The Memeing of Life

If Richard Dawkins’ "The Selfish Gene" didn’t change my life, it’s fair to say the book caused me to look at the world in a whole new way.

No, I didn’t become a biologist, geneticist, or scientist of any stripe. I didn’t stop fantasizing about every semi-attractive woman within six square miles, and I didn’t stop getting drunk when every woman within six square miles rejected my advances.

But, at the risk of hyperbole, it’s fair to say that my understanding of how the human race functions had been fundamentally altered.

"The Selfish Gene" is basically a primer on Darwin’s theory of natural selection, done with such flair and verve that you might think that John Kennedy Toole or Kingsley Amis wrote it. Though Dawkins has written many more tomes on natural selection, the origin of species, and, recently, atheism, "The Selfish Gene" will probably the book that obituary writers will mention most prominently once Dawkins leaves this mortal coil. 

If you believe that a supernatural force created the human race and you don’t change your mind after reading "The Selfish Gene," it ain’t ever gonna happen.

One of Dawkins’ ideas in "The Selfish Gene" is the "meme," or an idea that gains currency in society using the same principles as natural selection. A meme could be an idea, phrase, brand of beer, or TV theme song. This was the only part of "The Selfish Gene" that felt forced, yet Dawkins said he wanted "memes" to be his primary legacy.

Dawkins had no idea of the forces of nature he’d unleashed.

It’s not obvious unless you blog. You don’t see mentions of "memes" in the mainstream media ("The Clinton campaign’s ‘If Obama wins, terrorists will kill your children’ meme took hold in Ohio"); I don’t see talk of memes in current movies, television, music, or other form of pop culture. Kids aren’t texting about memes, and 50 Cent isn’t rapping about them, either.

What Dawkins hath wrought

In my chosen field of creative frustration, I doubt that a novel or short story will be written about memes, though, given current events in the field of autobiography, one could write a hell of a bogus meme memoir:

When I child, I was the most hated meme in my family. I was so radically different, I was despised, hated, and treated differently than my siblings. I tried mutating and adapting to the environment, but the harsh realities of natural selection kept me repressed. At school, the other memes stole my lunch money, and beat me so bad that the lifeguards wouldn’t let me swim in the memepool. My parents didn’t notice: Mamma Meme was too busy with her "latest idea boyfriend," and Daddy Meme was always drinking, embittered by by the fact he never made it into the realm of ideas.

Though they seem to have gained some currency in sociology and scientific circles, memes have found their true place in the blogosphere, where its progency, in classic style of natural selection, has obliterated all other memes about the nature of the meme. (In other words, this meme about the meme has survived, while the other memes about memes have gone extinct.)

I speak of being "tagged." You know to what I refer: posting on one’s blog a "meme" regarding one of many curious lists or such. You list the five books/albums/movies you’d take to a desert isle, or form a word with the first letter of the title of one’s seven-favorite poems by Symbolists; your 56 most embarrassing moments not involving a penis.

I had avoided being tagged for lo these many years, probably because most bloggers find me an irritating, ingratiating, and generally masturbating presence on their sites. However, Collin Kelley, a poet, novelist, and all-around mench who runs the excellent Modern Confessional blog, finally did what I had been dreading — I was tagged for his meme*.

Silly meme

It is the etiquette of such things that if I do not respond, a man named Ubaldo will come to my home and break my ankles. 

So I will submit to the inevitable, and fulfill my duties as a blogger. To borrow an evolutionary perspective, I can’t think of the utility of such things as a writer or how they help me survive. But I if you blog long enough, you’ll drown in the memepool.

Just remember — "meme" is "me" written twice.

If that is supposed to meme anything. Because I had a really bad meme about it last night. As nothing is as it memes. Don’t wear your blue memes to shul. And I’ll shut up now.

*The meme is to turn to page 123 of a work of fiction, go to the fifth sentence, and copy it and the following three sentences. This is from Brock Clarke’s "An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England":

"And what does one do when finally becomes a grown-ass man? Why, one goes back to the people he’s loved and lost and tells them, as the poet says, the whole truth and nothing but and then refuses to go anywhere until he is forgiven for lying in the first place. It was time. Hopefully it wasn’t past time."

Now that I’ve done that, I tag Gawker, Daily Kos, and right-wing cybernut Michelle Malkin.