Hello and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boiler.

Okay, so imagine this. Imagine your exchanging text messages with a friend.

It doesn't really matter what it's about, but it's probably about some unsolved problem

the world or in your life. And she sends you a two-cell cartoon of a dog drinking coffee

in a room that's on fire. And the speech bubble says, as if I even have to fill in the

blank for you, the speech bubble says, this is fine. I don't think it's crazy to assume

most of the people who listen to this will call up the mental image of that cartoon before

they even hear the full description. For many of us particularly liberal people, this

is fine dog has been the defining meme of the past several years, followed very closely

by the LOL Nothing Matters meme, both of which became very zeitgeisty in the Trump era.

But what do these memes actually mean? We use them almost like second nature now, right?

Few of us remember when we first happened upon them, most of us know how and when to

deploy them without much conscious thought. But what ideas are they actually getting at?

On the face of it, the main ideas are that things are not quite right. They're not getting

fixed. Attempting to fix them is probably futile. I think the ubiquity of both of these

references suggests a widespread sense that this describes our collective condition in

some way. The added layer of humor on top of it suggests that the best way to reconcile

ourselves to that state of affairs is with a sense of ironic detachment. And for what

it's worth, I think survey data over the years has been consistent with the idea that this

is or was a sincerely held point of view. It's reflected in pessimistic assessments of

the direction of the country and negative views of various civic institutions. I think

you can see it in Joe Biden's atrociously poor polling among young voters. When you

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