I.



There was a mist over Scotland and there was a moon in the sky. But opinions differ as to which made 75 people die. The bridge was long, the longest of its day. It spanned two miles from Dundee to Wormit across the Firth of Tay. 



In 1871 the North British Railway Act received the Royal Assent. Government funds were lavishly spent. Within the year the Tay Bridge’s foundation stone was laid. However, to the depth of the central waters, little attention was paid. The bedrocks descended too deeply to support the originally planned piers. As a result, project completion was postponed seven years.



The architect was Thomas Bouch, of English descent. He revised his plans to great extent. The piers were set deeper and spaced more widely apart. The superstructure girder spans were thus longer than envisioned at the project’s start. But Bouch pressed on, getting his revisions approved by the Board of Trade. And so the first fatal error was made.



 



 



II.



William Topaz McGonagall was the town of Dundee’s most ardent supporter. But his time there was not without turmoil, often spent flirting with Edinburgh’s border. His father, quietly Irish, was an heirloom weaver. McGonagall soon caught his father’s occupational fever. The job was short-lived, as Scotland traded in its craftsmen for the Industrial Revolution. The transition was only the businessman’s solution. 



McGonagall, tasked with feeding a wife and seven children, still longed to weave. In the year of 1877, a revelation from within he received. He reported a “strange kind of feeling” that lasted precisely five minutes long. He knew then and there that to be anything but a poet would be existentially wrong. On the spot he sat down and wrote his foundational poetic feat, “An Address to the Rev. George Gilfillan,” an ordained pastor and poet in Dundee. The first of over 200 obscure works by McGonagall it would be. 



For one poem in particular, “Tay Bridge Disaster,” McGonagall is known. Its opening verse shall be presently shown.



*Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!*



*Alas! I am very sorry to say*



*That ninety lives have been taken away*



*On the last Sabbath day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



 



III.



The last Sabbath day of 1879 was December 28. Many onlookers that evening reported forewarnings of the bridge’s impending fate. At a quarter past six a northbound train crossed the bridge, sending sparks in the air as the wheels grated against the railing. But few suspected the bridge would soon be failing. To be sure, there had been worries of structural flaws. Many passengers experienced unstable transport, though of unknown cause. 



But Bouch was the most respected architect of his day. If he spoke with confidence then there was nothing left to say. Indeed, immediately following the completion of the bridge, Bouch was knighted by the British crown. Queen Victoria ensured he was of great renown. So when the next train passed through Dundee on the last Sabbath day of 1879, none feared the worst. Not even Bouch, who in structural integrity was so well-versed. 



 



IV.



McGonagall declared 90 lives had been lost that night. In fact, the train had carried only 75 passengers, but he used poetic license, as well he might. And there was no doubting the burgeoning poet’s genuine dismay. Only one year prior to his masterpiece, he had penned an ode to the bridge titled “The Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay.” To McGonagall, the bridge was the pride of Dundee. He rhymed with this much in mind in his poetry. 



To the rest of the town, McGonagall was a landmark in his own regard. His talents extended beyond that of a bard. Before his five-minute poetic revelation struck, McGonagall toiled in the works of Shakespeare. And so a theatrical homage he determined to engineer. Rehearsing “Macbeth” with fervor, he auditioned for the title role at the local theatre space. The producer offered to give him the role if McGonagall paid “a large sum,” a proposition the newly minted actor chose to embrace. On opening night, the theatre filled with friends of McGonagall who were prepared to witness a train wreck. McGonagall made the performance worth his paycheck. Upon the utterance of his first line, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” the crowd erupted into a standing ovation. With welcomed interruption he proceeded in his oration. In the final scene, sensing that the actor playing Macduff was jealous of his reception, McGonagall refused to die. The sword fight lasted for many minutes as MacDuff’s would-be lethal blows all seemed to go awry. At last, the actor burst into a rage and cried out, “Fool! Why don’t you fall?” It simply took a certain strand of Macbeth to have such gall.



But there would be darker days ahead. Days when he would memorialize the dead.



 



*’Twas about seven o’clock at night,*



*And the wind it blew with all its might,*



*And the rain came pouring down,*



*And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,*



*And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-*



*“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”*



 



V.



The weather was unkind on that last Sabbath day. A westerly gale chose to blow across the Tay. Winds blew often and winds blew strong. But that day, the wind blew particularly long. Joints in the bracing bars protecting the rail chattered. Stress on the bolt holes led to cracks and fatigue from being endlessly battered. Many times the rail had supported trains upwards of a hundred tons, filled with coal and stone. But though the structural piers when blown by wind would sway, the continued loosening of the joints went unknown. The six o’clock train, destabilized by both wind and loosened joints, caused the rail’s safety tie bars to break. But in the dark of night there was no damage to visually intake. 



 



VI.



McGonagall’s rise was swift. He knew he needed to share his gift. He quickly determined the obvious path to the top of the poetic scene. And so he set out to impress the Queen. From Dundee to Balmoral, 60 miles he walked. Despite walking straight into a thunderstorm and then a mountain, he never balked. Soaked and starving, “I am the Queen’s Poet,” he told the palace guard, and for a response proceeded to wait. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the Queen’s Poet,” the guard said, irate. Poet laureate he was not meant to be. He turned around and walked back to Dundee.



 



*When the train left Edinburgh*



*The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,*



*But Boreas blew a terrific gale,*



*Which made their hearts for to quail,*



*And many of the passengers with fear did say-*



*“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”*



*But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,*



*Boreas he did loud and angry bray,*



*And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay*



*On the last Sabbath day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



* *



VII.



Boreas blew winds at an estimated force of 10 or 11 on the Beaufort scale. For comparison, 12 is a hurricane and nine a strong gale. With the already weakened joints, a slight misalignment in the tracks would cause increasingly severe wind-induced oscillation. Defective cast iron lugs created a situation prone to devastation. Observers marveled at the sight off of Dundee’s coast. The bridge’s high girders wobbled the most.



 



VIII.



McGonagall lived in a world unlike today’s, in that it was in a different century. It was equally easy for a poet to wind up in debtor’s penitentiary. Making a living on poetry was no simple task. Few would ask to buy his works, even those he would ask. He still took to the streets daily, selling copies of his poems to passerby. He resolved to rake in pennies or at least try. And try he did, with notable success. Not in selling his poems, but in getting friends to bail him out in times of distress. It was with said friends’ donations he published “Poetic Gems” in 1890, his first collection. Critics hailed it as a beacon of imperfection. 



The book brought him great publicity. Dundee viewed him as a unique voice with unparalleled authenticity. Soon he performed his poems nightly in taverns and bars. The gigs were not without harm, and he came away with many battle scars. He was often at odds with his audience, due to his staunch opinion that none should drink. Not highly of this opinion did the bar patrons think. McGonagall’s view on publicans was grim. As he often pointed out, a publican was the first person to throw a plate of peas at him. 



 



*So the train sped on with all its might,*



*And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,*



*And the passengers’ hearts felt light,*



*Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,*



*With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,*



*And wish them all a happy New Year.*



*So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,*



*Until it was about midway,*



*Then the central girders with a crash gave way,*



*And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!*



*The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,*



*Because ninety lives had been taken away,*



*On the last Sabbath day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



* *



IX.



At 7:13 in the evening eyewitnesses saw the train reach the south end of the bridge with unease. Sparks flew as the cars shook in the unusual breeze. Seven minutes later, a markedly forceful gale on shore was felt. In the train, each passenger was decades away from being offered a seatbelt. The train wobbled and wobbled, then wobbled too much. Off the tracks went the train at the Storm Fiend’s touch. The central high girders collapsed one by one. Into the Tay went the train, and 75 lives were done. 



 



X.



McGonagall was soon in financial straights once more. Maintaining a standard of living was quite the chore. So he took to the circus, as any performer would do. And at him, spoiled foods the audience threw. But McGonagall put up with the chaos, returning home each night with 15 shillings for pay. There was profit yet to be had from the tale of the Bridge of Tay. 



Until, at least, the circus became so popular and crazed that Dundee officials decided to shut it down. McGonagall promptly put on his poetic frown. But his poems in protest did not shake the law. His relations with the city would never quite thaw. He became mocked in public and hassled in streets. Few cared to buy his poem sheets. By 1893, he threatened that if treated so poorly, he would leave Dundee. It became a town joke that he would surely stay another year once he realized “Dundee” rhymed with “1893.”



For one reason or another, McGonagall left in 1894. Dundee saw little of their poetic pride anymore. 



 



*As soon as the catastrophe came to be known*



*The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,*



*And the cry rang out all o’er the town,*



*Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,*



*And a passenger train from Edinburgh,*



*Which fill’d all the people’s hearts with sorrow,*



*And made them for to turn pale,*



*Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell *



*the tale*



*How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath *



*day of 1879,*



*Which will be remember’d for a very long time.*



 



XI. 



The fallout fell quickly. Blame was layered on the architect Bouch damningly thickly. The Tay was poorly built, the press declared. To think not a single life had been spared. Vehemently Bouch did protest. Had it not been for the wind, he claimed, those 75 lives in peace would not rest. Surely the train had been blown off its track. And this was the train that broke the camel’s back. The Court of Inquiry did not agree. Eye to eye the Court and Bouch could not see. The Court announced the bridge “badly designed, badly constructed and badly maintained.” In the public’s opinion, Bouch’s fault was ingrained. A bridge he was building at Montrose was promptly demolished. His reputation could never again be polished. He grew sick and weary in his public flogging’s stead. Within months he was dead.



 



XII.



McGonagall, meanwhile, at last received the royal treatment he desired. According to a letter surreptitiously delivered one otherwise uneventful day, by King Thibaw of Burma his poems were admired. As the letter declared, McGonagall had been knighted. Now known as “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma,” all past wrongs had been righted. Pleased with his legacy, there was little left for the Knight of the White Elephant to do. And so McGonagall died without a penny to his name in 1902. 



Today he is known popularly as the worst poet of all time. Reasons cited are his total ignorance of meter, his obscure wandering content, his misaligned metaphors, his abrupt moralistic endings and (perhaps) his simpleton rhyme. But some are suspicious of this master of poor verse. They think the bad bard could have been much worse. Some believe his works and public shows were in fact brilliant displays of early performance art. Much like the cause of the felling of the Tay Bridge, we may never know the degree to which he was smart. 



But there is no need to quarrel over problems like those. There is only the problem of more of his prose.



 



*It must have been an awful sight,*



*To witness in the dusky moonlight,*



*While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,*



*Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,*



*Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,*



*I must now conclude my lay*



*By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,*



*That your central girders would not have given way,*



*At least many sensible men do say,*



*Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,*



*At least many sensible men confesses,*



*For the stronger we our houses do build,*



*The less chance we have of being killed.*

If the six-second video gives any indication, it’s a handsome July day in Cedar Rapids. It’s 2015 and it’s caucus season in Iowa, the polls still 7 months away from opening. Amidst the robocalls and canvassers, the politicians are here—in the flesh!— rubbing shoulders with the Hawkeyes. The Clinton campaign has stopped along the banks of the Iowa River. Somebody brandishes a phone. Who knows who it is, really. I imagine a dutiful young staffer, but maybe it’s HRC herself. Surely there’s a digital marketing team, social media specialists, an oblique hierarchy. Nevertheless, the impulse is clear: handsome moments in Iowa don’t go unseen. Not now.



The video they record is short. It opens on a bottled iced tea, snug in an aquamarine koozie. This view lasts for three seconds, just long enough for us to read the koozie’s white lettering: “More like Chillary Clinton amirite?” Flip to the front-facing camera revealing Clinton’s smiling face at that uncomfortably close distance that is as sure a sign of age as there is in contemporary life, of the technologically uninitiated who haven’t spent hours of their young life snapping themselves, scrutinizing their angles on their screen. She is kissed by this Iowa sun and trying to look happy, and maybe she is. Through a smile, she tells herself on the screen: “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.”



From here it’s a matter of tracing the dissemination. The video was posted to the HRC Snapchat Story. A Snapchat follower downloaded the clip and posted it to their Vine account, username “its moi,” with the caption “I love politics.” From then to midway through August, the Vine clip was played over 17 million times—shared relentlessly across a whole variety of Internet channels, remixed, inserted, and expanded by users across the country.



There was something about the clip that made it resonate with people. It seemed like a microcosm of the Clinton campaign’s failure to connect, the sort of square-peg- in-round-hole stiltedness of their branding efforts. The thought process was painfully 



transparent. People immediately saw it as an attempt to seize on something they might call “appealing to millennial tastes” in a boardroom. This transparency became genuinely funny when the attempt fell at on its face. The smiling seemed overcooked, the delivery stiff, the word chillin’ alien, like maybe it was the rst time it had come out of her mouth. And this is all cherry-topped by the mention of Cedar Rapids, which, to any Midwestern-illiterate millennial across the country, could only be spectrally project- ed as an unlikely site of chillin’. All this amounted to something deeply recognizable, such that it could become an effective vector of expressing some discomfort that young people felt about Clinton’s campaign. It could say something big and difficult to say, implicitly in the course of six seconds. That is, I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids had become a meme in an election cycle in which the meme reached its political maturity.



Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in 1976 in his The Selsh Gene. Everyone’s favorite grumpy atheist Darwinian posited that the human evolutionary path had veered in a different direction because something they had that the other species didn’t: culture. Human survival wasn’t predicated on the same rules of genetic evolution as animals because they had externalized the means to survival. Tools, language, governments —any constituent of culture—made progress that allowed people to keep on adapting without any genomic variation. The onus of evolution began to fall on culture itself. Dawkins made a strong argument that, further, we can do a sort of Darwinian reading of culture, suggesting that it too evolves in the way that species do. The validity of the par- ticulars of such a claim are surely up for debate, but its structure is compelling. The potentially suspect fundamental assumption is that units of culture, like units of hereditary information, seem to display an instinct for conservation and preservation. Their goal is to survive. In biogenetics, the grand structure of evolution snowballs from the rst fact that genes are compelled to survive. Dawkins proposes that culture has a similarly complicated grand structure that too snowballs from the rst fact that units of cultural information have a survival impulse. Dawkins decided to call this unit the “meme” in reference to the Greek root mimeme, its similarity to the word gene, and its relationship to the word memory. He emphasized, “it should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”



Dawkins argued that, again like the gene, the only real criterion for success in the meme is its relative survival value in the meme pool. Fitness is end all be all. And fit memes carry the same qualities that he outlines for fit genes: they have longevity, they’re fecund, and have high copying-delity. In his account, memes have no normative goodness. There is no agenda other than to be recognizable, to infiltrate, to sustain.



As a proper wing of culture, politics’ essential meme orientation should come as no surprise to us. If a politician, a party, or an ideology is able to introduce a fit meme into the culture, one that people are compelled to share and recapitulate, then they’ve done their job. In this sense, it’s easy to argue that the meme has had longstanding indispensi- ble political import. The Free Silver movement of the late 1800s, and what bimetallism culturally transmitted to embattled people in the United States, was a meme powerful enough to catapult William Jennings Bryan to a presidential nomination. The meme has always been connected to our politics because it and democracy both operate under the same logic. Fitness is tantamount. The number of people that relate to a message is the most important factor.



If there’s anything historically unique about our period of political memes, it’s that the omnipotence of the Internet has changed the channels of information distribution, which has managed to expand the number of memes made and accelerate their dissemination. This informational flood has engendered serious demands on our attention and the discursive speed warp has dictated that our units of political conversation become ever smaller. Our period of politics is the period of the meme because its conditions have realized the meme’s ideal function as informational vector. There is a sincere necessity to communicate unwieldy ideas in a slogan, a hashtag, a photo, or a brief clip. The meme’s communicative power lies in a moment of recognition. There is some unarticulated soup of a thought or feeling that oats around in your mind, a situation that you endlessly find yourself in, a seemingly inexpressible, but all-too-knowable something that sits on the tip of your tongue, but you cannot find the words for it until you see the meme. You recognize it and it recognizes you. You cannot help but share it because that thing is finally there to be said. And in our political moment, rich in complexity, poor in reflection, this function of the meme is crucial.



One of the groups on the vanguard of understanding the political efcacy of the meme was Kalle Lasn’s Adbusters magazine, which rose to prominence in the 1990s by championing “culture jamming” as a means of political resistance. The magazine was, and still is, a sort of anti-capitalist rag with a spirit of pranksterism that published spoofs of advertisements, casting them in strange lights with different slogans. It was cultural cannibalism, an attempt to subvert capital messages with their own material. Recently, the magazine has come to see their politics in terms of memes. In 2012, they wrote that the world was engaged in a “meme war... in which the decisive battles are being fought not in the sky, nor in the streets, nor in the forests, nor on the high seas, nor even on the battleelds of the Middle East, but rather in the mediums of the mental environment: newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and the Internet.”1 In the meme war, all global citizens are belligerents. Political efficacy is founded on our ability to produce fit memes, to inject units of culture that stick and manage to subvert other memes in their fitness. They argue further in the line of a classic Marxian critique that the landscape of the meme war must be viewed through the dynamics of capital. “Right now,” they say, “corporations control much of the means of meme production and propagation. They wield that power to devastating effect, foisting a few thousand ads, logos, marketing concepts and political slivers into our brains each day.” This is an important move, to see advertising, marketing, and branding, as the wing of meme making supported by capital interest. There too, the goal is to produce bits of culture that stick, all in the name of consumption.2 The financial power that backs these memes makes them even more intransigent. Adbusters concluded that the challenge in “reimagining activism” was to see its job as creating an “insurgent meme factory” that could introduce t memes into the culture that carried a more full-bodied political expression, some valence outside of consumption.



Again, if the idea of building an insurgent meme factory sounds silly and self-serious, Adbusters’ own success in doing so should convince us otherwise. Adbusters was the organization responsible for starting Occupy Wall Street, which we should read as one of the most effective political meme campaigns of our time. Among all of the movement’s successes and failures, it managed to introduce the slogan “We are the 99%,” which quickly became its rallying cry, ideological kernel, and essential contribution to the global political culture. It served the essential purpose of a political meme: to capture this big idea and distill it into a shareable, digestible unit. People could express their dissatisfaction with the complexities of the increasing nancialization of global economies and wealth inequality in succinct, recognizable terms. In creating the 99% meme, Adbusters had arguably done more for the global political process than it had in the history of its magazine. It’s hard to imagine the occurrence of a whole host of events—from Piketty’s appearance on the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list, to the outcropping of support for Bernie Sanders’ campaign, without the meme’s legwork.



As we sort through the wreckage of the 2016 presidential election, the inuence of the political meme has been criminally underexplored. Throughout the year, memes that grew up in communities across the Internet took lurid political twists. For instance, there was Pepe the Frog, a popular “reaction image” of a cartoon frog that’s appended to posts that engender especially strong, often melancholic, “feels” was appropriated by white nationalist segments of the “alt-right” Internet community. In months, the cartoon became a nihilistic hate symbol. The Anti-Defamation League was compelled to add the meme to its Hate Symbols Database. In September, the Clinton campaign posted their own “explainer” of the meme in question and answer format to their official website, criticizing Trump for posting images of the frog on his Twitter account. One exchange read:



“Let me get this straight: Trump’s presidential campaign is posting memes associated with white supremacy online?”



“Yes.”



There’s a way to read the unfolding of the whole election as a meme war, of the Trump campaign’s great success in meme making and Clinton campaign’s repeated failures. The election’s contours even followed many of the patterns that we recognize in Internet meme making communities. Trump launched his political career from Twitter, playing one of the quintessential online archetypes: the troll. The troll is inflammatory for inammation’s sake. He normally lurks anonymously, taking potshots at whomever just because he can. But Trump was identiable, already a celebrity on his veried account, and before the 2016 election was even something we could have conceived, he was questioning President Obama’s citizenship, demanding to see a birth certicate and stoking a hypernationalist re, all by acting like some of the people who run rampant around Reddit and 4Chan. Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump’s Twitter account would remain an essential part of his campaign. It was a constant stream of publicity and its content seemingly didn’t matter as long as it could drum up some fervor. There was some sort of irreverence and confidence that spoke the language of the Internet that Clinton could not.3 Trump didn’t flinch to say he was chillin’ in Cedar Rapids. Instead, on Cinco de Mayo he sat in his office in Trump Tower and posed for a photo to be posted to his Twitter, sitting behind a taco bowl, giving something that can be scarcely described as anything other than a devilish grin, putting one thumbs up. The tweet came with caption “Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!” The tweet prompted outrage from detractors and laughs from his supporters. But it really didn’t matter: the message was on brand and, by the time of this writing, it has been retweeted over 85,000 times and liked another 120,000 more.



The Clinton campaign was furiously trying to keep up with memes that had grown organically on the Internet, but the attempts reeked of the same cloyingness of the Brands Saying Bae phenomenon. There were her multiple Ellen appearances, each time coaxed into doing the popular Internet dance craze du jour with DeGeneres. And there is something so distinctly painful about watching these segments now. Clinton tries her best to perform these dances, the Nae Nae, the Dab, popularized originally by a vein of Internet hip hop meme culture, and she is embarrassingly bad at them. But this is the conceit of the segment. We know she is going to be embarrassingly bad at them, her campaign knows, the Ellen producers know, even (or, especially) HRC knows, but she goes forth with it perhaps because that’s the joke, perhaps because they all don’t know how else to make a meme. It might be best distilled in Clinton’s appearance as a guest on a popular New York hip hop radio station talk show called “The Breakfast Club.” Toward the end of the segment, one of the hosts asks Clinton if there’s something that she always carries with her. Without missing a beat, she replies “hot sauce.” The hosts look truly shocked, wondering if she’s making a reference to Beyoncé’s recent popular song “Formation,” with the line “I got hot sauce in my bag, swag.” One pipes up: “Now listen. I want you to know that people are gonna see this and say ‘Ok, she’s pandering to black people.” The room laughs and Clinton labors to joke along with him, “Is it workin’?” The Clinton camp’s last attempt to jump on a viral meme trend happened just days before the election. They lmed their version of the “mannequin challenge,” a meme that was just exploding in which groups of people stood still, as if mannequins, to the tune of hip hop duo Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles.” The Clinton challenge takes place on the campaign plane and, as the camera makes its way down the aisle, we see Clinton standing frozen at the back of the crowd as Sremmurd’s Swae Lee croons, “That girl is a real crowd pleaser.”



Throughout the Clinton campaign’s oundering Chillin’-In-Cedar-Rapids-attempts, the Trump campaign was paving a road to the White House with effective meme making. “Build the wall!” was a meme that was able to capture the resentments of an appar- ently sizable group of people and express their political fervor in a sharable clip. The logistics and funding (Mexico will pay for it), the intricacies of migration policy, the effectiveness of the wall-as-border, none of it mattered – it was all fuddled and in flux. The Trump campaign’s watershed meme moment, their “We Are The 99%,” was undoubtedly “Make America Great Again.” Its terms weren’t novel. Surely the sentiment has been the nub of American conservatism at least since Reagan. But the branding was impeccable. Hundreds of thousands of people roamed the country with hats bearing the phrase. It could be worn, tweeted, shouted. What mattered was its athleticism: the speed with which it could be shared, the imposing strength of its claim, its ability to make an agile impression. It suggested nothing specific so it could be applied to anything. Yet, it was just specific enough to tap into the necessary demographic. It was the vague frustration of a certain type of American, distilled into its essential ethos. It provided millions with that moment of recognition. And it worked. The memes didn’t win it all, but they didn’t hurt. 



Even beyond the election, there’s early indication that Trump will run the presidency as meme maker, or at least it’s become clear that inammatory tweets won’t remain just a tactic to draw attention as a vote-seeker. In the month’s since his election, Trump has continued to tweet furiously in his classic style and has already used the platform to comment on minor crises of international affairs. He’s given us the meme take on the Russian hacking imbroglio and following diplomatic response from Putin (33k retweets): “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!” The Iran Deal (34k retweets): “The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” Military strategy meeting (13k retweets): “I met some really great Air Force GENERALS and Navy ADMIRALS today, talking about airplane capability and pricing. Very impressive people!” All such posts have been covered in the press as official presidential statements of the past and the Trump administration intends for this to be the status quo. Incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer, has stated in interview that the Trump administration will “absolutely” use Twitter to make official statements on policy. He even went on the offensive: “I think it freaks the mainstream media out that he has this following of over 45-plus million people that follow him on social media, that he can have a direct conversation. He doesn’t have to have it funnel through the media...The fact of the matter is when he tweets, he gets results.” Perhaps we’re even to be subject to meme governance, four years of our world affairs encapsulated and disseminated in 140 characters or less.



So where do we stand on the left? Perhaps to make our own memes with the boldness of the Trump campaign. We are compelled to no longer flail behind pop culture, to think that our endorsement from celebrity and corporate media will be enough to translate into fit memes. We turn to that process of recognition, to understand what we demand from our politics and to know how to share it such that others recognize themselves in our demands. Memes need to be a vector to transmit the pathos of a true left ideology. If we actually believe that left politics are more benecial for the embattled people of postindustrial America—not taking for granted here that the tepid ailing of Dem’s approach might suggest that many establishment liberals haven’t bothered to build this conviction—who Trump swung with memes, then we are compelled to meme back. The question is: can the left nd its memes? Will we uncover our Drain the Swamp, our Build the Wall, our Make America Great Again in the next four years? The future of our politics might depend on it. 



 



 



1 If this sounds potentially naïve or high-minded, that’s because it is. It’s hard for me to imagine explaining to people engaged in warfare in the Middle East, from any side, that the true battles are only being fought in the mind. That said, their point is well taken. Our politics do seem to be engaged intensely in this cultural war, the currency of which is memes. 



2 It bears noting that, in our period of meme acceleration, marketing strategists are also engaged in a race to co- opt memes that develop organically within Internet communities and use them in advertising campaigns. This too is a relatively omnipotent trend around which an important body of criticism has already developed. Doreen St. Felix’ s [“Black Teens Are Breaking The Internet And Seeing None Of The Profits” from The Fader](http://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee-meechie-viral-vines) is essential reading here. A great Twitter account called, [@BrandsSayingBae](https://twitter.com/brandssayingbae?lang=en) catalogues these instances. 



3 Another important aside is required here before diving too deep into this. It’s important to consider the role that implicit gender politics might have contributed to the candidate’s diverging success as meme makers. The same sort of coded gender dynamics that assailed Clinton’s ability to be seen as “charismatic,” for example, were at play here. This irreverence and confidence that it seems to take to be an effective meme maker carry strike me as carrying a masculine cultural weight that Clinton was doomed to be unable to project. Not to mention, we know that many influential communities on the Internet that dictate lots of sharing and remixing of memes are infamously inhospitable to women.

The caravan was burning. What would later be called a tragedy was still, for now, just a fire.  With a flicker of orange and a tiny *pop *the paper celluloid flowers burst, sold so cheaply and aflame so easily.  These would not make it to their marketplace, the Parisian cemeteries. Django was late coming back from a gig, so his wife Florine had stayed up waiting. She distracted herself with her work.



 



 



How banal are the beginnings of disasters: a guitar discarded on a table; a hand rising fatigued to a forehead and then back to the table in a gesture never completed. A candle knocked over and a world alit.



 



The caravan burned—the lace curtains curling up and gone, the cast-iron stove swallowed in a bang—but Django and Florine would emerge alive though not unscathed. Important possessions were lost: a guitar, three suitcases, some rings. A small wardrobe and two charred fingers. It was 1928 and Django Reinhardt was eighteen, married, Manouche -- a French gypsy. He lived in the outskirts of Paris among other Manouche, also called Romani, and he played a secondhand banjo-guitar.



 



Music was his livelihood and had been since he was thirteen. *Musette *was his preferred style: a form traditionally played by gypsies that had begun to gain currency in French dance halls beginning in the 1880s. By World War II it had become the most popular dance style in France. It also proved attractive to those upper-class rebels itching for a way out of boxed-in waltzes and ballroom steps. More daring Parisian élites began to turn to smaller, smokier establishments in the Latin Quarter, like Django’s on Rue Monge, where Italian Gypsy Vetese Guérino had agreed to mentor the budding young musician.



 



2010 marked the centenary of Reinhardt’s birth. It was celebrated by a plaza created in his name in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, where rue Binet intersects the Avenue de la porte de Clignancourt—approximately at the site of the burning caravan. Today he is hailed as the only European to have reached the level of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. He was the European star of jazz. At the time, though, the fire in his caravan left him with severe burns on his right side from knee to waist, which would require over a year of recovery. In addition, the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand were mutilated.  The doctors said he would never play guitar again.



 



 



 



It is more precise to call Django Reinhardt the European “king of jazz,” as *Le Monde* once dubbed him, rather than a merely French jazz star. Reinhardt’s entrance into the Parisian music scene was due more to chance than to intent. He was born Jean Reinhardt, in his parents’ caravan in Liberchies, Belgium, the Romani patron saint Sara-la-Kâli perched on the center wall. The family spent some time in Paris when he was quite young, but after his father abandoned the family, the mother led him and his brother through Nice to Italy, from Corsica to Algeria, before making their way back to Paris. In this his story mirrors that of many other Romani, and of the Romani people in general, condemned to an itinerant lifestyle for nearly a millennium. They are believed to have originated in India, according to linguistic connections between the Romany and Sanskrit languages. Scholars speculated that they originally formed part of an army of lower-caste Indians, engaged to battle Muslims led by Islamic leader Mahmud of Ghazni, when he invaded India in 1001. Some survivors migrated westward, some to Europe, some to North Africa. Europeans, believing their origin to be Egyptian, called them “gypsies”. European folklore claimed that Gypsies had forged the nails to crucify Jesus. Beginning in France in 1427, they were systematically expelled from European kingdoms, though less frequently granted special status as a people.



Historians have since traced the Reinhardt clan to 18th-century ancestors based in the Rhine River valley. Wanderers like the rest of the Romani, by necessity rather than by choice, his grandparents were forced westward by the Franco-Prussian War. Django Reinhardt, then, held no great patriotic pride for his adopted homeland of France, even as classified as a specific type of gypsy: Manouche, or French Romani. Where then to turn? Manouche poet Sarah Jayat put it succinctly in 1961, in her poem “Django”:



 



Django



Like us



you have no king



no set of rules



but you have a mistress:



Music



 



The musician slipped out of the national *musette* craze without a great struggle, once his accident made those brisk dancing chords impossible. His father had been a professional player of violin, guitar, and piano, touring through Belgium to Corse and Italy, and so the strains of these and of the accompanists’ instruments, the banjo and drums, had framed his son’s earliest memories. Django returned to this in convalescence before stumbling upon the new if remote phenomenon of American jazz. Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues” opened the floodgates, followed by Joe Venuti and Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band. He was particularly struck by Eddie Lang, born Salvatore Massaro in Philadelphia at the turn of the century. Lang’s pioneering guitar style, melding a flatpicking rhythm with a bluesy lead, helped to establish him as the first major jazz guitarist. It is quite likely due to him that Reinhardt abandoned the banjo almost entirely, in exchange for the possibilities of the guitar.



 



Yet a not insubstantial hurdle remained: how to reach the level of his Yankee contemporaries with three-fifths of a right hand. (Critics have never agreed as to what extent the charred fingers were usable, if at all). It was probably inevitable that a new type of music emerge from this arrangement, though its popularity was hardly a given. Jazz scholars speculate that Reinhardt began by using his two functional, curled in fingers to fret notes on the upper two strings—B and E—while he abandoned fretting notes with his burnt fingers entirely, or used them just to play chords. His left hand often muted strings that went unused. Reinhardt only rarely played standard major and minor chords, exchanging them for minor 6, major 6, and major 6/9.



A surprising variety burst forth. “Minor Swing” is a fast-paced jig with a solo characterized by string bends and pull-offs, while the classic “Nuages” (‘Clouds’ in French) shows off his digital dexterity. His phrases tended to rise and fall, ascending over E7, descending over Am6, but ending in a different way each time—improvisation changed up the patterns. Reinhardt mastered what jazz musicians call “encirclement,” approaching a specific chord tone from the chords around, creating chromatic interest for each phrase.



 



This was all mostly idle practice, though, at least for the first few years. Things began to change in 1931 upon a fateful meeting with violinist Stéphanie Grapelli. Grapelli was working in the cabaret scene, taking on gigs for films as a pianist when he needed the extra cash. The two began participating in informal jams together, each finding in the other an ideal complement and a companion in musical taste. Their relationship solidified, the two took their partnership to the next level, establishing the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934. Reinhardt’s guitar and Grapelli’s violin sloughed off the need for drums, horns, or piano, which up to that point had been a standard in jazz tunes. Instead they dreamed up *la pompe—*the pump—to give percussive rhythm to their songs. The two rhythm guitars played fast up-down strums followed by a longer down strum, setting a background beat for Reinhardt’s melodic yet still free-swinging phrases.



 



Traditional Gypsy music found its way into the Quintet, inserting chromatic runs and note embellishments played with a varying rhythm. Mixed with African-American “hot” jazz’s elaborated chord forms, bass lines, and percussive pulse, the new “gypsy jazz”—*jazz manouche *in France—struck a minor then major chord in the Parisian jazz scene. Their gigs began to rack in the highest ticket prices throughout Europe: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie were among the Americans lining up to record or play with him. Reinhardt and Grappelli continued to perform together up until September 1939, when Hitler’s invasion into Poland led the two to cut short a London tour. Reinhardt returned to Paris, where he believed he would be safer at a time when Romanis were being targeted by official Nazi policy, less systematically than Jews but substantially all the same. Yet when the city fell to the Germans, Reinhardt stayed. His recordings and performances became a kind of loophole allowing him to escape ethnic “purification.”



 



In occupied France, jazz was officially banned. But an underground record industry continued to boom. The titles of jazz records were often tweaked to hide their origins. Luftwaffe officer Deitrich Schulz-Kohn, known as “Doktor Jazz,” was only one of many German officials to cultivate a not-so-secret admiration of Django. He helped Reinhardt secure gigs throughout Parisian clubs, sometimes bringing along his German comrades. Photographs from the time reveal a slightly jarring image of German soldiers listening enraptured to a Gypsy artist, whose compatriots were perhaps simultaneously being hauled away in cattle cars. “It was really a golden age of swing in Paris,” Michael Dregni, author of the biography *Django, *has said in an interview, “with these gypsies living kind of this grand irony.”



 



 



While Boris Vian is best known today for his novels, the French polymath’s one consistent avocation was that of jazz. Born in 1920 in the well-off Parisian suburb of Ville d’Avray, Vian was  involved in the Parisian jazz scene starting in 1937, when he began to play the trumpet and joined the Hot Club de France. He later played in a band with musician Claude Abadou, serving also as conductor at Tabou on Rue Dauphine, or at Club Saint-Germain on Rue Saint-Benoît. His novels (though widely lauded today) were initially met with little enthusiasm and a lukewarm critical reception, leading him to throw himself back into the jazz scene, where he continued to play and critique.



 



Indeed, Vian’s literary side gave him a unique angle from which to deconstruct the allure of jazz in France. He himself was hardly a sober-minded critic: he was apt to wax adoringly of Django Reinhardt among others. In one of his reviews, he wrote, “There are only a few French musicians who are of an equal class as the great American soloists. Django…is one of them.” Yet he also made an attempt to undress this mystique.



 



For the un-indoctrinated masses, Vian wrote in January 1948, jazz was merely the next catchy rhythm, suitable to be paired with a dance for eagerly awaiting youth. For a certain type of child, it could be a snub in the face of more straight-laced parents. It could also, though, serve as a sort of societal metaphor. A materialization of the good life, Vian called it, with all the rules of etiquette bored into any regular cinema-goer: “champagne, whisky soda, plunging necklines, furs—and twenty handsome musicians beating out a refrain, whose words the heroine murmurs half an inch from her beloved.”



 



In this sense, then, jazz was no longer a counter-culture or a sub-culture, something to react against or to. It became something to aspire to: just as Parisian élites hauled *musette *musicians out of their underground dance halls, the expansion of jazz unearthed a musical trend, dusted it off, and framed it prettily.



 



But it was more than this for some. Vian, a purist at heart, considered the noblest followers of jazz to be those who shed the social or cultural trappings surrounding it, yielding only to the sound. Reinhardt, to him, was among those seduced solely by the cascading rhythms and jangling chords of jazz, touched “by the senses, by its intelligence…but who seek to deepen, to understand, to acquaint themselves with it.” Vian admired Reinhardt as one who learned to extract from jazz its true substance, remaining faithful to it as a form, rather than as another sub-cultural trend. In this sense Reinhardt would not be the social warrior that some have tried to make him into, striving to re-appropriate an identity that history had so often trampled upon. Reinhardt was hardly against the popularization of the form he produced; but at the same time he tended to treat it rather myopically, in his intense fervor for the music. “Wine, women, and song,” wrote his biographer Pregni, summing up Reinhardt’s central preoccupations. There was to be no chromatic progression into music’s social ramifications.



 



And yet at the same time gypsy jazz *can* be said to frame a certain mood, urban if not national. The Paris of the thirties was beset by intrigue and uncertainty, a more measured follow-up to the glee of the twenties.  This was coupled with the music scene’s tentative but eager improvisations and experiments. Gypsy jazz twisted all this together with a mix of Romani and American strains, rolling out the red carpet for another postwar trend—rock & roll. Artists from BB King to the Libertines would cite or cover Reinhardt. Some have gone so far to call him the most eminent guitarist, under the headline of “pre-rock & roll.”



 



 



If Reinhardt’s legacy is rock and all its endless permutations, the gypsy jazz form itself has trickled down to the present via different routes. The scene today hovers between mainstream and underground, emerging for events like the centennial of Reinhardt’s birth before dipping back down once again. Saint-Ouen, where his caravan was parked, is home to several bars with *jazz manouche *leaking out the windows. L’Atelier Charonne and other places around Rue Oberkampf have lent a squeakier sheen to the form, surrounded by young grungy-hip nightlife, and charging fixed prices for dinner and a show.



 



On a recent Tuesday night, Rodolphe Raffalli was playing at the Piano Vache in the fifth arrondissement. An institution in the contemporary Parisian jazz guitar scene and a sworn devotee of Reinhardt, Raffalli is heavyset with a sober expression and a ubiquitous post boy cap. He arrived with a partner to play the percussive drum-less background that Reinhardt dreamed up. Posters blanketed the dark oak walls of the venue: “Django: 20 ans forever” or “Death in June: 30th Anniversary Tour.” Patrons shot shot glares at those who whispered or shifted position too loudly. After Raffalli’s first crescendo’ed arpeggio the audience broke into applause. His phrases flowed into each other, though every so often shaken up by an errant twang. An energetic song was followed by a more tranquil one, with a pause between, as Raffalli wiped his brow and replaced his pick, red for yellow.



 



The crowd was not young but not old, the average age hovering around mid-thirties. It was a crowd that knew music, or at least *jazz manouche*, or at least knew that this was worth knowing. There were no furs in the audience or champagne flutes; plenty of skinny jeans and dark t-shirts, however. When it was over there was that one frozen moment, as there is always, as the lights switched back on, before anyone tries or wants to move. A crowd began to gather outside and cigarette smoke gathered around it. A Subway sign flickered wanly across the street and Raffalli prepared to leave, the *manouche *arpeggios barely lingering as he snapped his guitar case shut.