You Cannot Be Serious

I was going to make fun of an article published in the journal called The Contemporary Pacific by Dr. Holly M. Barker of the University of Washington. In it, Dr. Barker tales the creators of the show to task for assuming that they may use Bikini Bottom, a lagoon off the Bikini Atoll, as the setting for their show.

Back during the middle of the last century, the Bikini Islands were used by the United States for nuclear testing. The islanders had to be moved because their homelands became too irradiated to be safe, and so Dr. Barker thinks that setting the show there "normal[izes] the settler colonial takings of indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland." The show's theme song "provide[s] the viewer with an active role in defining Bikini Bottom as as a place of nonsense," since it points out that Sponge Bob's activities are often nonsensical.

Dr. Barker concludes with this admonition: “We should be uncomfortable with a hamburger-loving American community’s occupation of Bikini’s lagoon and the ways that it erodes every aspect of sovereignty.” I am not certain if this means that we are OK with the lagoon's occupation by hotdog-loving Americans, or perhaps souffle-loving Americans. Or vegans, who presumably would openly hate hamburgers.

See, I was going to make fun of it, but then I thought that this had to be a joke article. It had to be one of those jargon-fests that professors make up sometimes, in which they deploy the language and concepts of their discipline in service of a "serious critique" of some lightweight pop culture phenomenon. I didn't want to be the one who didn't get the joke. But as it turns out, Dr. Barker has been grinding this particular gear since last year and it's not a joke at all.

And I realized that there was no way to make more fun of this article than its existence already did -- my own mockery would be spitting in the ocean. In American coastal waters, of course, so as not to salivially colonize any folk dwelling anywhere else.