As recently complained about by Madonna via one of her Instagram stories, “Everyone is so literal.” This, however, is something she’s spoken out about for decades, remarking often on how people frequently misunderstand her and her work because of their lack of a grasp on irony (it once prompted her to scream during the Blond Ambition Tour, “You know what I have to say to America? Get a fucking sense of humor, okay? Lighten up!,” eerily adding, “Spend your time worrying about more important things like how much Ivana is gonna take the Donald for.”).
And it’s true, for some reason, people have only become more non-figurative in spite of the fact that the internet and its associated technology (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) has made it apparent that we should always be questioning what we see. The latest case in point comes in the form of a Britney Spears fan who decided to create a 3-D mockup of “Cleopatra” in the image of Spears. Though it might have been a non sequitur joke that largely fell flat to those who don’t see Spears as anything akin to an empowered queen, it still shouldn’t have caused the level of outrage that it did.
That outrage, of course, stemmed from the literalism of people easily buying into the fan’s caption, “Scientists at Harvard University have created this 3D model depicting what ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra may have looked like.” In spite of the image very obviously being Britney Spears, apparently the average person has forgotten what she looks like after being out of the mainstream lexicon for so long. So naturally they took it to mean the “scientists” at Harvard are not racially woke, among other such scandalized comments as, “$45,000 a year education and all they could come up with is a 3-D image of Britney Spears?” and “Why don’t you link the scientific article instead of just posting unverified pictures?”
Oh dear, must the masses be so undeviating in terms of how they interpret what’s presented to them? Indicative of the primarily American problem of taking everything at face value without being able to think for oneself or probe just a little bit further, the sense of irony and humor in this country appears only to have increasingly plummeted in the wake of the current presidency. But then again, thinking can be very difficult–hurt even–and no one wants to attempt it when someone else can do it for them–regardless of the person so willing to potentially being the biggest dolt of all.
