2020-06-29

All-time favorite

Bullet-proof under pressure

Nice for the summer

Quatrains

I was not born for revolution;

My fathers of fathers were lords

Of a genteel country, no solution

To their sort regicide affords;

But I was not born under a king

Increasingly, beyond my will

I have become fixed upon a thing

And I am bent upon it still;

I who do not vote, have come to see

It is not fashionable, I have said

Yet, easy it does not come to me 

That I must take a new path instead;

I was here before you, knowing well

The futility of the ballot-box alone

Rejecting its enchanting spell

I became like a standing-stone;

A fool I was, and so still remain

Praying in an open field, did God

Come and put this idea in my brain--

I who stand upright in the sod?

I must swear, while my arm is strong

I must understand my conclusion--

I am the future, this is its song;

I was not born for revolution.

"Karen", and Other Memes

A common meme these days is 'Karen'. What is a Karen? I've heard the allegations; the Karen is a social climber, she calls the manager to gain power over the organization. Karen is always serious; she does not get jokes. She talks over you while she claims she is speechless. The only thing Karen has a sense for is power.

I have also heard people trying to connect Karen with Mrs. Grundy. Sadly, this connection is spurious. (I even saw some go so far as to connect her with Hera or Juno - sad ignorance!) First of all, Mrs. Grundy is clearly uncool; she is very unfashionable, unattractive, a nag, and by her name lacks the social power she tries to exert 'for other peoples' good'. A grumbler, unattractive, moralizing... if Mrs. Grundy was Karen, she might be effective, rather than the butt of jokes for over a century.

For a good idea of what Karen "means", in the poetic sense, one should listen to (and read the lyrics for) Cake's song "Short Skirt/Long Jacket". Unliky "Grundy" which sounds like a combination of "Grungy" and "Grumble" and a number of other deprecating words, Karen is an objectively attractive name. Now, I'll grant you I'd never have married a woman named Karen - I will be honest with you! - but the name holds an attractiveness to both men and women. Like its maladroit companion "Kevin", it is a strong word, simple, and communicates a certain power.

The Left, and particularly those self-disapproved agitators love this term to attack white women who are trying to get the system to help them against threats of personal violence -- and this alone should give us pause. If we look at the list of 'approved' slurs for "white people" by some of these same people, we find that there is but one single commonality in all of their memetic ideas: they are bad.

Like the attempt to 'hurt' some people by calling them "Chad" and "Stacy", Karen is likely to end up being an ironic compliment, and certainly calling a woman Karen doesn't make her seem weak, foolish, or any of the other things that effective memes do. What we get from the idea is that Karen talks too much. And if we look at all of the "Karens" we find that really, we're dealing with a gal who just has an overactive mouth: honestly, in the right circumstance, Karen could be very useful. 

Of course Juno (or Hera) is not Karen, either. "A Juno" is the term given by Romans for the closest thing to Genius there could be in a woman. Juno as a negative picture is more about the needlessly warlike tendency of powerful women (borne out clearly by the tendency of Queens in history to start more wars in the same amount of time compared to their male counterparts.) Juno is *definitely* closer to a Karen than to a Mrs. Grundy -- but Karen, unlke Juno, is not a queen. She is trying to grasp power for herself, she is kind of a shadow of Eve, of whom it said, "and he will rule over you." Karens vanish like smoke before a breeze because other than speech, which "alone is flaring thing", they possess no power at all. 

A Karen! Imagine relying on such a meme. 

[sketch note: not bad for a first try!]