One of my oldest and dearest friends and I were having a conversation the other day. It was by email, since we can’t be bothered to hold the phones up to our ears. Instead, we have these spiraling conversations that spill out over text messages and emails and tweets and Facebook posts and… whatever.
We were having a particularly uncouth conversation, the kind only the oldest and dearest of friends can have, with their shared history of depraved exploits from the college years and earlier, the late-night escapades which produced no arrests or charges… but for the grace of God.
We were talking about something that was funny in 2003 or thereabouts. I had asked him something playfully, and expected a funny response, some kind of pun, for which he is well known and scorned.
But instead of a pithy one-liner, he sent back a simple animated picture. It was an image of a young and bearded Robert Redford. The camera zooms onto his face for a few seconds, ending with a slight and tight nod of manly approval, handsome jaw cracking to a wan smile. Then the thing replayed. The four-second scene is from a pretty decent movie from 1972 called Jeremiah Johnson. I had seen the movie years before, and have since seen that short animation at least three times a day during my long hours toiling on the Internet, mining this teeming Information Superhighway for… whatever.
How dare you send me this crap, I wrote.
Screw you, he responded.
We began to fight, over passive-aggressive and virulent 21st collections of texts, images and sound. We kept it behind the curtain, without it spilling out into the social media networks.
But none of it made any damned sense.
Why memes?
In truth, the fight was my fault, because it was my own scorn at this tendency to shoot off little moving images in place of real communication. Everyone seems to be in on it.
The world’s most famous rapper starts talking about how slavery was a “choice” for 400 years? The rabble responds to his tweet with two seconds of the world’s third-highest-paid actress giving a sarcastic thumbs up. Authorities catch one of the worst and most depraved serial killers of all time, and drag him, shackled, to his first court appearance – why not post a picture of a woman on a daytime talk show, lips pursed, clapping and nodding with a righteous tilt of her head? The President of the United States of America is making unhinged international threats and raving about “witch hunts” with his tiny index finger on an unsecured device, potentially causing historic American devastation in manifold ways? The solution has to be posting a smorgasbord of political cartoons and pictures of the previous president with a Hitler moustache, launching images of the candidate who lost to the president with a crazed loopy smile on her face, and plastering everywhere salacious glam shots of a buxom pornstar who the President (allegedly) slept with and tried unsuccessfully (allegedly) to pay off.
Isn’t anyone tired of this? Doesn’t anyone want to just unplug, leave the iPhone in the oven, set it to 375, and take a nice walk around the block with the kids?
This isn’t to say I’m some kind of deep thinker. There are many more things up here and down there than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I find myself getting wrapped up in what Kanye West says, and the 24-hour soap opera of this Presidency consumes me as much as the next citizen, MAGA or non-. But before I go blasting GIFs and JPEGs with cute witticisms on them all over the land, I take a deep breath, I go mix myself a martini, and I play with my daughter. I read a book, maybe I write a book. I wait, breathing slowly.
Because the important things in a civilized society will rise to the top of the list of importance, on a long enough timeline. Comforting the afflicted, and advancing humanity to a higher consciousness will eventually become paramount.
Right?
So that fight with my dear old friend lasted for three days, before ending in a stalemate. Then we carried on our conversation; he sent pictures of his half-dozen cats, and I responded with pictures of my toddler. But at least we had left Robert Redford’s handsome bearded smile behind. Instead, I sent him one of the commanders of the USS Enterprise holding his head in his hands, bereft in disappointment.
