viz.

In November 2011 student protestors at UC Davis were holding a peaceful demonstration on their campus when former Lt. John Pike pepper-sprayed them at close range.  In the days that followed, my Facebook newsfeed became a log of collective outrage. One day, an image of former Lt. John Pike Photoshopped into Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” appeared, and the “Casual Pepper Spray Everything Cop" meme was born.

Image Credit: Knowyourmeme.com

Reactions to the meme were varied. Some, like a friend of mine who is a UC Davis alum, worried the humor would become detached from the message of the protest. After all, in the world of internet memes detachment is somewhat of a governing principle. Even databases like knowyourmeme.com refer to the UC Davis Cop as “Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop” -- emphasizing the disjuncture of his body language with his actions in a nonspecific time and place, over his place in UC Davis’s institutional history, and in the history of the Occupy movement. I would argue that some subjects seem riper for meme-making than others because their engagement with their surroundings already suggests the kind of disconnect between an individual and his or her environment that we usually associate with the chaotic and Photoshopped world of the Internet.

The highly controversial portraits taken of Brazilian model Nana Gouvêa in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy provide another example of this disjuncture. The photos featured Gouvêa in a variety of postures and attitudes in which she appears completely oblivious to the effects of the disaster that claimed hundreds of lives and cost billions of dollars in damages. Perhaps creators of the Gouvêa meme were able to identify Gouvêa as a specimen prime for meme making because her portraits amidst the wreckage mingle the absurdity one finds on awkwardfamilyphotos.com with the kind of morally reprehensible obliviousness that led to the creation of the Casual Pepper Spray Cop meme.

Image Credit: knowyourmeme.com

What both Gouvêa and Pike have in common is that they were completely disconnected in a way that occluded any empathy or attention to the crisis at hand and any ability to fathom the effects that their personal actions would have on the people surrounding them. Satire can be an excellent outlet for outrage, as we see in the case of some users of the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop meme, but it can also be a tool rendering history absurd to the point of erasing it. As Susan Sontag says in Regarding the Pain of Others “As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. ” What happens to a meme is of course anyone’s guess, but one would hope that purveyors of memes will be able to steel themselves with humor without losing sight of the original crises that sparked the controversy: a complete numbness to the suffering of others. 

Look for more on memes and the process of erasing vs. preserving history in the next post.

For more on memes, check out fellow viz. blogger Laura Thain’s previous posts: http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/%E2%80%9Cmemeing%E2%80%9D-silence%E2%80%94-gif-and-silent-film-part-1

http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/content/%E2%80%9Cmemeing%E2%80%9D-silence%E2%80%94-gif-and-silent-film-part-2