Having stirred his shadow army of commenters to a fever pitch with an article about abortion, the next day Dark Matt decides to calm them down with a lighter puff-piece.
Pacing is all. Patience is everything. Dark Matt does not want the shadow army to flame out too early. It must be prepared for the next phase of intensification, when Dark Matt becomes even Dark Matter.
The revolution was not started on the radio or the television, rather a single ping as the email box ticked from 1283 unread messages to 1284 unread messages. A thundering crowd of thousands emerged from as far away as DC, SF, even NYC! College towns across the country awoke to a cry! ONE BILLION AMERICANS they shouted. Defend the border! Shouted the degrowthers and MAGAs, but it was a feint. They were in Buffalo handing out localized visas. By then it was too late, the positive spiral of growth and improving tax base for high quality services was too hard to ignore. A fait accompli.
At the after party you pull yourself away from a heated discussion about how much bus routes should vary from optimal spacing to adjust for local conditions. While waiting for another drink a tall man walks up to the bar.
Tom Cotton??? Wth are you doing here?
“Seemed like a fun party, didn’t want to miss it.” Like all successful revolutions, this too was eventually fueled by FOMO.
Wait, you can *see* Dark Matter? That's amazing -- I thought the astrophysicists had to infer its existence indirectly from gravitational discrepancies.
Remember when the Onion guy who made the Diamond Joe articles came out and apologized because they made Biden look too cool? (Primary season is always weird.)
"At the end of the day, this is a free country and nobody is stopping you from saying “fuck Joe Biden” if you want to."
This isn't quite true and I think misses part of the reason why Let's Go Brandon took off. There are actually still quite a few places where dropping the F-bomb is considered uncouth or would result in some form of discipline. By not being an explicit obscenity, it allowed people to bring Let's Go Brandon paraphernalia into the work place without being asked to remove it and to say it on FCC regulated television without getting censored. It also allowed the Cad wing of the right to signal how they felt about Biden without upsetting their puritan grandmothers.
Incidentally, this phenomena is one of the reasons I am strongly opposed to criminalizing hate speech. People will always develop perfectly innocent seeming euphemisms for criminalized language, often adopting words or symbols used by every day people. This will in turn result in a push to criminalize the euphemism, sweeping up and penalizing members of the public that aren't paying attention to the word games of the cultural class. For another example see how the OK symbol became essentially verboten in left wing spaces nearly over night a few years ago.
There are fewer of those places than one might think. I've seen F Biden flags flying in multiple rural locations between the East Coast and the Rustbelt.
I'll admit that I am old and uncool enough to have been pretty shocked the first time I saw one of these, though I've become inured to it now. It's one thing to say it (and I really enjoyed this post), quite another to display such a thing in full view of one's community. Doing so, regardless of who is in the White House, seems unpatriotic (and I'm generally not super patriotic). But these are the times we live in.
I think part of the idea is that the uncouthness of the F bomb is often enforced primarily by people who are otherwise traditional conservatives. Nobody *else* is really stopping them. (At least, if liberals were allowed to win this culture war.)
I'd consider myself a liberal and I think that bringing material that says "Fuck *Political Figure*" into a workplace is inappropriate and risks negatively impacting team cohesion. If I was a supervisor, I would almost certainly ask an employee not to bring in any stickers, etc. that had that kind of message.
My workplace told someone to remove a “Make Coding Great Again” hat from his desk, and a “Lets Go Brandon” would certainly not have been considered okay.
A key reason “Let’s go Brandon!” took off so much was that it was an inside joke, so not only were you putting Biden down, you were doing it in a way he didn’t get, which was a double put down, and him not getting it further played into the Sleepy Joe caricature, essentially making it a triple put down.
Of course, Biden probably actually did get it, but one of the great things about using "secret" slogans for your in-group is that it lets you *think* your opponents don't get it, whether or not they do. Witness all the Facebook posts a few weeks ago by blue state people offering red state friends a chance to "host your interstate camping trip if you ever need it".
But the cat was out of the bag on this "secret" within, like, a week. It trended on Twitter once and there were Vox explainers up within a couple of days.
Yeah, I've been done with memes for over a decade now. I was on 4chan and other sites like it in middle school in the 90s, long before anyone at NPR had ever heard the word meme. By the time it entered popular culture I had already seen every variation that can possibly exist. It's like I'm still waiting for people to realize that pogs and beanie babies are dumb. Grow up people.
Edgelords fundamentally misunderstand electoral politics. By definition, cool is something only exceptional people can be. Once ordinary people catch on to something, it is no longer cool. It can’t be.
But politics is about resonating with lots and lots of people, who, again by definition, are cringe normies.
If your identity is based on knowing indie bands before they sold out and went mainstream, then your political ideology will not be popular. And popularity is required to win.
That’s why I loved the “No Malarkey” bus and Pete’s “Panic at the Disco” dance warm up. It’s fun and doesn’t take itself seriously. Biden is a walking, talking Dad joke. And that’s why he’s president.
One the one hand, I'm grateful for the explainer, because I was definitely a bit puzzled about the layering involved in the "dark Brandon" thing.
On the other hand, I think most of my exposure to it was from following Matt on Twitter, so I think I've just paid him to solve a problem that he created.
Just a note on Reagan and the SNL skit: This was specifically about Iran-Contra. Reagan was saved from impeachment over this scandal partly because of a widespread perception that he was mentally out of it and that rogue underlings had hijacked the NSC etc. It's long been established through declassified documents that he was far more directly involved in key decisions and the entire process than almost anyone thought at the time. This was much truer than it was of his involvement in other policy areas in his second term.
One thing this doesn't mention is the obvious influence of superhero culture on these memes. The sketch about Reagan doesn't suggest he has laser eyes, but Biden having a super powered alter ego is now the most legible way to describe this phenomenon.
Are millennials the aging demographic you speak of? Because we would totally pick Rambo over any marvel super hero hands down. I don't generally think of 30 year olds as an aging demographic, at least not in politics.
I disagree - Harry Potter characters would be the canonical *literary* figures for the millennial childhood. Literally *everyone* seemed to have actually read them, even kids who’d never opened a book before or after. It was a phenomenon unlike any other. The movies were magical for us because we got to see the characters we knew and loved on screen. It’s fundamentally different from what I hear from some younger generations who only watched the movies.
"Are millennials the aging demographic you speak of?"
Nah, much too young. Rambo came out in 1982, before you were born.
It peddled pure Dolchstosslegende about the Vietnam war (we totally would have won it if the college kids, pinkos and liberal press had not betrayed our brave boys, etc.). So it appealed to my generation and a bit older -- people who were draft-age in the '60s.
Rambo was part of a slew of post-Vietnam movies that were primarily about the psychological impact of the poor treatment of Vietnam veterans, although the “we coulda won” angst played heavily as well.
Another theme was POWs and the widely believed theory that Americans had been left behind and abandoned in Vietnam.
These movies were all part of the early Gen-X media landscape. Given the veneration of veterans and military service since 9/11 in the culture, I don’t think later generations understand the point of those movies.
It’s both depending on if you area talking Rambo or Rambo II which are totally opposite plots. The first Rambo is about veterans being mistreated and misunderstood. The cops literally torture him and he fights them.
All the trump memes are Rambo II in which Rambo goes back to save a bunch o f POWs the American government was to weak to help.
"Another theme was POWs and the widely believed theory that Americans had been left behind and abandoned in Vietnam."
I recently read that this theory was amplified and sustained by Chinese diplomats who wanted to delay any reconciliation btw the US and Vietnam, for their own purposes.
Conflict btw Vietnam and China dates back centuries if not millennia; our "involvement" was a mere blip in time.
The first message to aspiring American diplomats before they go traipsing around the world should be, "it isn't all about us; country X and country Y have been hating on each other since before the Magna Carta was signed."
We've lost every war we've fought since WWII. What is Gen X and the Gen X landscape? We could have won but for the traitors at home. Is that it? This reminds me of the Japanese soldier who wandered out of the jungle in the 1980's to discover everyone else had surrendered and gone home 30 years ago. I'm not one for denigrating generations, but I'm starting to get strong vibes Gen X is wandering in the jungle. The movie industry isn't blameless, but movie goers don't have to be dopes either.
Eh I don't really agree with this. Korea could be called a draw, but we also defeated Stalin's plan to annex the South, so- kind of a win? And Iraq was a pretty crushing win, I'm a little confused why you'd think otherwise (and I was solidly against the war there 20 years ago, so it's not like I have a hawkish bent)
These were primarily boomer movies made for boomers - at least those made before the mid-1980's when the first tranche of Gen-x were still teenagers. When the first Rambo came out, the oldest Gen-Xers were 12. Or you look at something like The Deer Hunter which came out in 1978 - not a Gen-X movie but many of us saw it.
The "we could have won" and angst over Vietnam themes were mostly a boomer thing, it just that Gen-X got to see that theme play out in film and TV when we were young.
The quintessential Gen-X war-related movie - at least IMO - is Red Dawn. And there were a lot of similar Cold War and nuclear war movies that were much more influential with my generation than Vietnam-related movies. The Day After, Top Gun, War Games, etc.
Millennials tend to love older stuff, the stuff we grew up with. I'm sure Rambo was too old for some people to be watching but I totally watched it as a teenager and it fit in with all the other action movies I loved like Terminator, Predator, and Mad Max. I consumed superhero stuff too but the first of the modern marvel movies didn't come out until after I graduated high school, so it's not nostalgic. When I think of a badass from a movie I think about Rambo and Predator, partly because the vibe of those movies was over the top and gratuitous just like I would want the meme to be. Cause I don't got time to bleed.
This millennial grew up watching Spider-Man and X-men cartoons (among many other things, most of them not super heroes) , later smallville , the x men movies and Nolan Batman movies and very much enjoyed the MCU from its birth (though lately not as much -am I changing or it?). So yes, super heroes of both marvel and DC are very familiar (and I’ve been eating up the deconstructions of the Boys and Invincible too!). By contrast I only have a vague sense of Rambo as someone mentioned by my elders, I suppose.
P.S.
Surely laser eyes are primarily a Superman reference (perhaps the best synecdoche for superhero) and not marvel/mcu?
The appropriate comparison would be Indiana Jones. He's the main character of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's never quite what he's actually contributing.
The Rambos are totally different and the plots are almost opposite. Rambo I has John Rambo, a veteran, arrested and tortured by US cops which triggers a sort of PTSD and lead to him escaping to the hills of PA.
The second Rambo (Rambo first blood) is basically super hero Rambo going to Vietnam to save POWs because the government is too weak. Rambo II is where the trump memes are from.
I think there was a really interesting idea to do a sort of “creed” style racial swap remake with Michael B Jordan as an Iraq war vet subjected to police brutality after he returns to the USA.
This, THIS, is what the internet was invented for. Looking forward to your next book about the meme-ification of presidential communications (except it wont be a book but a long form Twitter thread)
One of my fixations is the enormous amount of online commentary dedicated to the proposition that these older female Democrats aren't left-wing enough.
I remember the collective freakout over the wine moms reading American Dirt in book clubs, like this was something wrong.
Having stirred his shadow army of commenters to a fever pitch with an article about abortion, the next day Dark Matt decides to calm them down with a lighter puff-piece.
Pacing is all. Patience is everything. Dark Matt does not want the shadow army to flame out too early. It must be prepared for the next phase of intensification, when Dark Matt becomes even Dark Matter.
The revolution was not started on the radio or the television, rather a single ping as the email box ticked from 1283 unread messages to 1284 unread messages. A thundering crowd of thousands emerged from as far away as DC, SF, even NYC! College towns across the country awoke to a cry! ONE BILLION AMERICANS they shouted. Defend the border! Shouted the degrowthers and MAGAs, but it was a feint. They were in Buffalo handing out localized visas. By then it was too late, the positive spiral of growth and improving tax base for high quality services was too hard to ignore. A fait accompli.
I got up at 4am, started building several tiny homes in my backyard. Yeah, I’m familiar with the zoning restrictions, m**********r.
At the after party you pull yourself away from a heated discussion about how much bus routes should vary from optimal spacing to adjust for local conditions. While waiting for another drink a tall man walks up to the bar.
Tom Cotton??? Wth are you doing here?
“Seemed like a fun party, didn’t want to miss it.” Like all successful revolutions, this too was eventually fueled by FOMO.
The zombie in front of Biden's Iron Throne with a speech-bubble saying, "one...billion...brains...."
One ping only. Next Slow Boring article will be a screed against Bill Simmons.
“Dark Matter” is very clever lol
Wasn't going to "heart" this until I saw Dark Matter
Wait, you can *see* Dark Matter? That's amazing -- I thought the astrophysicists had to infer its existence indirectly from gravitational discrepancies.
It's easy when you have glowing yellow eyes that shoot lasers. The gravitational lensing effects become obvious
Makes total sense now. And also explains why Dark Brandon can see Dark Matter, and vice versa.
You know he's there when historic buildings are suddenly destroyed. "Oh well, we have no choice but to build a new highrise."
"You know he's there when historic buildings are suddenly destroyed."
No one sees Dark Matt; you have to infer his presence from his absence.
That's how I can tell he liked my comment: because he did not "like" my comment. What clearer evidence could there be?
I came here for this comment.
Lol!
This explains why when I look at Matt's profile picture on Twitter in a certain light I can see the laser eyes.
"small-c conservative and incrementalist...fundamentally uncool"
I feel seen.
Remember when the Onion guy who made the Diamond Joe articles came out and apologized because they made Biden look too cool? (Primary season is always weird.)
I really want the Chinese cartoonists views on all this!
That would be excellent
He's in a Chinese prison now for enabling the enemy. /S
I actually prefer the Trans Ams to Dark Brandon, but those memes are probably less presidential.
"At the end of the day, this is a free country and nobody is stopping you from saying “fuck Joe Biden” if you want to."
This isn't quite true and I think misses part of the reason why Let's Go Brandon took off. There are actually still quite a few places where dropping the F-bomb is considered uncouth or would result in some form of discipline. By not being an explicit obscenity, it allowed people to bring Let's Go Brandon paraphernalia into the work place without being asked to remove it and to say it on FCC regulated television without getting censored. It also allowed the Cad wing of the right to signal how they felt about Biden without upsetting their puritan grandmothers.
Incidentally, this phenomena is one of the reasons I am strongly opposed to criminalizing hate speech. People will always develop perfectly innocent seeming euphemisms for criminalized language, often adopting words or symbols used by every day people. This will in turn result in a push to criminalize the euphemism, sweeping up and penalizing members of the public that aren't paying attention to the word games of the cultural class. For another example see how the OK symbol became essentially verboten in left wing spaces nearly over night a few years ago.
There are fewer of those places than one might think. I've seen F Biden flags flying in multiple rural locations between the East Coast and the Rustbelt.
I'll admit that I am old and uncool enough to have been pretty shocked the first time I saw one of these, though I've become inured to it now. It's one thing to say it (and I really enjoyed this post), quite another to display such a thing in full view of one's community. Doing so, regardless of who is in the White House, seems unpatriotic (and I'm generally not super patriotic). But these are the times we live in.
I think part of the idea is that the uncouthness of the F bomb is often enforced primarily by people who are otherwise traditional conservatives. Nobody *else* is really stopping them. (At least, if liberals were allowed to win this culture war.)
I'd consider myself a liberal and I think that bringing material that says "Fuck *Political Figure*" into a workplace is inappropriate and risks negatively impacting team cohesion. If I was a supervisor, I would almost certainly ask an employee not to bring in any stickers, etc. that had that kind of message.
My workplace told someone to remove a “Make Coding Great Again” hat from his desk, and a “Lets Go Brandon” would certainly not have been considered okay.
I have very strong feelings against Trump and I'm uncomfortable with using that expletive to describe him.
Isn't that kind of why TFG (ostensibly "The Former Guy") has taken off somewhat?
Sort of an equivalent to "Let's Go Brandon"
I didnt know there was actually a "wholesome" meaning of TFG. And yea its exactly an analogue to LGB.
A key reason “Let’s go Brandon!” took off so much was that it was an inside joke, so not only were you putting Biden down, you were doing it in a way he didn’t get, which was a double put down, and him not getting it further played into the Sleepy Joe caricature, essentially making it a triple put down.
Of course, Biden probably actually did get it, but one of the great things about using "secret" slogans for your in-group is that it lets you *think* your opponents don't get it, whether or not they do. Witness all the Facebook posts a few weeks ago by blue state people offering red state friends a chance to "host your interstate camping trip if you ever need it".
But the cat was out of the bag on this "secret" within, like, a week. It trended on Twitter once and there were Vox explainers up within a couple of days.
Could they not simply say "Biden sucks" or "Screw You Biden" if censoriousness were the issue? Why go deep into coded language?
Yesterday I posted a long essay about why I quit Twitter.
Today Matt Yglesias posted a short essay about why I quit Twitter.
I enjoy a peek through the Twitterscope once in a while without getting deep in the silliness. 😁
Yeah, I've been done with memes for over a decade now. I was on 4chan and other sites like it in middle school in the 90s, long before anyone at NPR had ever heard the word meme. By the time it entered popular culture I had already seen every variation that can possibly exist. It's like I'm still waiting for people to realize that pogs and beanie babies are dumb. Grow up people.
Ok Gen X'er.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us
Edgelords fundamentally misunderstand electoral politics. By definition, cool is something only exceptional people can be. Once ordinary people catch on to something, it is no longer cool. It can’t be.
But politics is about resonating with lots and lots of people, who, again by definition, are cringe normies.
If your identity is based on knowing indie bands before they sold out and went mainstream, then your political ideology will not be popular. And popularity is required to win.
That’s why I loved the “No Malarkey” bus and Pete’s “Panic at the Disco” dance warm up. It’s fun and doesn’t take itself seriously. Biden is a walking, talking Dad joke. And that’s why he’s president.
It's all about that Hayes compatible BBS life.
9600 Baud for life.
I started at 2400. BRAND NAME HAYES!
Left those 300 and 1200 baud slowpokes in the dust!
One the one hand, I'm grateful for the explainer, because I was definitely a bit puzzled about the layering involved in the "dark Brandon" thing.
On the other hand, I think most of my exposure to it was from following Matt on Twitter, so I think I've just paid him to solve a problem that he created.
Just a note on Reagan and the SNL skit: This was specifically about Iran-Contra. Reagan was saved from impeachment over this scandal partly because of a widespread perception that he was mentally out of it and that rogue underlings had hijacked the NSC etc. It's long been established through declassified documents that he was far more directly involved in key decisions and the entire process than almost anyone thought at the time. This was much truer than it was of his involvement in other policy areas in his second term.
Love this. Reminds me of the old Vox explainers before a lot of the best people from Vox were poached by the New York Times.
reminded me of the "Yes Yes No" segments from the glory days of the Reply All podcast!
Somebody needs to help us normal people understand what's going out there in the wacky world of memes...
Yes Yes Yes! I loved that segment. I miss reply all.
Me too :(
Thought the exact same thing.
One thing this doesn't mention is the obvious influence of superhero culture on these memes. The sketch about Reagan doesn't suggest he has laser eyes, but Biden having a super powered alter ego is now the most legible way to describe this phenomenon.
"...superhero culture.... The sketch about Reagan..."
Good point. The closest '80s equivalent was Reagan depicted as the Sylvester Stallone character "Rambo," a post-Vietnam live action hero.
It's a mark of MAGA's aging demographic that they tend to depict tfg as a Rambo-like action hero instead of a Marvel-era superhero.
This is a good point
Are millennials the aging demographic you speak of? Because we would totally pick Rambo over any marvel super hero hands down. I don't generally think of 30 year olds as an aging demographic, at least not in politics.
I believe LOTR, the Star Wars Prequels, and especially Harry Potter would be the canonical aspirational movie figures of millennial childhoods..
I disagree - Harry Potter characters would be the canonical *literary* figures for the millennial childhood. Literally *everyone* seemed to have actually read them, even kids who’d never opened a book before or after. It was a phenomenon unlike any other. The movies were magical for us because we got to see the characters we knew and loved on screen. It’s fundamentally different from what I hear from some younger generations who only watched the movies.
"Are millennials the aging demographic you speak of?"
Nah, much too young. Rambo came out in 1982, before you were born.
It peddled pure Dolchstosslegende about the Vietnam war (we totally would have won it if the college kids, pinkos and liberal press had not betrayed our brave boys, etc.). So it appealed to my generation and a bit older -- people who were draft-age in the '60s.
Rambo was part of a slew of post-Vietnam movies that were primarily about the psychological impact of the poor treatment of Vietnam veterans, although the “we coulda won” angst played heavily as well.
Another theme was POWs and the widely believed theory that Americans had been left behind and abandoned in Vietnam.
These movies were all part of the early Gen-X media landscape. Given the veneration of veterans and military service since 9/11 in the culture, I don’t think later generations understand the point of those movies.
It’s both depending on if you area talking Rambo or Rambo II which are totally opposite plots. The first Rambo is about veterans being mistreated and misunderstood. The cops literally torture him and he fights them.
All the trump memes are Rambo II in which Rambo goes back to save a bunch o f POWs the American government was to weak to help.
I’m talking about the genre, not necessarily a single movie, but the Rambo franchise covered all the angles.
First Blood was pure fantasy leaning on a lame allegory. Rambo was Special Forces but also drove tanks and flew helicopters?
The lack of realism from a Hollywood movie is hardly unique to First Blood.
"Another theme was POWs and the widely believed theory that Americans had been left behind and abandoned in Vietnam."
I recently read that this theory was amplified and sustained by Chinese diplomats who wanted to delay any reconciliation btw the US and Vietnam, for their own purposes.
Conflict btw Vietnam and China dates back centuries if not millennia; our "involvement" was a mere blip in time.
The first message to aspiring American diplomats before they go traipsing around the world should be, "it isn't all about us; country X and country Y have been hating on each other since before the Magna Carta was signed."
That theory is new to me, but it does make logical sense.
We've lost every war we've fought since WWII. What is Gen X and the Gen X landscape? We could have won but for the traitors at home. Is that it? This reminds me of the Japanese soldier who wandered out of the jungle in the 1980's to discover everyone else had surrendered and gone home 30 years ago. I'm not one for denigrating generations, but I'm starting to get strong vibes Gen X is wandering in the jungle. The movie industry isn't blameless, but movie goers don't have to be dopes either.
“We've lost every war we've fought since WWII”
The South Koreans disagree, and send their thanks.
"We've lost every war we've fought since WWII."
Wait, what? How did we lose Korea or Iraq?
Eh I don't really agree with this. Korea could be called a draw, but we also defeated Stalin's plan to annex the South, so- kind of a win? And Iraq was a pretty crushing win, I'm a little confused why you'd think otherwise (and I was solidly against the war there 20 years ago, so it's not like I have a hawkish bent)
These were primarily boomer movies made for boomers - at least those made before the mid-1980's when the first tranche of Gen-x were still teenagers. When the first Rambo came out, the oldest Gen-Xers were 12. Or you look at something like The Deer Hunter which came out in 1978 - not a Gen-X movie but many of us saw it.
The "we could have won" and angst over Vietnam themes were mostly a boomer thing, it just that Gen-X got to see that theme play out in film and TV when we were young.
The quintessential Gen-X war-related movie - at least IMO - is Red Dawn. And there were a lot of similar Cold War and nuclear war movies that were much more influential with my generation than Vietnam-related movies. The Day After, Top Gun, War Games, etc.
Millennials tend to love older stuff, the stuff we grew up with. I'm sure Rambo was too old for some people to be watching but I totally watched it as a teenager and it fit in with all the other action movies I loved like Terminator, Predator, and Mad Max. I consumed superhero stuff too but the first of the modern marvel movies didn't come out until after I graduated high school, so it's not nostalgic. When I think of a badass from a movie I think about Rambo and Predator, partly because the vibe of those movies was over the top and gratuitous just like I would want the meme to be. Cause I don't got time to bleed.
This millennial grew up watching Spider-Man and X-men cartoons (among many other things, most of them not super heroes) , later smallville , the x men movies and Nolan Batman movies and very much enjoyed the MCU from its birth (though lately not as much -am I changing or it?). So yes, super heroes of both marvel and DC are very familiar (and I’ve been eating up the deconstructions of the Boys and Invincible too!). By contrast I only have a vague sense of Rambo as someone mentioned by my elders, I suppose.
P.S.
Surely laser eyes are primarily a Superman reference (perhaps the best synecdoche for superhero) and not marvel/mcu?
The appropriate comparison would be Indiana Jones. He's the main character of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it's never quite what he's actually contributing.
It’s totally clear what he’s contributing: courage, know-how, skill. The trope that he’s irrelevant is very dumb. https://collider.com/indiana-jones-doesnt-matter-theory-is-bad/
Fair enough, I was mostly going for a cheap joke.
Sorry to be the humorless fanboy!
Despite being an older millennial, I've never seen any of the Rambo movies. Is he even supposed to be a hero in them? I have no idea.
The Rambos are totally different and the plots are almost opposite. Rambo I has John Rambo, a veteran, arrested and tortured by US cops which triggers a sort of PTSD and lead to him escaping to the hills of PA.
The second Rambo (Rambo first blood) is basically super hero Rambo going to Vietnam to save POWs because the government is too weak. Rambo II is where the trump memes are from.
I think there was a really interesting idea to do a sort of “creed” style racial swap remake with Michael B Jordan as an Iraq war vet subjected to police brutality after he returns to the USA.
“…escaping to the hills of PA”
Washington. Very different foliage.
I think I got it conflated with “the deer hunter” in my mind.
First Blood is why America thought it needed Reagan, Rambo is Reagan’s America ascendant.
Not quite the same, but the 2004 remake of "Walking Tall" covered some of that already.
So this is what they do on Twitter all day?
Matt’s Vox explainer of the American Chopper chair-throwing meme was great too: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2018/4/10/17207588/american-chopper-meme. Matt missed his calling as a Comp Lit professor.
No no no, guys- the Game of Thrones was won by Dark BRAN, remember?
https://www.theringer.com/platform/amp/game-of-thrones/2019/5/21/18633468/bran-stark-king-iron-throne-evil-bad-ruler
Bran was named after his grandfather, Brandon Stark (and his legendary forebear, Bran the Builder).
Dammit, I knew I could have made a better reference. Dysphemistic treadmill would not have mangled this one.
This, THIS, is what the internet was invented for. Looking forward to your next book about the meme-ification of presidential communications (except it wont be a book but a long form Twitter thread)
Tldr
I actually spent about 20 minutes last night googling “Dark Brandon” to try to figure this out, but I should have just waited for the explainer.
One of my fixations is the enormous amount of online commentary dedicated to the proposition that these older female Democrats aren't left-wing enough.
I remember the collective freakout over the wine moms reading American Dirt in book clubs, like this was something wrong.
Kind of want MY to take over knowyourmeme now