When Karen Thinks You're the Karen
Karens really believe they're not the Karens [or insert negative label here]. Don't believe me? Attend an HOA meeting.
The right meme can be therapeutic. Millions of people found comedic reliefW= when the Karen meme came along in 2020, a Covid-era reimagining of the overbearing “soccer mom” stereotype who will stop at nothing short of a mani-pedi to make sure the parking rules are enforced and the manager at Ann Taylor gets a piece of her mind and that little Mason makes the team. Better than humor, they found a name for the kind of people that were boosting oppressive policies and snitching on people who just wanted to get over Covid and live normal lives. When some white lady in her late 50s says she’ll go tell the supermarket manager that you’re not wearing a mask, you can snort, roll your eyes, and say to yourself, “Okay, Karen.” Or say it to her face because you know she will hate it (though it’s not very Christian). You can put “no Karens allowed” in the description of your closed Facebook group. The term the Karens could help you grapple with how the world around you has changed, and where lines have been drawn, and easily reference the kind of people who help the oppressors.
Names are powerful, but like all heavily used, loaded terms, at some point the oversaturation leads to a dilution of meaning, and then it inevitably is turned on the people who first applied it. Somewhere down the line, some less aggressive, less politically involved Karens pick up this word that they don’t fully understand and then they wield it against people they don’t like. If Sheila is against publicly calling out people who still have their trash cans on the curb a day after pickup, then she’s the Karen. Carol just want some goddamn order around here, and anyone who gets in her way is a Karen.
I’ve written this week at The Federalist about how the left’s favorite abortion motif of “forced motherhood” is just a projection of their own brutality onto their opposition. I think more self-aware leftists understand this, though they will only admit it with lots if “but, but, but it’s not a person…”. Most, however, I think are quite unaware of the hypocrisy of saying natural consequences of sex, pregnancy and then birth, are forced, but ripping out a fetus limb from limb out of your womb isn’t force, it’s just “healthcare.” The evil Republicans are the authoritarians, the villains in this Handmaid’s Tale world, and they want to force their “religion” on all women. They’re like the Karens who are confident they aren’t the Karens because you are the Karen.
A popular quote circulates on the right (I believe, mostly, though it wouldn’t surprise me if it circulated completely unironically among the left) that is attributed to various villains of history like Josef Goebbel and Karel Marx and maybe Vladimir Lenin: “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It occurred to me this week that this isn’t a high-handed propaganda tactic of national and global politics. It is normal. This week our neighborhood gathered for an HOA meeting in which board members who were trying to make sure the covenants of the neighborhood are renewed instead of expiring (and therefore the HOA, and care for the common areas, and any rules whatsoever), were pointedly questioned and challenged on every line item of the agenda. Questions did not vary much in tone from, “Why do you suck so much as a human being?”
Neighborly thoughts were expressed along these very rational lines:
They want to raise the number of pets allowed from three to four? Gawd, it’s the effing politboro.
Our dues are being cut in half but they can’t refund us the extra dues the last board charged us because they say they’re not allowed to under the bylaws? Mother-effing piece of $#!+. (At least two of the board members wanted to refund the money).
They don’t want to use this opportunity in which we need 85% of the whole neighborhood to approve the covenant renewal to sneak in allowance for keeping chickens? How SELFISH.
They want to allow any house color already in the neighborhood instead of the boring list of ~4 neutrals listed in the covenants? What is this, the COMMUNIST CHINA?
I’m only exaggerating slightly. The verbal stoning continued for two hours and then some as neighbors snickered and scoffed together after the meeting, comfortable saying how they really feel about this or that board member in the twilight.
I realized after my first HOA meeting that a sizeable percentage of adults never mature past high school. They’re passive aggressive, self-conscious but not self-aware, and seek to take out their frustrations on whomever is in front of them whom they don’t like. Especially if they’re in positions of authority (even volunteer ones). They may want more rules, or fewer but in selfish ways, but they will call anyone who shows the slightest resistance to their way of thinking a Karen. Or worse. And they will not feel the slightest twinge of guilt about it because they already identified the Karens [or insert negative label here], so it can’t be them.
This is the deeply unsatisfying part of a cultural meme’s cycle: the unconscious boomerang of a term back at the people who first embraced it, who even needed it to help them process and cope with a difficult reality. Getting whacked on the head with labels for the opposite of the thing you are actually doing, that feel so close to gaslighting (though the people pelting you with these insults probably aren’t sinister enough to manipulate you that way), really sucks. This linguistic rot happens even to more common and ubiquitous terms that used to mean something more particular, but now are just smears of the opposition. You want more freedom? Authoritarian. You want to keep more of your own money? Thief. You don’t want children pressured to take experimental injections? Child endangerment. You want people to show ID before voting? Electoral cheating. People discontented with the fact the world doesn’t bend easily to their whims are very comfortable accusing you of being or doing something you’re not, but which they very often are themselves. I’m not the Karen. You’re the Karen.
Projecting and accusing people of that which you are guilty is a normal, sinful behavior of the fallen human, not something reserved for abusive spouses and world leaders. The perversion of a useful term that’s then turned back on us sucks, but if we remember that it’s normal, it sucks a little bit less.
This decade in the U.S. has been a great lesson in how it's possible to create enormous amounts of unhappiness and social bitterness amid material plenty.
The Karening phenomenon is part of it. The perpetuation of Let's Go Brandon after it lost its satirical verve is another part. There's a sour quality to life, even in South Dakota it appears, and I believe it's different from how it was 4 or 7 years ago.