vapid, ho!

Unlike misbehaving pets (damncatthatpissedonmyLegos15yearsagoruiningmywholecollection), you can't take cultural mini-trends to a guy who couldn't handle med school veterinarian to be put to sleep. But if there were such a Dr Kevorkian for Memes (a concept I detest - fuck you Richard Dawkins - but is somewhat fitting here), his first order of business would be to give the gift of death to the stupid love affair people have with pirates and ninjas these days.

The way in which those two figures have been given such prominence is interesting in its own right. Why have both gotten grouped together and treated in a similar fashion? The clearest similarity is that both are incredibly anachronistic...but then, so is butter churning, black smithery, and Republicanism, and those things aren't inherently "humorous." I think the way in which both archetypes operate entirely outside the social order is the decisive factor - the interest in pirates and ninjas belies a wistful longing for the possibility for an individual to truly operate contrary to the rest of society in a successful and active way (aka, not just hiding in a bunker in Montana or being irrelevant to society). It does not appear likely that individuals will ever have that level of power vis-a-vis society again. Celebrities and the super-rich are usually even less powerful than most, because they are bound more than most by the demands of society. Owning expensive things doesn't have much to do with power, typically...money can liberate from basic needs, but it can also be its own form of shackle if pursued relentlessly (witness any reality show "star" who structures even their privacy around the need to be a pathetic clown for a brief payday). Ninjas and pirates were never about having really expensive things (or at least, the idea of both that we have....remember the Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa are looking for buried treasure, and they have that hilarious flashback to a pirate suggesting that they keep the stolen treasure to buy things instead of burying it, and the captain just stares at him for a moment in silence before shooting him in the head?).

That unplanned tangent into the psychology of our interested in pirates and ninjas notwithstanding, the point is that these things aren't inherently funny. Anything can be funny given the right context, but people substitute cliches for imagination and wit. I realized that things had gone too far when I received the following facebook invitation:


What is this?? Why are ninjas fighting pirates? Why do I care, or feel the need to pick sides?!? Just as our collective need to talk about snakes on a plane was forever cured by the movie Snakes on a Plane, we need some massive event to get all this pirates and ninjas crap out of our system permanently. That's why I want them to make a big, empty, absoludicrous movie Ninjas vs. Pirates. No protagonists, no plot...just a bunch of ninjas fighting a bunch of pirates for 100 minutes. After that, no one will talk about ninjas or pirates again for CENTURIES.

...actually, that movie would probably make a ton of money. I always knew I should be a Hollywood producer!!