Unless you’re in middle school, which I could foresee of some of the readers of this site are, you can recall that subtle territory wherein the “everybody’s equal” mentality of kindergarten started to dissolve in favor of, ”Wait now. That more popular kid is getting far more attention from the suddenly appealing females,” or, “Hold up now. That nerdy weakling is doing far better than I am with his grades,”  or, “That… that kid dressed in black that’s both unpopular and of medium intelligence – that kid with openly neglectful parents that seems to be getting really, really into satanism and buying a small army’s worth of assault rifles – seems to have an awful lot of maps of the school.”

At this point of your life you began to pick up on a sense of individuality, even if you chose to give up your burgeoning sense of independent thought in favor of more traditional or ‘normal’ ideas. You started developing your political ideals. Your sense of humor also blossomed. Humor that, if you’ve ever endured a conversation with me that was longer than 10 minutes, has become far more abstract than it was a few decades ago.

I wanted to cry when Bon Iver became mainstream, but crying is so mainstream.

Shit, I was in Williamsburg Brooklyn for the first time in my life last night, and if what I saw there wasn’t a dress code and lifestyle based on a maladapted sense of self-deprecating humor, then I have no idea what was going on. By some certain measure: ironic humor is clearly alive, if not unwell and malnourished there.

I’m digressing because I need to mention that I loathe hipsters, but it’s not completely off topic. This particular episode of Southpark really highlighted the desperate need to be recognized that seems to be present in the your average meme-er. [that's 'meme-ist,' fuckhead -ed.]

They’re funny, I know; and I love running gags and stuff, but has anyone else picked up on the downgrade from the Warhol 15 minutes to a 30 second prolonged fart clip or single shot of your buddy imitating an inanimate object? Do you know where memes come from? Well, Wikipedia sure does. And it’s easily the laziest way to get an answer across. It’s the desperate hope that something you’ve done will live on, and in this case it’s just in the form of a jpeg.

Yes, because when I invented Memetics, what I really wanted was for idiots to use it to graph My Little Ponies on D&D alignment charts.

Is it some small, morbid, concern that I have that the advent of memes, in the social media sense, is also the iconic sign that we’re finally hitting a point where an ever larger number of people are again realizing they’ll never be more than silly cogs in a malfunctioning machine? It’s like Billy Corrigan saw this shit coming in ’99, and dressed in an attention-gettingly-appropriate way for the video:

Let’s have a nice quick round of applause for musicians with unignorable substance abuse problems, and then I’ll get back to my point.

I’m constantly hearing people over 50 that I know comment that the world is in its all-time worst condition ever. It isn’t that I have a distrust of the opinions of most baby-boomers (though I might), it’s that there’s a very large percent of our population, born between ’46 and ’64 that doesn’t have a grasp on proportion. I’d far sooner say that bad news sells, and since every news corporation is in danger of closing down, they have to announce as much bad news as possible to stay afloat.

By proxy, with more news and information sources available on a daily basis, the people still under 25 have always grown up knowing a constant flow of information, much of which has been deflating their concept of individuality or importance. And thank GOD, because we just didn’t need another generation of boomers. There. I said it. I think we’re also finally hitting the turning point on Social Darwinism in the means of establishing the hierarchy in classroom vis a vis lateral evolution. I can go on a bullying in popular culture tirade another time.

What kind of faggot doesn't know basic C++? Gunk gunk.

What I’m seeing in all of this is a post-goth indifference to the world as expressed through a poorly understood grasp of humor and irony; it is exemplified in everything hipster, but iconified in the pan-sub-culture knack for memes to appeal to everyone. I’m not a cat person, but I’ll troll through cat memes for hours, just because the affectionate jokes appeal to my distaste of the creatures.

Me? I write articulate, verbose social commentary with complex puns, and I feel like I’ve left my mark on the universe. But I’m smarter than you are, so I don’t have to make a video of taking turns dry humping a sofa with my friends, or riding something precarious over, on top, or near something more precarious, and then post the video after something somehow goes wrong.

Is this a good thing? If you’ve ever seen the Darwin Awards, and then watched a video with someone overtly stupid, acting… stupidly, you’ll agree we’re at least thinning the herd. Do I need to experience another wave of the black background 6 framed ‘this is what ___ thinks ___ does’? No. No, I do not. However, if this helps keep nitwits in line and taper back the sense of entitlement and self importance that MTV has been so content to cater to since the first season of ‘Real World’ then I’m totally OK with it.

 

The only difference between subject A and subject B is shitty parenting. Somebody get this kid a rat.

A few months back, Scumbag Style brought to your attention a serious parenting fail involving an Indian family and their miracle spider child that could have grown up to be New Delhi’s most badass masked avenger. Barring that, she could have remained the living Hindu godthe ignorant rurals had already made her, collecting riches and fame and endless cunnilingus from her personal harem. But no! They had

A team-up for the ages.

to go and “fix” her, further homogenizing Eurasia into the blandest place that smells like shit on Earth, and not the comic book mecca of justice and cleavage it might have been, replete with onomatopoeic violence bubbles and grappling hooks.

That was all not to mention the schooling she could potentially have given those Bollywood hussies, all tryin’ to use their inhuman sexiness to distract us from the fact their evolutionarily inferior number of extremities. But the surgery was a “success,” and now other parents are feeling empowered to deprive their children of their most basic and innocent dreams. Like this mutant turtle kid in China:

Dad Maimaiti Musai said: “We were told surgery wasn’t possible when he was very young so we waited. But the growth got bigger and harder and became like a turtle shell. (der SUN)

You cured your son of being a Ninja fucking Turtle? Can your deranged – - nay, diseased mind possibly comprehend the implications arising from the damage you have done? I – - I… fffffuuuuh… hold on.

Despite my clenched, grinding teeth of incredulous rage, I have forced myself to count to ten, and rub one out* for good, calm measure. I want to make myself perfectly clear, so there is no chance of misunderstanding. I was born in 1984. Between the ages of three and eleven or so, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the most important thing to ever happen to the planet. My friends and I would put on bulbous green noses and plastic shells on our backs, on purpose, just so we could spaz out like an epileptic cat at a laser show in the middle of the street, and beat each other senseless with crappy carnival-prize swords. Every kid, at one point or another if not for a solid couple of decades, fantasizes about being a mutant turtle that knows karate and eats pizza for dinner every night and doesn’t look gay yelling, “Cowabunga!” before going serial killer on a super villain whose costume was sponsored by Ronco.

I’m not saying you’re the worst parent in the world, sir, but if you had a fan club, Andrea Yates would be president. This kid couldn’t have been closer to living the fuckin’ dream if he rolled around in mutagenic ooze with a Chinatown turtle up his ass, and you literally lanced the awesome off of him. Why?

“People bullied him and we were determined to end it. He is such a good and brave boy and he never complained. We are so glad that he is now on the mend.”

On the mend from evolution, maybe. Oh, boo hoo! He got teased for being different. When has that ever happened? I bet the thousands of socially awkward but otherwise physically sound kids that get teased around the world wish you could surgically remove their bullies, but they know nothing is coming. Some of the most important people in history were teased at school, because the other kids had nothing but their good looks and their Starter jackets to bolster their foundering self esteem.

Billy Joel likes to recount how he used to get beat up for being a little Jewish piano playing pussy on Long Island, and look at him now. He’s a blubber-plated alcoholic who hasn’t put out a record in a decade, and he could ruin the back door of any chick within a hundred mile radius, and your mom, just so he can hold banging your mom over you. You don’t take adversity away from the kid because it makes him feel uncomfortable now. You make it a life lesson, help him develop some metaphorical callouses to match his gross real one. Wait until the mayor of Shanghai hands him the key to the city for foiling the plot of an evil super-genius with his bullet-proof back, and ask him if he’s worried about what the adult failure version of the kid that bullied him thinks.

Medics at Urumqi Military General Hospital say they have taken away the growth and replaced it with skin grafts from Hali’s scalp and legs.

Oh, that’s much better. He’ll definitely get teased less when he shows up for school in September with the head of a horror movie monster and the legs of a burn victim. At least with his disfiguring shell he had the potential to win some ladies over by saving the day. Not to mention, he could probably be the greatest break dancer of all time. The west has like three hundred talent shows that somehow pass as real entertainment that would kill to throw him a few million bucks to roll around on the ground smacking pajamaed street punks with his nunchucks on camera. If all else fails, you can make a damned decent wage on the freak show circuit nowadays. I’m just saying, parents tend to lack the foresight that people who are willing to exploit others’ kids have. It’s cool, you didn’t know. But what we should really be doing is collecting all the freaks that are born immediately after birth, setting up an kind of X-Men mansion school scenario, just in case they prove to be valuable freaks. Their parents might think they know best, but that’s all the genetic conditioning and hormones talking. We’ve already lost two potential super heroes – that we know about. Can the world afford another misstep?

* To this, in case you were wondering. If you need to go a good, philosophical, angry #3 that clears your mind of all concepts of evil and lets you, say, watch a Sarah Palin speech without rupturing an important blood vessel, this is well aged scotch of masturbatory fodder.