But Why?
By Botwine, professional penguin wrangler
These penguins are all heading towards the open water to the right.
But one of them caught our eye.
The one in the center.
He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice, nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him heading straight towards the mountains.
Some 70 km away.
Dr. Ainsley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony he would immediately head right back for the mountains.
But Why?
With 5000KM ahead of him he’s heading towards certain death.
It’s been a very busy February. Probably the busiest in my life. Traveling most weekends and busy most evenings. Dear reader, it’s been a while, how are you all doing?
For me despite the hustle and bustle of the month one little flappy creature has not been able to escape my mind. Due to another enigmatic creature, we are cursed to 6 more weeks of bleak winter. So while we are all huddled round the fire to wait out the winter storm why don’t we begin the tale of the plucky mad penguin.
I often thought back to this little creature bravely waddling towards the mountain and I thought; “if he, why not me?”
Dear reader, settle into the monumental task of trying to sum-up the very vibes-based February of our discontent in the great U S of A(i).
Our Penguin marches forward, head bowed against the wind rolling off from the mountains. He extends his flippers out to either side for balance. He has set his face like a downy flint to go towards the mountain. There is a certain feeling one gets when looking at mountains. I used to live in a town nestled in a valley. The hills to the immediate edge of the town were oftentimes shrouded in smog, but the mountains. The mountains soar like some great beast bursting from the earth.
The penguin charged across our collective social media feed with an inexorable desire to run towards the mountains. The interpretation of this event has been the call to adventure. Why is he running towards the mountains? One may ask. The answer for many, is because he has to.
All penguins die – but few dare to live. The journey is tough but the end is worth it. As with many things that we on the right tend to latch onto, the thing being communicated is distant from the thing that was originally created. Yes the author is dead, remains dead, and we have killed him.
So there we are on the Roundtop. A nature documentary clip taken and retold by our Twitter argot into the sum total feeling of man’s search for memeing. I might not have even bothered writing this article if not for a short form video put out by one Mr. Folding Ideas. I will readily admit that he is one of my favorite Leftists on Youtube and I have watched most of his videos. Wrong as he is in the ways that matter (like most Leftists) I otherwise find him to be engaging and erudite.
Though this video I thought was more of the former than the latter.
Mr. Folding takes issue in particular with the DHS’s tweet “Americans have always known why.” He decries the call of glorifying Trump’s “gestapo…brutalizing the American people.” Mr. Folding portrays this message of “terrorism” against the American people as merely the steps that must be taken to get to the mountains. Mr. Folding further enlightens us chuds that well AKCHTUALLY the penguin is going to die.
He remarks how this clip comes from a point at which Werner Herzog, the narrator of the original video, is asking the Penguin expert “Dr. Ainesley” whether penguins can go insane, with the subsequent clip being an example of madness causing penguins to leave behind the nesting grounds and fishing zones to wander into the frozen inhospitable interior.
For Mr. Folding, this is a perfect representation of the Trump Administration, unleashing its self destructive id on the American people for a destiny that is essentially a suicide mission.
From all this, Mr. Folding concludes that Right-wing propaganda is grim and nihilistic. In this anthropomorphizing of the Penguin on his way to die, he imagines the DHS saying to themselves “yes this is us going out into the wilderness to die, we’re doing this for no reason with no hope of success, there is no meaning to this, you don’t need to ask why because you’ve already known why.” For a Leftist artist who I’m sure is steeped in academic discussions of interpretation and art, death of the author ought to have been the key cypher here.
Implicit in the repurposing of this clip is a clear bait and switch. Mr. Folding is right when he states that Herzog’s main point about the mad penguin was to make a morose point about the follies and insanities of humanity. His vision of the penguin was a sad stark analogy of man’s propensity to charge off into the wilderness doomed to die. But was that what the Right-wingers were really saying?
If you go and look on Twitter, Youtube, or anywhere in which Right-wingers were reposting and remixing the penguin, you see a lot of common themes. The penguin interspersed with, charging knights, last stands,
…and Christian imagery.
This meme might have originally gone by the moniker “nihilist penguin”, but the usage has been anything but a call to meaninglessness.
Certainly not the meaninglessness that permeates the Left. No culture to speak of, nor history, or destiny. Once again we are confronted by the impossibility of the Left to employ any level of strategic empathy to try to understand their second worst foe.1 Their self-image of Right-wingers is literal insane suicidal maniacs that want to tear down society with themselves. Maybe that’s why they celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk.
From this whole disagreement springs the uncomfortable realization that there is very little common ground that is keeping the country together. If one side can look at ICE and see a heroic crusade to rid the country of foreign invaders, and the other can view it as literally Adolf Trumpler Gestapo, concentration camp holocaust 3000, we are running out of unity very quickly. More damaging than most things is the inability of Western countries to agree on the basic ideas of identity. We no longer see ourselves as a unified people, polity, or destiny. What is left for us? The left is going to call you a mad penguin either way, so you might as well break with the herd.
I am not a world leader.2 I cannot change society with my own two hands. The most I can do is choose to go to the mountains. Perhaps it is lonely at the top, but the view, the view is to die for.
Their worst being themselves.
At least, that’s what I want you to think.
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