If you want to vanquish the enemy, render him absurd. Most recent case in point? The viral stardom of University of California, Davis, police Lt. John Pike. A week ago, you didn’t know his name. Now, he’s Pepper Spray Cop. And Pepper Spray Cop is considerably more entertaining than Lt. John Pike.
Lt. John Pike, as the world was made painfully aware last Friday, is the officer who pepper sprayed a phalanx of peacefully linked protesters who refused to move from the university’s quad. The gung-ho Pike, it should be noted, was swiftly joined by several of his similarly pepper-spray-happy cohorts. But it was the image of him and his confident, casual, almost bored delivery of a torrent of orange that ignited outrage — and then, inevitably, parody. (...)
But easily the most Facebook wall-ready appropriation of Pike’s moment of infamy has been his sudden, often hilariously Photoshopped appearance “cracking down on so many famous moments in history.” The cleverest have already been neatly gathered on the Pepper Spraying Cop Tumblr, which depicts Pike unleashing his orange rain in the midst of Picasso’s “Guernica” and “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” upon a noble George Bailey, and, of course, the deeply troubled star of Munch’s “The Scream.” Sample caption, accompanying an image of Pike going to town on Rosa Parks: “Sitting is a perfectly peaceful form of activism. What are they gonna do about somebody calmly sitting down to make a pointAUUUAHAHAGHAGHAGHGHGHHH.” (...)
But as Megan Garber pointed out Monday for the Nieman Journalism Lab, there’s power in the way that instantly iconic image of Pike — so cool, so brazen — has become something unto itself. It’s something that “demands, in trending topic terms, attention.” And whereas once the old maxim used to be that comedy is tragedy plus time, who has time anymore?
Instead, what we have is the meme. And yes, it’s dopey and pretty juvenile. But for as long as we’ve been human, we’ve had satire. We turn to the Onion after 9/11 to make us laugh at one of the worst human disasters in our nation’s history. We cling to Colbert and Stewart, groping to make mockery of the bad news of the day. Even Harry Potter had to learn a “riddikulus” spell to chase away the boggarts. Humor gives us context. It shrinks the monsters down to size. It can’t make a guy with an itchy trigger finger and an inflated sense of purpose any less real a threat, but it diminishes his power to scare us. And when we’re not afraid, that’s when we find the courage to stand up again.
by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon | Continue reading:
[ed. Hundreds of images here. Click on a picture to enlarge:]
