Many are feeling the Bern. Others are getting Berned out.
What’s up with that?
Joe Biden promised unity, but Bernie Sanders brought everybody together on social media.
A photo of Sanders looking frumpy and a tad bored at Wednesday’s inauguration led to millions of memes around the planet and in outer space.
Local postings show Bernie at a cannabis shop, Dick’s burgers, Schack Art Center, stealing a chair from Office Depot with anti-tax activist Tim Eyman, and on the sidewalk with Everett’s beloved tattooed patriot, Samiu Bloomfield.
The meme-able moment was a photo of the Vermont senator off to the side, arms crossed, slouched in a chair on the U.S. Capitol steps. Everybody else was gussied up in tailored coats and heels and there’s Bernie, wearing big mittens made out of a recycled sweater, wearing a drab jacket and disposable blue mask.
Bernie at the Everett Costco, created with an app using Google Maps.
As a viral tweet put it: “Bernie dressed like the inauguration is on his to do list today but ain’t his whole day.”
Sanders, 79, later said he was just trying to stay warm.
On Google, there are some 120 million results for “Bernie mittens.”
There are a few million posts reading, “OK, I promise this is the last Bernie meme, I promise.”
About 10 million Bernie memes were created over three days from a free and easy app using Google Maps street view to place the Sanders image at any address. Over the weekend, the NYU student who created the app took it down, saying the maintenance costs were too high.
A photo illustration of the 20-foot rooftop muffler man statue on Hewitt Avenue in a meme using an Instagram filter. (Andrea Brown / The Herald)
Instagram and Snapchat have filters to insert Bernie into photos.
“I think it is fun. It brings a lot of people some laughter,” said Tanya Dowell of Everett. “They see it and chuckle. Or they roll their eyes, ‘Not this again.’”
Dowell made a Bernie meme using Snapchat and a photo of her daughter, Rian, 12, selling Girl Scout cookies in March 2020 in front of a store. Rian sold 2,807 boxes last year. Cookie sales are all online this year.
The meme is a little levity in a dark winter of a COVID vaccine shortage and a death toll surpassing 425,000 people in the United States from the coronavirus.
Bernie is everywhere.
At the Last Supper table. A fly in Pence’s hair. With the Pope. On a bucket of KFC. In an X-ray. Under the covers with a Golden Girl. In the orange pattern on Melania Trump’s exit dress. On a bench with Forrest Gump. Next to Winston Churchill at Yalta.
Tanya Dowell used a Snapchat filter to make this Bernie meme of her daughter, Rian Dowell, 12, selling Girl Scout cookies in front of an Everett store in 2020. (Tanya Dowell)
He’s on Saturn, on Paris runways, in the streets of Kenya and photobombing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. An India tourism site has him sitting on a rock near a tea plantation.
I can’t look at a photo now without searching for Bernie. It’s like looking for Waldo.
As if that’s not enough, there are Bernie knitted dolls and bobbleheads. The meme has already found the way onto skin as tattoos and as designs on fingernails. Count on it as a Halloween costume.
The jacket brand is sold out as is the official Chairman Sanders $45 crewneck his campaign offered up for charity. Other memed shirts are plentiful on the internet. Sites sprung up overnight to tell how to make your own mittens.
Malicious Women Co. in Snohomish came out with a limited-edition “I’m Bernin’ For You” candle, with $2 from each sale donated to local food banks.
Sure, it will stop getting funny at some point. (Some claim it never was, already has.) But until then …
Just one last Bernie meme, I promise.
Andrea Brown: abrown@heraldnet.com; 425-339-3443. Twitter @reporterbrown.
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