguish and spreading it all around.
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We had a hint that this was how it’d turn out. In 1937 a Hearst photographer, H.S. Wong, captured an image of a burned and bloody Chinese baby—still living, but screaming—amidst the rubble of Shanghai after a Japanese bombing strike.
Titled Bloody Saturday, the photo was shown in newsreels, and newspapers ran it internationally. Hearst publications featured it prominently, of course, but other outlets did as well. A few months later Life magazine published it, and by that point the headline boasted that “136,000,000 People See This Picture of Shanghai’s South Station”.3 In other words this was the first piece of viral media: a widely shared documentation of dehumanization.
A young Andy Warhol contemplated the image and the phenomenon around it. He was impressed most of all by the quantifiable reach of the photo. Nearly seventy years before Facebook and Twitter, this photo was exactly like a social media post with a viewcount of 136M. The earliest known Warhol artwork based on a photograph was his interpretation of Bloody Saturday.4 Warhol got it; he saw it coming.
A hurtful image or an insulting phrase is captured by technology—it could be the worst moment of at least one person’s life—and thenceforth social media circulates the preserved pain. And with sadomasochistic attention spans, that’s what we want. There’s a morbid, sordid curiosity. That’s the public interest. The very first viral image was of an injured baby: Few people would say that they wanted to look at something like that, but 136 million people did look at it.
In more recent years, outrage journalism has formed symbioses with various electronic innovations, such as camera phones and text messaging, to enflame and continually exacerbate racial tensions. Social media often makes “mere words” and “isolated incidents” as harmful and impactful as possible, ripping open old wounds that never healed properly in the first place. Rightly or wrongly, people have the impression that race relations are worse than they’ve been in decades.
Whatever the actual truth is on the ground, media technology creates and feeds a bottomless appetite for anger and pessimism.
Some will say this situation has an upside, because discomfort can provide an impetus for positive social change. Sure, in some respects. Maybe. But for the most part everyone is just getting increasingly mentally ill, hypersensitive, sanctimonious, and influenced by whatever stories their favorite online voices tell them. I see less and less mutual understanding or even the capacity for it. Everything’s collapsing, everyone knows it, and almost everyone can admit it, as long as they get to blame their favorite targets.
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The old man in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road remarks, vaguely, that earlier in life he knew the collapse would happen: “This or something like it. I always believed in it.”5 In the film adaptation the same character, played by Robert Duvall, makes an allusion to climate change (or something like it): “Yeah, some people thought it was a con. I knew this was coming. They were warning us.”6 It’s never explained exactly how things fell apart, however. The story is about the aftermath of the fall; it leaves the origin—the cause—to the reader’s imagination.
Here’s my remix, in reference to the ChatGPT controversy addressed in chapter 10:
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So many memes simply juxtapose disparate cultural elements: one surface-level similarity becomes the basis upon which very different things, feelings, or properties are made to confront one another, to humorous effect. The classic Drake motif, in which the rapper turns away from something and then happily leans into something else, becomes a connector next to which any bad/good dichotomy can be placed: Drake gestures “no” to the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie design but “yes” to the redesign, or “no” to Marlowe’s Faust but “yes” to Goethe’s. The pairings may be senseless—that’s part of the humor—but memespace allows items from all across the multiversal timeline to collide.
The many memorable situations and classic dialogue exchanges from Seinfeld admit a limitless number of anachronistic and surreal meme meetings. One time George Costanza dressed like a king; another time he appeared shirtless in public: these Seinfeld moments partner with a known cultural idea—the familiar practice of decorating a Christmas tree well on one side, but leaving it sparse or even bare on the side facing the wall—and a meme is born.
Is that all Two N-words is? There is the racial slur and there is the nuclear bomb, and they are both touchy subjects that can really upset people. And they both start with the letter N. That’s all there is to it—two different things with one or two thin commonalities—and that’s the pretext, the pretense, the conceit.
In these twelve essays, we have strived to give the reader some insights into certain boundaries and de facto rules of the current system. We have used the two N-words as excavation tools to dig into various aspects of the history, culture, and psychological trends that have led us to the present moment. We have taken the twin techniques of pro wrestling and democracy as illustrative examples from an unwritten playbook on social control. Our critical scalpels then dissected these two institutions to expose some of their inner workings. We traced these ways and means of public management as they developed through the era of big media, with all the fake fights, amidst all the mass suffrage. What started as a superficial concordance—two scary words that start with N—has revealed much more.
Does it matter? The public is harassed and turned against itself. In chapter nine we compared everyone (ourselves included) to Pavlovian dogs subjected to spurious threats. Trained to recognize keywords, we salivate or cower upon cue, even if the referents transcend our ken. For most of us, nuclear war is as far beyond our comprehension as slavery is beyond our experience.
A dog notices that the pink of some flowers in the park matches the pink on some clothes of the woman who takes care of him. Both the flowers and the clothes are more or less beyond the understanding of the dog. There is no working connection between the flowers and the clothes, but the dog nonetheless forms a spurious, totemic identification between them based on superficiality. Who knows what inchoate, wordless theory the dog makes between pink correspondences. Perhaps the dog eats the pink flowers and gets sick; the dog then runs away and hides whenever the woman wears pink clothes.
We are not the dog, or we do not have to be. We do not live in metaphors but can use metaphors to build understanding. We can see what is similar, what is different, how fears can be exploited, and how good will can be commandeered against us to diminish our survival instincts. While we still possess language, the nature of the situation can be ascertained through reason. With enough effort our shibboleths can be discarded for good. We can slice our shadows from our heels.
In closing, though some would no doubt find much of this in poor taste, I have tried to make this all a comedy. These funny little essays have been a pleasure to write. Whatever lessons they may provide do not need to remain on paper. Survival requires bold and unpredictable actions that could break the gears of the endless downward-tilting conveyor belt beneath our feet.
For now, I do not know the preventative solution for nuclear war. But the race problem in America has an obvious fix:
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This ends the last installment of the Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs) series. Thank you for reading. If you’ve enjoyed these posts, please consider sharing them, and subscribe if you haven’t.
“AI threatens humanity’s future, 61% of Americans say”: https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-ai-poll-idCAKBN2X80ST.
See Blake Gopnik’s Warhol biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), p. 101; Victor Bockris’s Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, (1997) 2003), p. 88; the Wikipedia article about the photograph; and most of all my thoughts on the matter in Warhol/Chris Chan, p. 229.
MacCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006, p. 168.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roUjENsQz0U. The old man must have been a real tedious system-supporter if even after civilization falls apart he’s still talking about how great the tired old lecturing journalists and public scientists used to be.