Baffoe: Cry, The Beloved Meme

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) "The tears tumbled, flooding his face and Michael Jordan had yet to march to the microphone at Symphony Hall."

In what is in retrospect a Woj bomb without even trying to be a Woj bomb before anyone had even coined "Woj bomb," Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski penned a column in 2009 after Michael Jordan's induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame that began with that sentence. Little did he know how prophetic those words were (or, because he's Woj, he totally knew).

The Internet is bad and wrong and terrible -- for myriad reasons, my presence included.

I know it's awful. You know it's awful. Yet here we are. We're on at least our second consecutive hour today on this roller coaster of GIFs from The Office used to defend white supremacy or pitchers swinging the bat or both.

Because the Internet is also self-medicating therapy. It's an opiate of an experiment in ADHD where we get to be really mad one minute, then laughing the next, then cruel after that, then hugging it out with a stranger miles apart, then forgetting to finish reading the thing whose headline got us mad in the first place. The Internet is very good.

Speaking of Hitler and bad hitters -- Michael Jordan. In the 21st century, he's not a former basketball great, advertising icon, franchise owner, teammate puncher or Will Perdue zinger.

He's a meme. His likeness, something so precious to him that he has sued defunct grocery chains for merely alluding to it on $2 steak coupons, is now arguably social media's biggest joke. His crying face now gets superimposed over those of sports, pop culture and history figures who have publicly or (in)famously suffered some sort of defeat or embarrassment. The dude's name is on the world's most popular shoe for three decades, and somehow his face is now mockingly synonymous with loss and struggle. Because the Internet is brutal. And awesome.

Jordan isn't on social media. Presumably, he's never even been on the Internet, because what would someone as wealthy and otherworldly as Michael Jordan ever need the Internet for?

The Crying Jordan meme has divided the Internet, as superficially silly but deep metaphor for human existence popular social media stuff is wont to do. This is similar to the Great Hot Dog Sandwich War of 2014-'15. (Note: While a hot dog is logically a sandwich, some rebs and scholars argue that the conflict, a.k.a. The War of Split Bread Aggression, a.k.a. The Nitrate Vietnam, never ended so much as was allowed to dissipate without official pullout from the bun and/or continue underground).

In one camp sit the vocal antis, the separated oil in the online centrifuge who hate Crying Jordan (or should it be called the Crying Jordan -- and is that a sub-argument I just initiated a la pro- or anti-ketchup on a hot dog sandwich?). The antis consist of multiple battalions. There are those who once liked the meme -- perhaps even posted a version themselves -- but have developed a fatigue. There are those who were indifferent to it in its infancy and problematic adolescence but can't stand that it hasn't died from an overdose yet and keeps bumming space off their social media timelines. And there are those who claim to have never found the meme funny and have always found it dumb (and are liars).

These are haters. The hollow men, whispering together quiet and meaningless like wind in dry grass or rats' feet over broken glass in the dry cellar that is these interwebs. These are the hot dog fascists.

No louder were they ever than after Monday's NCAA championship game, which provided the perfect storm of Crying Jordanity -- a most major of sporting events, sudden crushing defeat, that of Michael Jordan's alma mater, and Michael Jordan in attendance. The meme was born into new worlds after Villanova's winning buzzer-beater against North Carolina, going meta in ways the Internet had never before seen.

Only the coldest of cynics could rail against spontaneous phantasmagoria of true art that volcanoed in bald teary beauty across Twitter amid the postcoital euphoria of having just witnessed perfection of sport. And they did. And there were converts made that night against the weeping Madonna meme's saturation.

Wrote FTW's Charlotte Wilder on Tuesday:

So where do we go from here? Nowhere. Because once you make a meme so meta that it collapses in on itself like a black hole of internet sadness, there is no where else you can go. It was funny for a while (although the fact that Michael Jordan is a real person whose display of emotion got turned into a running joke seems a little mean, to be honest), but after last night, we have officially reached peak crying Jordan.

It's also annoying and played out and I'm sick of it. If I see one more gif of Jordan's weepy, bobbly face, I may log out of all my social media accounts, light my computer on fire, and throw it out a window.

Again, a liar. Wilder and the rest of her ilk need Crying Jordan because they need the pleasure of the hate. I'm guilty of tilting at Internet windmills, too. (Deep dish pizza is a casserole for dumpster divers, for example.) Just not Crying Jordan, because Crying Jordan is versatile and good and necessary and hopefully forever.

Know who else made a lot of wild promises and tried to wipe out an entire group and its history?

Yep, Jason Whitlock.    

Herein lies the rub for the antis -- your hate is shared by Whitlock, Lord High Ruler of Bad Takes. By online transitive property, your argument is automatically then noxious. As the Internet loves Godwin's law, so shall we here on out cite the "Rule of Whitlock." To paraphrase his beloved Omar from The Wire, "If you side with the king, you already missed." If Whitlock is against it, it must be good. I mean, look at the moldy niche the man has carved for himself.

Let's remember, too, that Crying Jordan -- impossible to explain to your parents as it may be -- is an exercise in taking the social elite down a peg, something absurd humor has prized forever. At its core, it punches up, and we lose a piece of our soul when we start calling off the skewering of those in positions of power.

The meme comes from the Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech of the greatest player ever being recognized as the greatest player ever where the greatest player ever dumped on people in a classic Jordan it's-never-over-dance-on-your-grave fashion that made him look sadder than any meme or jeans he wears. Jordan was literally crying as he continued a quixotic fight against all his detractors that was a cool storyline as a player but today exists only as pathological neurosis.

Jordan then did himself no favors as he stroked himself in Jordanesque third person on Monday night in an interview with Craig Sager.

"That was the birth of Michael Jordan," his Airiness says of his 1982 championship-winning shot experience and his Mike-to-Michael #brand.

The 21st century sociologists might disagree. Michael Jordan has been born anew and baptized in his own haughty tears.

As those tears continue to tumble down his face that tumbles down your Twitter timeline, possibly you can blame a Woj bomb for it. Perhaps Jordan himself and his symbolic Internet distance from us is most responsible. Regardless, it unites us in absurdity even as it divides us. We need Crying Jordan, maybe if only to cry for us.

And due to spastic sugar high that is the Internet, Crying Jordan won't go away anytime soon. Because hot dogs are sandwiches, and the only good pizza is from the place where you get it.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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