For some strange reason I recently picked up and flipped through a few pages of a long-forgotten memoir from the old “popular front” days of the 1930s, I Change Worlds by Anna Louise Strong. Strong was a true-believing Stalinist, and her account of the glorious Soviet Five-Year Plans, the communal spirit of Soviet workers, and the glittering industrial accomplishments of the Soviet regime make for comical reading today. It culminates with Strong declaring, “One must not make a god of Stalin; he was too valuable for that.”
This came to mind in the oddest of ways, in connection with clueless liberals looking at the proliferation of funny and self-deprecating memes of J.D. Vance, a few of which were featured in TWiP yesterday. The number of Vance memes is growing at a geometric rate; if they keep growing at the current rate, they will eat up all the pixels on the internet faster than you can say “population bomb.”
Vance is said to find them very amusing, but the left is wondering, “How can MAGA people be demeaning Vance with these memes?” The Guardian calls them “grotesque.” The Atlantic asks, “Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?”
In every image, Vance has been reanimated as an utter doofus. . . Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That’s not exactly what’s happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. . . So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes?“
Oh, maybe, just maybe, because they are funny? But serious people on the left (that would be all humorless leftists, right?) don’t think this is funny at all:
The Vance memes might work against the vice president. . . There is no silver lining to looking like a doofus. As trivial as they might seem, memes about politicians can be telling.
No, what they are telling us is that leftists really do have humor- and irony-deficient blood. One can easily imagine that if Anna Louise Strong were alive today, she’d be leading boycotts against The Death of Stalin when it came out a decade ago. (Note that such a movie would never have been made when the Soviet Union was still a thing.)
Kyle Smith commented, “The idea of a Dem making fun of Obama [with similar memes] is unthinkable of course. Because he’s their religious leader.” Just as Stalin was a god for the likes of Anna Louise Strong. Making a self-deprecating meme of the Lightworker is blasphemy and a sacrilege. (Just think how often the media fact-checks the Babylon Bee.)
But look, since the Vance memes are going strong, let’s not be left out of the party:
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