On Cultural Memetics
All bullshit travels, so it seems,
In basic units known as "memes"*.
While poets think that they create
An individual world template,
But, in reality, what they do
Is pass their viruses onto you.
And being its host, you're blind
To the infection of your mind,
As you just replicate each day
Some tired cultural cliché
Of pompous meme-enamored fools,
Who think they're brilliant and cool.
But bullshit's bullshit in the end,
That changes with each fad and trend,
Through meme mutation it's unseen
By mind's emerging meta-memes,
Which knows it can't fight with it--
For there is no vaccime for this shit.
You now feel trapped in a rubber room,
Where memes float by and go boom
Within the cells of tortured brain,
Drunk with conceptual champagne--
Like Buddha going through Hell,
That salivates to Pavlov's bell.
Where is my brain? Where are my shoes?
Where is the world I loved and knew?
Only these toxins of the mind?
Have I gone mad? Have I gone blind?
Have I forgotten what it means
To be a man with will and dreams?
And I walk out of the cave,
This land of freaks, this home of knaves,
This desert of conceptual hell,
Where love is gone and bullshit sells,
Yes I walk out once again--
Not as a membot, but a man.
September 5, 2006
NOTE: The term "meme" (rhymes with "dream"), coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information that can be transmitted from one mind to another.
Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution
analogous in many ways to the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or
meme-complexes. The idea of memes has proved a successful meme in its own right, achieving a degree of penetration into popular culture rare for a scientific theory. Some proponents
of memes suggest that memes evolve via natural selection--in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution -- on the premise that variation, mutation,
competition, and "inheritance" influence their replicative success. For example, while one idea may become extinct, other ideas will survive, spread and mutate -- for better or for worse --
through modification. Some meme-theorists contend that memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes which replicate the most effectively spread best;
which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts.
--From Wikipedia, free encyclopedia
Copyright © 2006 by Alexander Shaumyan