By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Ways & Memes
Rubber dildoes are raining down on WNBA games and the women’s basketball league’s not happy.
The first neon green one, flung from the stands at the Golden State Valkyries-Atlanta Dream game, struck some players as a joke. Not police.
Delbert Carver, 23, was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, public indecency/indecent exposure and criminal trespass. In an affidavit, he admitted the act was “intended to go viral.”
By Aug. 7 there had been reports of sex toys thrown in six games since then. The league has denounced flinging dildoes as disrespectful, demeaning to women and dangerous. How would you like to get hit in the head with these flying things?
A cryptocurrency group has taken credit (?) for the flying phalluses, which they claim were planned to promote their Green Dildo meme coin, purportedly as an awareness-raising protest against the hardships of being small-time investors in the “toxic” landscape of cryptocurrency.
“We didn’t do this because like we dislike women’s sports,” said an anonymous group spokesman, “or, like, some of the narratives that are trending right now are ridiculous.
“Creating disruption at games is like, it happens in every single sport, right? “We’ve seen it in the NFL, we’ve seen it in hockey you know … fans doing random things to more or less create attention.”
Like, you know, what a great idea. The instant I see a green rubber schlong sail down my pity goes out to these crypto-nuts.
Lee Escobedo, writing for The Guardian, suggests it’s a trend more ominous than just stupid. “These grotesque affronts aren’t just juvenile spectacle. It’s the logical endpoint of a culture fluent in irony, addicted to attention and hollowed out by meaninglessness,” he opines.
“These aren’t protests or insults that make a point. They’re spectacles. The goal is to provoke. In a memetic landscape poisoned by irony, absurdity is the point.”
Naturally he blames Trump. “All of this really boils down to the death of shame within society. And it starts at the top,” writes the Englishman.
“Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy isn’t a policy but a persona as the shameless troll who made humiliation a political strategy. His constant provocation and gleeful disdain for norms created a playbook both parties use now.
“Liberals respond with faux-moral outrage, conservatives with Nietzschean bravado, but the end result is the same: a culture addicted to performance, where shame is no longer a deterrent.”
Donald Trump Jr. corroborated this Aug. 7 posting a doctored image on Instagram showing his father flinging a dildo at a women’s basketball game from the White House roof.
Now America has been made great again, let’s on with things. I’m talking Hendrix, the profane parrot put up for adoption in a Facebook notice that fast went viral.
The blue-and-gold macaw’s vocabulary is liberally spiced with endearments like “shut the f___ up!” and “MFer!”
Chantelle Rogers, an administrative assistant at Forever Paws Animal Shelter in Falls River, Me., didn’t mince words in her description.
“If you adopt Hendrix, you’re essentially adopting Samuel L. Jackson,” she wrote, referring to the actor known in part for delivering profanity-laden dialogue in movies. “This bird’s language is not for the faint of heart.”
Thousands of people shared the post, which got traction for its candor and humor. The next day the shelter received close to 60 adoption applications, causing shelter staff to close applications that day.
“And just like that I learned more about people than I wanted to,” Rogers wrote on Facebook a few days later. By June 21 Hendrix was up and out.
“Zeke,” I told the Pullman Tavern bartender. “I’m worried about humanity. The toxic landscape of cryptocurrency has me wanting to fling green dildos at women’s basketball games.”
“So adopt a parrot,” he advised.
In flew Hendrix.
“That’s who I meme,” Zeke said.
