parody wins again

meanwhile, as we continue to sink into ironic detachment

In a strange way, in an eerie way, it’s nice to know that at least we’re the very first people in the history of humanity to go through such a thing together.

Such a rapid decay in mass media’s perception of any reality outside that of parody feels something akin to discovering that our hands can do so well to protect our faces from the rain when held tight tight together.

My hands are smaller than my face, actually. I can pretend they’re not. Parody is interesting, isn’t it?

I parody myself with this little blog of mine; I’m not sure I would know how to write it without parodying myself. This is troubling in a way. In another way it’s completely fine.

damn these tropes got hands

So my hands are smaller than my face. Sure. But I don’t know if such a thing is true of Mike Tyson even if I know it’s probably for Jake Paul, — I assume he has small hands. Because Mike Tyson is Mike Tyson, I assume he has hands the size of school busses. Not anymore.

A friend of mine described the feeling around the Tyson/Paul fight as “the election results fully setting in.” And yeah. It seems that the only thing more American than a boxing match is a presidential election.

The modern era of American mass media has now entered its fourth decade of increasingly ironic, pop-culture soaked trepidation; so much so that parody has infiltrated the high places, it finally rules the world. Trump’s whole brand of neoconservative politics, perhaps the label nu-conservatism is a good name, is a viral parodying of conservative politics in the twentieth century. He’s a parody of our businessmen and politicians in this country. He’s a consequence of our overly ironic culture. Someone like him was always coming.

The same can be said of Jake Paul, though in a much less dire and absolute way. He’s a part of the nu-media like Trump’s the star of nu-conservatism. Paul’s become a parody of a Boxer in the same way that the WWE parodied stage fights, except in a frightening turn of events, the parodying has overtaken the actual very real, very athletic¹ sport of boxing and turned it into a parody of itself so much so that there’s no mass cultural representation of boxing now outside of Jake Paul, a man who has taken it onto himself to be an athlete out of some need for self-legitimization and can’t separate his tiktok performativity from anything else he does.

And that resonates in a similar sort of somber grimacing as that of election night this month when Donald Trump, the Ronald McReagan candidate, won reelection running as someone who loves broadway musicals of the 60s and 70s more than he does anything political. He’s more interested in the stage of governance than he is with governance himself. Trump talking about the chandelier in the original Broadway run of Phantom is probably the most excited we will ever see him. He’s certainly never read De Tocqueville, and it’s an open question of whether he can read at all.

Before going into Real Estate under his father, Trump produced an off-Broadway stage play that failed so resoundingly that he had to go into real estate under his father’s legacy and he became a parody of real estate moguls so much so that he became THE caricature of real estate moguls in the pre-Shark Tank media environment.

And now Trump’s become a parody of the president. As the twenty first century’s connectivity has revealed and disseminated so many dark sides to the American presidencies of the late twentieth century, it would make complete sense for the symbolic role of the president, i.e. that of a monster, is to be played by someone who is so very clearly a monster. This is why accusations wash off him like they’re a golden shower. All the things he’s accused of make too much sense for him to have committed, being the caricature that he is. It’s as if, through him, our penchant for parodying has taken on a life of itself and taken over the highest office in the world. The Simpsons knew this before anyone.

Parody is winning, across the board. It has infiltrated almost everything by this point; and expect it to expand its empire of irreverence going forward.

But there is a flip-side to this story, or at the very least a positive angle: namely, the fact that The Onion bought Infowars with the help of the Sandy Hook Families, snatching the brand away from the alcoholic insanity of Alex Jones, himself a parody of conservative talk radio and Art Bell’s conspiracy radio of the 70s and 80s, and will now rebrand the exercise as an intentional parody instead of an unintentional one.

So a self-aware parody brand ate a parody brand without any self awareness, and the parody-style of the Onion is turning Infowars’s brand of paranoid conservative self-parody back into the realm of knowing and directed parody (something the Onion has been getting better and better at in recent years - and what a fun staff that must be to work in!). The parodies continue to win! They’re not all bad! But at the end of the day, I still feel uncomfortable with this sweeping, across the board of the ironic representation of the representation being all that is capable of succeeding in our modern media hellscape.

Anyways, let’s not lose the plot here too completely: this past weekend, in perhaps one of the dullest entertainment spectacles imaginable, a twenty-seven year old youtuber and a sixty year old retired boxer threw timid punches at one another for eighty million dollars. And the YouTuber, who rode out in perhaps the most LA-based YouTuber way imaginable, won the match because he was fighting a man over thirty years older than him.

i was really hoping tyson would bite this guy’s ear off ngl

I can’t stop thinking about this line from an interview with Mike Tyson this past Thursday:

“Well I don’t know, I don’t believe in the word legacy. I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy doesn’t mean nothing. That’s just some word everyone grabbed onto. Someone said that word and everyone grabbed on the word and so now it’s used every five seconds. It means absolutely nothing to me; I’m just passing through. I’m gonna die and it’s gonna be over… Who cares about legacy after that? What a big ego. So I’mma die, I want people to think I’m this and I’m that, but no we’re nothing, we’re just dead. We’re dust. We’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.

“Well thank you so much for sharing that,” said the child influencer interviewing him. “That is something that I have… not heard before, someone saying that as an answer.”

Tyson breaks back in. “Can you really imagine someone saying ‘I want my legacy this way or this way when I go,” — no, you’re dead. Why do you think you really want someone to think about you? Who’s saying ‘I want someone to care about me when I’m gone?’ Who the fuck cares. I don’t really want anyone to think about me when I’m gone. Well maybe my kids, maybe grandkids, but who cares.”

Tyson’s always been interesting, as astutely observant outside the ring as he was an absolute nightmare to encounter in the ‘90s, in his prime, inside or outside the ring,— let’s not forget him biting a chunk out of Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997, and let’s not forget he beat his first wife and later went away for rape for four years.

I wish James Baldwin were still alive. If anyone, he would know what to say about Mike Tyson.

Absolute monster though he’s been, Tyson’s always represented a more-or-less real boxer. He so completely embodies the devastating consequences of Boxing’s style of aggressive athleticism that he’s become a caricature of it, a living embodiment of a manically american pasttime.

But the torch is now passed, in the public perception of the sport, to a twenty-seven year old who is parodying the fighter personality that Tyson once perfectly embodied in all its darkness of the soul, transforming the archetype into a sanitized, TikTokified protein shake of a persona.

So Jake Paul is nothing compared to Tyson in his prime but he plays the character of a boxer in enough of a comprehensively safe way, — his brother is the face of a brand of energy drinks called Prime, illegal in parts of the world due to its caffeine and sugar content,—that he’s become a mass product beyond the already mass marketed sport of boxing. The snake has eaten its own tail it seems. The personality is at the forefront, and the personality is playing to the role so completely that critique can’t stick.

Going back to the point above, Trump has embodied so comprehensively a parody version of the Conservative American President that he’s become probably the most significant politician of the twenty-first century as our post-ironic need for parody has grown to such an extent that it has broken into the most powerful federal government in the history of the world. God I hope we’ll be okay.

If there’s an answer to this, I think the answer is to look beyond mass media. Find things that are your own. Embrace the small curios. Throw dinner parties. Invite friends over. Be a real person, be yourself, — it’s a recursive process, becoming yourself. Watch out so that you don’t intertwine representations in media, of traditional media archetypes, with the representations of yourself that are real to you. I think there’s the key to this all.

But, unfortunately, it doesn’t solve the simple fact that ours is a dystopia of irony.

1. as someone who was in the boxing club in college, it’s so athletic that my core is sore just thinking about it.