
Pepe Is a Theme, Not a Meme
Last year I was teaching 12th grade English at a high school in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s a working class community northeast of East Los Angeles. I had an incident that troubles me now, thinking back. In response to reading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and talking about living under the shadow of hatred, a student wrote an essay which I found disturbing. The student wrote about how he, like the Jews in Nazi Germany, was of an oppressed class. He was a Kekistani refugee and his people were being rounded up by SJWs(social justice warriors).
I admit I had to look up what Kekistan was. What I found was pretty unnerving: memes of burning corpses in Auschwitz with Pepe the frog in a Nazi uniform; the body of a dead young Syrian boy washed up on a beach but with the face of Pepe the frog overlaid on the face of the boy; a Nazi flag painted green with the swastika replaced by the letter “K.” Pretty gross stuff. I wondered two things: Who would think this is even remotely acceptable, let alone funny? And what would cause them to think this? I still do not have an answer. But I do have corollary.
Years earlier, in late 2002, I was teaching English as a foreign language in Paris, France. It was in the banlieue known as Ivry-sur-Seine. A communist city with massive public housing units (les grands ensembles) built mostly after WWII. The population was middle class French and North African. The corner boys selling keif would nod and greet me as “brother.” I never bothered to explain to them that I was in fact Mexican/American. At the time being American wasn’t terribly popular in France. There were a number of large anti-American demonstrations to protest the war in Iraq. Sometimes my students would ask me if I liked George Bush. When I told them I did not support him or his war it usually was enough to allay fears. But not always.
One student, a middle school girl, would, from time to time, hold up a drawing in class, a crude rendering of the twin towers in NYC with a plane crashing into them. “I love Osama Bin Laden,” she would shout out cheerfully in English.
At that time the shock of 9/11 was still raw to me. Her glee at the idea of so many innocent deaths made me feel unmoored. When I brought it up to fellow teachers they laughed it off, and then explained, “Oh, she’s a prostitute,” or “We think she sells drugs,” or, “She’s on drugs.” I began to realize that I was treading into the middle of a cultural and racial minefield. Was the girl wrong to make a joke out of the September 11th attacks? Yes. But, there was another problem that I found equally troubling, the attitude of teachers, who were mostly white, towards Muslim students of color. They were written off as lost before their lives had even begun. Even the teachers of North African descent veered toward the conservative orthodoxy of their fairer skinned peers. “These kids, there’s nothing you can do with them,” they all seemed to be saying.
I was fairly new to teaching then. I wasn’t very good. My class management sucked, but I recognized that something was truly wrong, when a system as liberal as the one in France — free lunches, free college, free medical care — still fails students to an extraordinary extent.
I think of that young girl whenever I read or hear about another young Muslim extremist who has just carried out another horrific attack, especially when, quite often, the young person was an EU citizen by birth. Sure there is free college in France but what good is that when there are no jobs? There might be work in the United States but why would a Muslim want to emigrate to a country that has been telling them it doesn’t want them since 2001?
That young girl was labeled as detritus by the majority society around her, one she had no choice but to live in. She wasn’t the only one. There were many others. Most of the students dealt with it, most survived and persisted, most had plans to go to college or government funded trade schools, but many were on the fringes. Some did sell drugs, or stole, to help their families, because in France, which is far more generous than the United States with aid to the poor, it is still not possible for a family to survive on government aid alone.
Cut to 2016: the young boy in San Gabriel Valley who wrote the essay about his beloved Kekistan, a tall, uneasy youth, who made racist jokes under his breath, but whose lips trembled in fear when I called him to the side and spoke with him one on one, this kid, wasn’t some blond haired, blue eyed Aryan, but Asian American. His grades weren’t great. He was on free lunch. He wasn’t going to college. His only hope was the military. And if that didn’t work out for him he didn’t have a fall back plan.
It was a bit of a wakeup call to discover that, as in my own Hispanic community, among middle class Asian American kids there is a lot of anger. The girls can study hard and do well in school, but if they’re not great students there’s a lot to be fearful of. In my generation many girls got pregnant, in my parents’ day many just didn’t bother to finish school. It’s not much better today for Asian boys, school can be an emasculating place, and if you feel like you don’t fit in, because you are not great at writing, or math, there is more than just fear, there is the reality that you will fail in life.
In my day gangs were a way to compensate for rejection by society. I was surprised to discover that in 2017 things haven’t changed all that much. Asian American boys in San Gabriel Valley who don’t fit in put their efforts into overcompensating, they drive big cars, they get in fights, they talk about guns, a lot, and some of them send hateful memes to each other, or scrawl pictures of Pepe the Frog in school books.
Both the Muslim kids I taught in France, and the minority students I have taught here in Los Angeles County are struggling to see a future for themselves. In France there are social workers on campus, and the free lunches are better than most fine restaurants in LA, and still many students fail, many fall through the cracks, some might even turn to radical Islam, not because they won’t try to fit in to the larger society but because no matter what they do, they never will. I see something similar in the anger bubbling up among young people here in the US.
Those angry young white neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville might feel that they have missed out on their “White Privilege,” maybe they have. I’m not excusing their hatred. Marching in support of statues that pay homage to slavery, statues that were erected by white supremacists to instill terror and fear, is reprehensible. Those young white men, and women, carrying Nazi flags, are angry because they see their future shrinking. Racism is not an effective way to fight for improved social conditions, but I guess Nazis never see things that way. As Hank Chinaski says in the movie Barfly, “Ooo baby, misdirected animosity.”
On the other hand a few students I had last year told me that because they couldn’t vote for Bernie Sanders they voted for Donald Trump. Others told me that they didn’t vote at all because Trump might be a racist but Hillary is very corrupt. When I asked how she was corrupt, the answer was either “I don’t know…” or “Her emails.” My African American neighbor upstairs told me a long story the other day about how bad Trump is, how he has a friend who was rounded up by ICE and what a tragedy it has been for the family. Then in the next breath he tells me about how poverty in Haiti is a direct result of the Clintons. None of it makes any sense to me. Except maybe the fact that we are all fighting for crumbs, and our anger is turning to hatred, and our hatred will turn to violence.
I have caught Hispanic students laughing at racist Pepe memes and this also makes no sense to me. Maybe this anger, coming from minorities, directed towards other minorities here in the US could be the result of the realization that no matter how hard they try, they won’t get ahead. They have brothers and sisters who did all the right things: studied hard, got good grades, went to college, yet still can’t get the job and are still living at home. I know, because I am one of them. I did all of the things I was told to do. I have two masters’ degrees and yet I have been underemployed since 2011. And I’ll admit it, I have anger.
After moving back to the United States I taught school in south Los Angeles in 2004, I learned a lot about the tensions between Hispanic kids and African American kids, but I did not realize that a similar tension existed between lower middle class Asian kids and whites. Oddly, many of my students think of me as white. I get lumped in with, “You white people,” when speaking to almost any group that is not white. But what I have noticed is that lately the tension seems more pronounced.
When I was a student growing up in San Bernardino, California in the early 1980s, it was not uncommon to find a KKK tract slipped into your locker. The tracts were gross, I don’t remember what they said exactly, a call to whites to join their cause. They were meant to scare anybody who was not white, but I am fairly sure they did not depict Jews burning in ovens as a hilarious joke.
Something terrible is happening and I almost wonder if it is too late for it to be stopped. We’ve seen the use of state run media to disseminate propaganda and foment hatred in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda, and we know how that ended. In The Great Crash of 1929 John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about how financial collapses take place as soon as a society has forgotten about the damage of the last crash. He also spoke about how the depth of the crash depends on the length of the bubble which preceded it. We are in a bubble right now, a bubble of hatred. And I fear the depth of the crash which is to come will depend on how long this hatred is allowed to fester.
This morning I watched excerpts of Donald Trump’s rally in Phoenix last night. There was nothing new said. He’s been spewing the same hatred at his rallies for two years. It is amazing to see Republican leaders and pundits cry out in shock at how unhinged he is, or un-presidential he acts. The man has never changed. Larry King said the other day he can’t believe Donald is the same man he’s known since the 1980s. And yet I watched Donald Trump on Larry King Live in the early 1990s insult Larry King on national television, telling him his breath was the worst breath he’d ever smelled. But people like winners, and when winners are winning no one asks how they do it.
But at a certain point the odds are the winners start to lose, and then what happens? Before the election my radical leftist friends blamed the neo-conservatives for everything, they blamed Hillary as much as they blamed the GOP, if not more. I admit I don’t speak to those people anymore. I listened to their rants about the evils of the Clintons. I never got it. I am angry that they could not, or would not listen to me when I brought up the fact that I don’t live in ideology I live in reality and in reality my parents went to segregated schools.
There are school districts in California that did not desegregate until 1970. My parents were the first Mexicans to buy a house in a white neighborhood in 1974. And yet I was “Shilling for Hillary,” every time I voiced doubt about Sanders. To me economic racism is a real thing. It is something that Bernie Sanders was never going to fix, mostly because he wasn’t a serious contender.
Three years ago I taught for a year in Santa Monica. One of my students told me happily that their school is great because they opted out of federal funding so they don’t have to share with poor kids. And why should they? The house my parents bought in San Bernardino in 1974 cost about $30,000. The same sized house in Santa Monica cost $80,000 in ’74. My old home is now worth $280,00 and that house in Santa Monica? In the millions. It’s no surprise to me that Trump adviser Stephen Miller graduated from supposedly liberal Samohi. But, perhaps I am part of the problem. Or rather, my anger is. I am still angry and that isn’t helping anything or anyone. But more than being angry I am afraid.
I saw those young white kids marching in Charlottesville with their tiki torches and their Nazi flags, and I was scared. But you know what? It’s not the first time. I am scared every time a big 4x4 truck with a confederate flag passes me on the freeway. That is the point isn’t it? There was no other point to putting those flags up other than to give tacit approval to white supremacy, and to make people of color afraid to speak up. If that is not terrorism I don’t know what is.
But here is the thing, Donald Trump can rail against terrorists and terrorism, but I know that the number of Muslims in Europe is in the millions, while the number who carry out attacks is but a small handful. Muslims rally against terrorism after many of these attacks and yet there is little coverage of that. Yet a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turns out thousands and white America is divided on what it meant. To me that is terrifying.
I watched some white Americans defend those in Charlottesville, saying that the rally was about heritage. And there it is, while some white Americans may feel that they have lost their privilege, or are being persecuted, many, like myself, feel that the deck was always loaded against them. Not only that, but whatever small inroads were made in the past are now in danger of being lost, maybe forever.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I know that after WWII my uncles came back and were denied government backed home loans. They headed back to the fields to pick fruit and it took them another generation to enter into the middle class. While their white veteran compatriots came back, went to college and bought houses in white neighborhoods where the value went up faster.
The town that l live in, South Pasadena, was once known as a sundown city. If you were black or Mexican walking the streets after sundown you would be arrested. This has changed. The United States has been growing more liberal for decades, something I took for granted. And yet I read in The National Review just the other day an article by Arthur Herman which stated, “…what American blacks suffered under segregation was nothing compared to what liberalism has inflicted on them since the 1950s…” And I have to wonder, am I living in a joke? Has my reality actually been a false one and only now the curtain has been drawn back and what I thought was a country of reason, is actually a Pepe the Frog meme?
At his rally in Phoenix last night Trump said, “They are trying to take away our history and our heritage.” It was a white supremacist rallying cry. There were children in that audience. Some of them may grow up believing that there is a “they” out there trying to erase their future and their past, and if someone believed that what would stop him, or her, from acting out violently?
The longer this building anger persists, the worse it will be. The trouble is that no one seems to be doing anything to stop it. There doesn’t seem to be any adults anywhere. The cult of Trump is morphing into a death cult, his speeches sound more and more like the late night ramblings of Jim Jones. But point this out on twitter and a million racists pile on. Or are they all bots? Likewise if you say something negative on twitter about Bernie Sanders you still get the wrath of a million angry white hipsters. Are they bots as well? What is real, and what isn’t? Anymore it is hard to tell.
And speaking of false realities, young white men watch Alex Jones for laughs, but after a while the poison begins to sink in and soon they are out in the streets with tiki torches. But young Hispanic and Asian boys watch Alex Jones too, they have told me so. “Don’t you think he’s hilarious?” they ask me. “No,” I tell them. “He isn’t funny, he’s toxic.” But to them Hitler is no more real than Caligula. To them Pepe is not a hate delivery system but a funny cartoon character like Bugs Bunny but darker, and they’ve never seen Bugs Bunny anyway. And none of it is real.
So here we are, hurtling down the highway at top speed. It’s a nice car we’re driving, perhaps it’s stolen. The back seat is littered with empties, the smell of pot wafts through. The bridge is out ahead, the sign read a few miles back, but I’m on twitter now. I’m liking something. Someone just sent me a hateful meme. I’m going on a tweet storm. It’s very quiet now, almost as if the wheels have left the road. That probably isn’t possible, but then again, who would have ever thought Donald Trump could be president?