Categories facilitate thinking. There's pets and you have dog and cats and birds and fish. There's fish and you have salmon and trout and sharks. How about "pet fish"? The number one spot in that category goes to "guppy" in the data collected somewhere once upon a research grant, even though it was nowhere near the top ten in those lists of pets or fish.

Take the word "category" and spruce it up a bit and you have today's "meme". It's more than just a word or a picture or an advertising jingle, and it can be all three together. A meme comes loaded for attention-catching and internet trolls and just casual users love them. They hold whole categories of facts and emotional colouring in one bite or byte-sized bit. Advertising firms really want their campaigns to produce memes and they will point to the Charmin toilet tissue polar bear or the Hallowe'en pirate. It can also be a Trojan Horse and that's a meme you don't necessarily want. 

Look at the cartoon up there. There's that Trojan horse labelled "softwood lumber deal" and there are those nice innocent Canadian politicians opining that it looks pretty good to them. The message for readers is that the "horse" of a deal will contain clauses that will not be favourable to the Canadian lumber industry. OK, we get it, even if those politicians didn't (and the name on the recipient label is "Steve" as in Harper).

Now consider the latest meme about Kamala Harris. It consists of a complex of her story about her mom cautioning her to work hard because she didn't "just fall out of a coconut tree" and a one-line compliment by singer XCX (that's "ex-see-ex" to you) that "She's a brat". All is well and good if you just take the nice image of a feisty personality ready to tackle the big job of the US presidency. Some have cautioned us to leave it at that because her detractors sure as hell won't. 

The Trojan Horse possibility is that the meme can be overworked to make Harris sound too preachy or flighty and her laugh can be distorted or just repeated to emphasize a tone described (by guess who) as a cackle, neither of which convey a serious president-competent personality. I've seen the videos in question and I've heard CBC's Elamin Abdelamahoud interview journalists with much better credentials than mine. You can listen to the podcast here if you like. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-1349-commotion-with-elamin-abdelmahmoud/clip/16083303-kamala-harris-meme-campaign-breakdancing-olympics

There now, we can all put on our headphones and have another drink and be educatained. And that picture, duly captioned is my meme for today. I love coining words like "educatained" even if the concept is as old as Aristotle. It was he who declared that all expression lay on a continuum from pure entertainment (of which I don't think he had a very high opinion) to information/education; but now I'm just showing off and meming myself as a pompous pedant. Tomorrow, the black pill. Or blue. Or pink. Go watch the old movie Matrix and you'll be ready for it.