I’m probably going to hell, guys.
Actually, there’s a caveat here: I’m pretty sure a main tenet of my religion is reincarnation. So, rather than going to hell, I’ll probably just be reincarnated as E. coli, S. cerevisiae or some sort of lower life form. Oh, and if I die in battle, I’ll achieve eternal Hindu nirvana anyway—take that! But that’s all beside the point.
You see, there’s this meme called “Third World Success Kid.” It regales the viewer with an image of a gung-ho, malnourished African child, arranged in a quasi-fist-pumping stance, ensconced by his smiling, malnourished African peers, excited because he’s just experienced success, third-world style. Some of the zingers I’ve encountered include the following: “Friends hot mom is always topless…. No PC, PS3, or Xbox—still get to play modern warfare and battlefield…. Patriots T-shirts get here tomorrow…. Found a lump of coal in my stocking—heat” and my personal favorite, “Got pepper sprayed—10 calories.”
Some people find this meme terribly offensive. I just find it terribly funny. I look at it and then feel guilty for my predominantly first-world problems. And the meme is so … well, inappropriate and ridiculous. Is the situation in Africa really that bad? Faced with such raw, emotional and cognitively dissonant stimuli, the only way I can respond is through laughter.
Anyway, I recently told a friend how hilarious I found this meme. He proceeded to admonish me, telling me it was not funny at all, but actually horrible. That it was insensitive, and showed a lack of compassion for our fellow human beings. That it was disgusting to make fun of the plight of third world citizens.
I could only counter with a meek, “Sorry, I still find it funny; I’m probably going to hell.” Or at least going into reincarnation limbo as some sort of life form used as a model organism in biology labs at Duke. I guess it’s nice to remind myself of that. But still.
Can we take a step back for a second, though? If you’re offended by Third World Success meme, I’d like you to be offended for a better reason than “it makes fun of the poor, which is horrible.” For one, only on the surface does the meme directly make fun of starving African children. In fact, I would hazard a guess that its point is precisely not to make fun of those children. I mean, we’re smarter than that. In its conspicuously inappropriate premise, it makes fun of something that’s a whole lot more meta, and a lot more pervasively disturbing in our culture—the tendency to belittle the tragic.
Let’s take another step back. That there are atrocities occurring in Africa even as I write this is certain—AIDS, starvation, war and genocide, companies dumping their toxic waste off the African coast. Worse, when we try to help, we aren’t properly informed where our donations go—and, thanks to rampant corruption, aid is sometimes funneled to the greedy and rich rather than the poor (think African banks and taxes).
Global corporations and the media realize this; I’m sure they do. But they seem to have turned a deaf ear to these horrors—even undermined them through failing to inform us. What was in the newspaper last week? Whitney Houston’s untimely death. The Grammys. Probably no more than a few sentences devoted to the problems in Africa.
The thing is, however horrible, the “Third World Success” meme represents the status quo. The captions in the memes may be ridiculous and inappropriate, but they point out that Africa clearly needs help in so many arenas—the social, political and economic. These really can be changed; people just need to be made aware, and feel something. And if the only way to raise awareness of the problems in Africa is this meme, so be it. It’s better than nothing. Feeling guilty, and laughing because of it, is better than feeling nothing.
So even if it does take a little reverse psychology to explain, when I laugh at Third World Success, it’s because I take notice, care and desperately want to change things. The meme makes me sympathize with African children much more, because the Internet actually exposes me to suffering quite often—whereas the media does not. It humanizes these starving African kids. And that is not offensive in the slightest.
Of course, there’s a larger point to make here, about the nature of humor and the construct of offense in today’s society. You see, getting offended and angry isn’t going to change things in the slightest. Anger doesn’t force people to change their opinions. But satire, a little inappropriate teasing, fostering a little guilty laughter and exposing a phenomenon or a belief for how truly terrible it is—so much, it’s ridiculous—helps us take the first steps toward awareness, discussion and hopefully, change.
And hey, even if you don’t agree with me, I guess I can always find a way to die in battle. Hinduism is the best.
Indu Ramesh is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Friday.
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