Maggie Hennefeld in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
You can predict the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election by tracking the laughter in the room. Laughter glides on the edge of the unspeakable. It flirts with taboo obscenity and unbearable trauma while toeing the line and somehow lightening the tone. When Donald Trump absurdly accused Haitian migrants in Ohio of eating people’s pets, silly videos of armed feline militias vied for viral visibility with TikTok loops of dogs and cats reacting to debate footage off-screen. Meanwhile, the endlessly memeable specter of ALF—everyone’s favorite cat-eating TV sitcom alien from the planet Melmac—evoked the mock cannibalism of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729), a Juvenalian pamphlet that offered to solve the Irish overpopulation and starvation crisis by serving up newborn infants “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.”
Like Swift’s furious satire, the viral meme culture of the 2024 election showdown between fragile democracy and resurgent fascism is responding to the apocalyptic political conjuncture with grotesque absurdity. As reality unravels, the jokes will only get weirder.
Intergenerational cannibalism has become more than a metaphor: the rich eating the poor’s offspring, Protestants gobbling up the papacy, Satanists pan-frying Christian progeny, outlandish conspiracy theories that human remains were found in Oprah Winfrey’s L.A. home.
More here.
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