The earliest image macros of the moment I can find on Tumblr carry the legend “Fuck You America,” and it’s hard to tell whether those reblogging it endorse or are outraged by the sentiment, although given both the youthfulness and the internationality of Tumblr’s user profile, endorsement is the educated guess. Later macros, more polished and engiffed, merely reproduce (ungarbled) the line she was rapping, “I don’t give a shit,” and it’s easier here to read the implied endorsement. (Not giving a shit will always be cooler, and therefore more popular, than raging against the machine.)
The two reactions I’ve read are either excited “hooray for culture jamming” or eye-rolling “god she’ll do anything for attention” — of course this means my particular echo chamber is devoid of “but what about the chillllllldrennnnn” voices, which are apparently out there. News organizations are reporting in serious, furrowed-brow tones about how it’s the only thing people will be talking about next morning, upstaging Madonna’s triumphant comeback and even sacred football. (News organizations I read, that is; I’m sure others are being rather snarkier, or gibbering in rage.) It always takes a little while to remember that outside the Internet bubble of intelligent adults I normally cocoon myself in, the one in which the spelling “f*ck” elicits unvarnished contempt, there’s a whole world that often gets upset about gestures and words and bodies.
It’s not just that people get upset — this is ordinary, and even trivial. People get upset, and explain why, and others either apologize or disagree, depending on whether they are or are not assholes. It’s that people expect their upsetness to be universally understood, that the wrongness of certain gestures, certain words, certain bodies are self-evident, that the only suitable response is contrition and self-abasement.
For a moment, while reading after-the-fact reports with certain contingencies still ringing in my ears, I caught an imaginary glimpse of a world in which sporting organizations — whose players, coaches, and fans are regularly shouting obscenities entirely audible underneath the smooth professionalism of the announcers and the buffetting sheen of the promo music — and networks — who make stadiumloads of money airing programs in which people regularly display obscene language, gestures, and body parts with a fillip of electronic interference that prevents no one from understanding what is being said, done, or displayed — refused to apologize for a moment that offended no one personally, the meaning of which was so muddled as to be irretrievable, and which lasted for a whole half a second while the camera was panning elsewhere.
The still and focused image macros, in fact, are the only things which alerted me to it; watching the video in real time, I might well have mistaken it for an untroubling and anodyne index finger.
