You are my theme for a meme

Illustration/Uday Mohite

For what might be an unprecedented couple of days, the Internet's kittens were replaced by Bernie Sanders' mittens.

The memes pranced puckishly across all timelines. At first, they photoshopped Bernie into iconic art, popular culture images from Hum Saath Saath Hain to Britney Spears to - my favourite - sitting in between Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Noor Jehan, all three united in #BoreMatKarYaar body language. In an example of intertextuality max, a visual loop-de-loop, Bernie Sanders sat beside Forest Gump, original history photobomber. Soon, Sanders was not just in the image, but became the image - morphed on Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, the entire chorus in a music video.

It may seem ironic that Bernie Sanders, of all people, became a meme. Who could be further from the wisecracking, timepass, shape-shifting world of memes than his unchanging earnestness? It was painful to watch Seth Meyers struggle to raise a clever comeback from Sanders about the memes. Sanders merely laughed a good-natured, polite laugh, as if he was just waiting to get to the real stuff. Eventually, Myers subsided haplessly and Sanders held forth in a serious, but decidedly non-entertaining way.

In his practical windcheater and oversized mittens, arms crossed, Sanders illustrated refusenik in a sea of crafted image-making. Quite like the woman who gifted him the mittens, which she made with repurposed sweaters and recycled plastic. She had 6,000 orders after the inauguration. She responded saying she was too busy teaching and being a mom, could they try Etsy? An unusual position in a world where "follow your passion" basically means turn your pleasures into profitable business, your enjoyments into work, not a passionate engagement with an idea or belief that propels you.

"For one night we put our cynicism aside and celebrated," my friend texted, the night of the US presidential inauguration. But, in politics and romance, we are more commonly advised to put idealism aside, be practical and choose the lesser evil, the more stable passion. In a talk the radio presenter and theatre director Jurgen Kuttner said, about why our stories today are so much more about dystopias than utopias. "We can imagine the end of the world," he said, "but we can't imagine the end of capitalism."

How else to manage these contradictions - if not with memes? Memes, like the film song, are about multiplicity. They make room for every idea, identity and fuse multiple aesthetics, each freighted with their own histories and economies. They defy the sobrieties of authorship and the reproductive logic of capitalism. Memes are digital bahurupiyas, merrily queering all narratives, speaking jokes to power.
The Internet is supposedly ruled by brand-like influencers, adept at staying on a single story. These class monitors are undermined by the unruly, unclassifiable class of memes.

If Sanders became a theme for a meme, does that mean he is the theme of our political dreams? The memes may represent affectionate embrace for the liberating image of defying the norms represented by PR perfect facades - an earnest straight talking counter to Trump's straight trash-talking. Or be effusive goodbyes, like saying "I'll always love you" to lovers we didn't choose. But perhaps it's also a dream for some memes in the Bernies, because head and heart, idealism and pragmatism, joke and earnestness, must join in a pleasurable politics, to birth new imaginations for the future.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com