Vintage Memes
Internet culture, but make it hipsterer.
Content warning: There is no point to this post.
circa 1840: “My name is Haines”
Thomas Jefferson, even while President, liked to travel alone, without bodyguards or assistants. Back then, a politician could get away with being a nerdy loner, because nobody was watching video of him or seeing his photograph in newspapers.
It was apparently pretty common for people to start a political argument with him without knowing who he was, and end up unwittingly bashing Jefferson to his face. Jefferson, either out of shyness, fear, or amusement, would just let this happen.
A bit after his death, one of these anecdotes in particular happened to go viral. A man named Haines was a passenger in the same stagecoach as Jefferson, and spent the ride explaining to him how terrible Jefferson was. When they both got out at the same stop, Jefferson came clean and introduced himself. Without missing a beat, the man said “And my name is Haines,” then jumped on a horse and rode off, becoming the first human to break the speed of sound using a vehicle.
The meme became to say “My name is Haines” when you were about to abruptly leave a situation. I think we should bring this one back—it’d be helpful to have a sentence that means “I’m about to make an Irish exit,” although now that I write that, I’m tempted to just yell “Irish exit!” next time.
Later 19th century: “Here’s your mule!”
We shouldn’t bring this one back, it’s for jerks.
American mules were expensive. They’re mostly infertile, so the only way to get more of them reliably is by breeding a donkey and a horse, which they are not always into. Mules are an example of heterosis, or hybrid vigor—the whole is greater (in the sense of more useful on a farm) than the sum of its parts. Famously, General Sherman would give 40 acres of land and a mule to families he’d freed, often seized from the family’s former owners. (There was a lot of hope that everybody who had been enslaved would get reparations, but Andrew Johnson, who became one of our worst presidents thanks to being nominated as vice president to balance the ticket with our best one, put a stop to it.) George Washington, who bred some of the first mules on the continent at Mount Vernon, joked once that he’d be fine with it if his tombstone read “Father of the American Mule”.
So mules were a lot of value in a small package. People would steal them and hope that their owner would think they’d just wandered off. If you really wanted to mess with your victim, you’d station conspirators everywhere the mule could plausibly have wandered off to, with instructions to each shout “Here’s your mule!” at a different time, so that the owner would end up running all over the place, constantly being told “Ah, you just missed it!”
This prank may or may not have been invented by Confederate soldiers, but they’re definitely the ones who popularized it. “Here’s your mule!” became kind of a jerk anthem. It was the chorus to Confederate marching songs. They used it as an ironic battlecry. Union soldiers countered by rewriting the lyrics to one of these songs so that it was about a plantation owner fruitlessly trying to find his freed slaves and what was, now, their mule.
Many tribes of American Indians had been forcibly relocated to what is now Oklahoma. Most of these tribes owned slaves themselves, and sided with the Confederates in the Civil War. After the war, this was used as a pretext to take their land again, giving it to white homesteaders…first come, first serve. The land rush was chaotic, especially if you followed the rules and only showed up when you were legally allowed to (people who snuck in earlier were called Sooners). You’d end up with a bunch of strangers all camped out near each other, staking out little plots of land in what was destined to become a city.
It was in this weird situation that the “Here’s your mule” meme had its peak. It might’ve been a joke from the start, or maybe somebody named Joe was actually looking for a lost mule. If so, he definitely never found it, because all the homesteaders started shouting “Hey! Joe! Here’s your mule!” It spread from camp to camp, probably confusing a lot of people named Joe but delighting everyone else.
Again, let’s not resurrect this one, it’s obnoxious. The people who all showed up at once, as soon as it became legal, were known in OK as Boomers. So if anyone tries to play keep-away, just tell them “OK, Boomer.”
1900 BC: “For the first time in recorded history…”
The ancient Sumerians were, as far as they knew or we know, the first people to start writing things down. That seems to have included jokes, although they’re almost all so lost in translation that we can only identify them as jokes by their setups, not the punchlines. One of them goes “A dog walks into a bar. He says, ‘I can’t see anything. I’ll open the other one.’” Get it? If you do, submit your paper to a journal.
Many are in riddle format. I have a nonstandard theory about the translation of one, that it’s meant to be read as “Who dies when you slit his throat, but not when you gouge out his eyes? A politician.” Ignoring your modern knowledge of anatomy for a moment, the meaning of this would be that politicians lose their power when they lose their voice, not when they lose their perceptiveness, so over time our leadership becomes more and more oblivious. Louder and louder, too.
Another probably-joke goes For the first time in recorded history, a woman has managed to sit on her lover’s lap without farting. I like to think the first half of this was a meme. Ancient Sumeria was the one place where you could use the line “For the first time in recorded history…” all the time, about almost anything. You just could never use the same punchline twice.
Sadly, only a tiny fraction of Sumerian writing has survived, mostly at random. We’re stuck trying to infer everything about their culture, and their successors the early Babylonians, from scraps like a one-star review of a copper merchant. We don’t have any more instances of the “For the first time in recorded history…” meme, but we do know not to buy anything from Ea-Nasir.
