Seriously funny: A DOGE of our own

There’s an outrageous meme circulating showing an AI-generated Donald Trump sucking the toes of Elon Musk. Being AI, the meme also cleverly mocks itself by giving Musk two left feet. The deepfake was broadcast on hacked monitors displayed within an American government department and running the caption, ‘Long Live the Real King’. The caption suggests that Elon Musk is the sovereign and President Trump the lackey. Using the term ‘King’ reflects the Democrats’ rhetoric about Trump, that he’s a would-be monarch, a fascist. It reminds me of The Sex Pistols’ outrageous attack on the monarchy in their infamous song, God Save the Queen: ‘God save the Queen/ The fascist regime/ It made you a moron/ Potential h-bomb’.

The song, released during Queen Elizabeth’s silver jubilee in 1977, managed to reach number 1 in the British charts despite the BBC giving it no airtime. I cannot imagine, in the Indian context, an analogous meme to the Trump-Musk one going viral. British leadership, like American Presidents, are subject to every manner of verbal and visual insult provided it doesn’t rise to the level of threat. But political cartoonist Ravi Shankar says that Indians can’t take a ribbing. We jail our stand-up comedians, our satirical cartoonists self-censor, and our free-speech protections are far less robust than those in Britain or America.

I raise these points about transgressive satire not simply because of the toe-sucking meme, but because of the issues behind it. That is, it was the actions of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – that so aggravated the creators of the meme that they decided to respond as they did. And DOGE is not merely a quasi-governmental department cobbled into tenuous quasi-legal existence; no, it is also in itself a sort of joke. For, Musk created the acronym DOGE to reflect the name of his favourite memecoin, DogeCoin. And Doge, now a top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap, was itself created as a joke to mock the speculative nature of cryptos. That’s layers of jokes built on jokes. To review, the meme of Trump sucking Musk’s toes is a joke about DOGE, and about who really leads the USA, and DOGE was a joke of Musk’s own to troll governance, naming a powerful government quasi-department after a memecoin, one that was itself originally a joke on crypto.

There are turtles all the way down. During the late Queen’s platinum jubilee in 2022, God Save the Queen was re-released as a single, an epic moment of British self-trolling. ‘God save the Queen/ She ain’t no human being/ Don’t be told what you want to want to/ And don’t be told what you want to need’. This time around, the Sex Pistols were celebrated by the BBC. The British government appropriated their anti-authority energy into its promotion of the Queen’s jubilee, and after nearly half a century, the anti-establishment song once again rose to number 1.

Now, many in India are proposing that we need a DOGE of our own. As we all know, our government is profoundly inefficient, bureaucratic, arbitrary, and any amount of government efficiency that could be achieved in India would do us a world of good. Very true. But this argument fails to recognise the turtle in the room. That is, unlike Britain or the USA, we in India do not erect our institutions on jokes and memes.

You can see that through our past attempts to inculcate government efficiency – they have all been dead serious. Twenty-five years ago, the Vajpayee government formed the Expenditure Reforms Committee that examined waste in government ministries. Nothing much came of the 10 reports that the Committee produced. The Disinvestment Commission, about twenty years ago, also produced 10 reports. Since then, the number of government enterprises has doubled. Ten years ago, an Expenditure Management Commission was formed. Yet again. Committees and Commissions can be infinitely created but efficiency will forever elude us. Why? Because to paraphrase Einstein, you can’t solve problems by using the same lack of humour that you used to create them.

What commentators (and would-be imitators) fail to recognise about DOGE is that at heart, it is contemptuous of government, it laughs at government, trolls governance, and is grounded in satirical, anarchic, transgressive, disrespectful precedents. India cannot have a DOGE of its own because this is not our sense of humour.

It is a completely different question as to whether DOGE will manage to succeed on its own soil. After all, if you have to explain a joke, it’s really not that funny. ‘God save the Queen/ God save your mad parade/ Oh, lord, God have mercy/ All crimes are paid’.

(Aakash Singh Rathore as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes. X: @ASR_metta)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.