The crown of the gently braised egg was cracked and ripped open with merciless routine and a heavy silver table knife, the latter no doubt a gift either from one of her three ill-fated weddings, or from the legion of dead and distant relatives that always gave up useless heirlooms at their expiration. Never just a boxful of cash with those ones.
Once silver and crown were lain aside with neither care nor haste, in fell those warm, golden soldiers. Fell one, then the other - yielding soft and delicious crunches in place of screams - until the prompt 06:45 ritual sacrifice was complete, betraying no more of itself than briskly swept crumbs and a half empty shell, dipped of all its golden goodness.
Karen was a good woman, a devout one even, so she often said. Nobody ever dared meet her quietly hateful and routinely condescending gaze to ask why she felt so often the need to assert that statement aloud when it was so very clearly far from the truth of her. They all knew and saw, but were never quite sure if she ever suspected herself deep down, and all were reluctant to be the doomed lamb who would turn her head into the mirror to finally observe the small town tyrant they had watched her grow into over nearly five decades. None of that was really their problem. No, so long as they were spared her petulant and entitled attacks for one day more.
Karen was not always their monster, their watchtower dragon swooping to gobble any idiot who did not take care to toe her line. She really came into her own hideous form on the awful day the Black Lady stumbled into their dozing village with her shining white sneakers, her brazenly loud openness, her naïve expectations of any sort of glad reception and her ever-damned always-on smartphone. That devilish device was really the sword that unmade and disembowelled Karen. When it fell and the millions beyond their sleepy suburbia witnessed it, that was her final undoing, so the story went. The brave sacrificial lamb had been an outsider, the old dragon had been slain, and - to be perfectly honest - the villagers weren’t too upset about it once the press had cleared out and everything had settled down again. No, they really found they could get on a bit better without the constant near-demonic presence of a loathsome and seething busybody.
But this is not the story of Karen’s great fall. We all know that fairytale by now. This is the biopsy of a cancer that was left to fester and grow, to become far too comfortable, complacent and, in the end, abusive of its privilege. Our primary concern is what madeth the Karen and why she was left to her own hubristic devices for far too long. Here, we enter into a rich and complex memedom where we can only make vastly sweeping generalisations about gender, race, class and more. Nestled far from the scrutiny of reason, logic and thorough scientific objectivity, journeying deep into the very real social hysteria of circa 2020, we turn to ‘The Year of Karen’ to seek our answers.
TO BE CONTINUED...
