Meh Struggle

Where do wingnut choads get room to talk about Simone Biles?

Among the little things in American life that bug me is the expression “meh.” As I said back in 2011, it seems to me “the characteristic vocal tic of a specific type of suburban douchebag who thinks his unqualified, monosyllabic opinion on anything matters because you can’t see his house from the road — the bleat of the burgher who resents every moment the world isn’t kissing his ass.”

The Olympics are always a great opportunity for a particularly dumb variant of meh-ism. America’s couches are draped with guys who, though they break a sweat whenever they move a kitchen chair, yet gaze blandly upon the feats of athleticism from Tokyo on the TV and think that in the parallel bars, for example, the first place guy is alright, but the second place guy is shit, he just really blew it; even before the commentator said what he did wrong, they knew it, as some of them will explain using terms they leaned just that day during the broadcast.

And if you know guys like them and have ever challenged their harsh judgments as perhaps not entirely qualified, and seen how ill they tend to take such rebukes, then you know too what’s in back of it: The idea that they are, too, qualified, because they are special and gifted and given the opportunity and the sort of advantages in training and discipline these athletes have had, they themselves could in fact do at least as well — maybe not right at this moment, sure, but with a little training — after all, how hard can it be? The mental part is half of it — hell, it’s most of it, and they have that part down already. The hesitation, the mental mistake that guy who only won the silver made? They never would have made that mistake.

So it stands to reason that a number of MehMericans have publicly offered their contemptuous opinion of the withdrawal from the team finals of U.S. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, who is a five-time world all-around champion, five-time world floor exercise champion, three-time world balance beam… oh, what’s the point, you all know her achievements and have seen the miracles of which she’s capable. Since she pleaded a mental deficit that would have made the feats of strength and agility required of her dangerous, men, or rather mehn (overwhelmingly and of course), have flooded social media to talk about how Biles blew it, in fact doesn’t have What It Takes.

And it’s even less of a surprise that so many of these guys are conservatives, for conservatism these days is little more than an inflated self-opinion and a mean streak —the essence of meh. You may have seen them before this (led by the tubby King of Meh himself!) talking about how much they hate the U.S. Women’s Soccer team, and about how, unlike ordinary Americans who enjoy cheering on what they consider to be their home team, they are actually hoping American athletes would lose:

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona

Newsmax host: "It's not often that I'm happy a USA team loses in the Olympics... I found myself rooting against not just Megan Rapino and her merry band of America-hating female soccer players...but I took pleasure in the men’s basketball Team USA's first team loss since 2004."

When Biles withdrew, while the rest of the world sympathized and wished her well, she was mehnaced by conservative commentators including Ben Shapiro beardo Matt Walsh (“That is what Simone Biles did to earn this exuberant applause,” he said of the outpouring of support, “she gave up”), a three-named twat from The Federalist who segued into a fallen-world lament on how “we as a society have begun conflating mental health and mental toughness, or grit” (this charge, I remind you, was made by someone who writes for The Federalist), by wingnut performance artist Charlie Kirk (“We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles”), and a never-used-to-haul-anything-but-groceries pick-up truckload of other rightwing insta-authorities.

That Biles is black can never be discounted as part of the reason for the rightwingers’ readiness to pile contempt on her when the opportunity arose. (Calling an accomplished black person lazy is like hitting fungoes for these guys, if they could hit fungoes.) But in my view the cause is mainly meh, and the inability of the meh-sayers to acknowledge any achievement or experience, indeed any reality whatsoever, beyond that which flatters their swollen egos. And, as mentioned, we see this run riot in our politics: the inability to comprehend the need for even the smallest personal sacrifice to combat a public health issue, the inability to accept as legitimate an electoral result that conflicts with one’s fantasies of dominance, etc. It’s getting close to time when, if we are to endure as a democracy, we’re going to have to slap the meh out of their mouths.