Meme-ing Ourselves to Death

In which we don't know what we're laughing about

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A recent Washington Post report has inspired heated discourse around the White House’s series of lethal strikes on alleged narcoterrorists in international waters. According to sources familiar with a strike launched on September 2, the initial hit didn’t succeed in killing all 11 people on board the small craft. When two survivors were spotted among the shipwreck, the order came down to strike again, and they were blown out of the water. This is known as a “double tap,” and under the laws of war, it constitutes a war crime.

As Andrew McCarthy discusses here, classifying these strikes as acts of war has always been dubious. But it’s how the White House itself wants to categorize them. In that case, McCarthy argues, they don’t get to eat their cake and have war crimes too. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s initial assertion that the strike was meant to be lethal didn’t meaningfully deflect the accusation at all. However, it seems there’s now a campaign underway to shift the blame for the double tap order to someone else. It’s not clear who would have given it, if not Hegseth, but obviously someone did.

Meanwhile, Hegseth is moving on from the whole affair with a parting meme: a book cover mocked up as a new entry in the popular children’s series about a turtle named Franklin. In this adventure, “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists” with an RPG, from his happy perch on the edge of a helicopter. “For your Christmas wish list,” Hegseth quips.

Even aside from the double tap controversy, the WaPo report notes there’s some ambiguity around whether these boats are exclusively carrying narcos. Hypothetically, they could also include innocent fishermen or smuggled migrants. In at least one case, it’s been claimed that this was more than a hypothetical. This already adds a potential ethical wrinkle, let’s say, to Franklin’s escapade. But the double tap is open and shut, whoever is ultimately left holding the bag for it. A counter-meme has been suggested for Franklin’s next adventure: “Franklin On Trial at the War Crimes Tribunal.”

Hegseth’s joke isn’t a one-off. It’s part of a larger pattern of communication by meme that’s been embraced at the highest levels of White House social media. Beyond the ethics of the case at hand, it’s worth reflecting on this trend, what it says about our leadership, and what it says about us.

Neil Postman famously took Marshall McLuhan’s “The medium is the message” and amended it to “The medium is the metaphor.” The vehicle by which a message is delivered isn’t making a statement about the world. Rather, “our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.” This insight grounds Postman’s crusade against the rise of television, which irrevocably changed us from people of the book to people of the fleeting image. In the same way, we might say the Internet has made us people of the meme.