The case in point is the hullabaloo around Uncle Joe Biden's latest fish story. As Biden related it on the campaign trail, as a very young man he took a job as a lifeguard at a black community pool in order to get to know black people better. There he crossed paths with a gang calling themselves the Romans and their leader "Corn Pop." After kicking Corn Pop out for breaking the rules, Biden found Corn Pop waiting for him in the parking with a straight razor. Instead of fighting, however, they bonded, and Uncle Joe found himself officially initiated into the black community.
This is the face of most people born after 1980 when listening to this story:
Then, as we anticipate our favorite takedown artists on social media responding, we shift into the next gear, breaking out the popcorn for Corn Pop:
Sure enough, social media warriors were lining up to dunk on Biden for the story. A representative example is The Root's Michael Harriot, who offered up a wicked blow-by-blow comic tweet thread.
As Harriot writes, it sounds like "some white kid tried to make a gang fairy tale for a 6th grade play." For me, the story immediately triggered clips of Michael Scott (Steve Carell's character from The Office and one of the biggest meme stars on the interweb) trying to relate to his black coworkers. There's a running gag where his black coworkers make up stories about growing up in the ghetto to play to Michael's after-school special level of understanding of the black community (a refresher here).
And so the first instinct after laughing in incredulity is to wind up for the dunk. I mean who doesn't love serving up Michael Scott/Joe Biden a plate of humiliation?
The only problem is that Joe Biden's fish story seems to be largely true (allowing for the usual big fish exaggerations). And it wasn't even a new story. He recounted it in his memoirs over a decade ago, and WaPo brought it up in an article in July. Multiple community members corroborate a bunch of the details, including the existence of Corn Pop.
Why should an apparently true story (again allowing for exaggeration) strike us as so ridiculous? Why do we so instinctively reach for the rotten tomatoes to fling? Biden's story could be an outlier, the exceptionally rare instance of a tall tale turning out to be true. But it strikes me as much, much more likely that is our reactions that are the problem here.
As soon as Biden opened his mouth and mentioned Corn Pop, the man disappeared and the meme took over. We stopped hearing a 76 year old recalling (and, yes, perhaps embellishing) his memories of a bygone era, and instead saw a familiar clown that we've been programmed to mock. And mock we did, regurgitating the appropriate memes and digs to generate the requisite sick burns.
As much as I love memes and the lèse-majesté they are capable of visiting on the powers that be, this is an example of some bad cultural programming. Trashing Biden for Corn Pop is false Wokeness, or a phony Red Pill, depending on which side of the culture war you're firing from. It's evidence of how the memers can be memed, losing all perspective in pursuit of the perfect put-down.
What perspective then can we gain if we set down the popcorn and pick up the Corn Pop? Maybe our elders, even Joe Biden, have some relevant, valuable memories.
Our gut reaction is to ridicule the idea that a cheesy white suburbanite could find some common ground with a corny urban black kid at a community swimming pool. After pondering it for a day, I'm more inclined to mourn that we consider that kind of encounter too ridiculous to be plausible.
To reference another cringy relic from an earlier age I'm reminded of West Side Story. The only time the (ballet dancing, Broadway singing) gang members get along is when they are ridiculing the grinning, Biden-like organizer of the neighborhood dance. Yes, we too can enjoy some temporary unity by ganging up to mock Biden. But are we really mocking the idea that we could ever really get along?
P.S. As an aside, I was thinking about the ridiculousness of the name Corn Pop. It's a tough name to square with contemporary image of the black gangsta. For me the first name that pops(!) into my head is NBA YoungBoy, a 19 year old rapper who has already done time for attempted murder. I have a very hard time imagining NBA YoungBoy calling himself Corn Pop and palling around with a cheeseball like Joe Biden.
But I'm also a big fan of old movies and the old NBA, so I have a few other cultural references to help me put Corn Pop in context. Back then, at least through these modern eyes, there wasn't such a huge corniness differential between prominent blacks and whites. Black celebrities had what we would consider "white" names. Their nicknames weren't quite distinctly "black" either. Contrast Kobe Bryant's self-bestowed "Black Mamba" with his dad's "Jellybean."
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