Google Wrecks Christmas

Daniel Penny, Luigi Mangione, and the Dumpster Fire of our Vanity

File: Life of Man (BM 1868,0612.1236).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

My Twitter feed—yes, it probably does resemble a trough, one filled with a jumble of different kinds of seed oil-infused nuts, some delicious, like cashews, and others the kind one continually passes over until they are the only ones left, like the awful macadamia nut—is full to the brim of Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione. First of all, what interesting names. Second of all, I have so many thoughts I’m not sure how to organize them.

Part of the jumble is that this age deals in images and impressions. We are the generation of the meme, of the gif, of the reel. I mean, that’s what I do every day—get online and scroll through all the content and then try to use words to describe whatever I see, along the way losing the emotional power of the image in the act of translation. Like, with what kind of words can I describe this Google Ad? It is of a tall man in an expensive gray lady’s top and rather badly cut feminine-ish trousers and clunky slippers. He has his hair in a tight ballet bun. He has on one stupidly large earring in only one ear and is adorned with subdued yet obvious make-up. Worse, he is acting like a woman. Or rather, he is adopting the movements and speech of what he, and by association Google, thinks a woman is like. His mannerisms are exaggerated and prissy. He has so many “looks” to pull off for the holidays, you see, and his skin is so dry. He ends up buying some kind of face cream. It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes me, an actual woman, want to crawl into a hole and give up. It is disrespectful and—what’s the word—grotesque.

On the other side of the phenomenon of men pretending to be women and getting away with it, of being thought clever and interesting, rather than castigated for shamefully mocking half of the human family, are two men who appear to be ordinary, nay even reasonable.