The following is satire.
The European Union has banned memes. I wish I were making that up, but I’m not. The EU Parliament, sometimes accused of being a useless pack of intrusive busybodies who sit around passing absurd regulations to enhance their own sense of power and prestige while having absolutely no sense of the regulations’ realistic effects or expenses because the parliamentarians are out-of-touch elites who despise the people they’re supposed to govern and really should be tarred and feathered before being tied to a rail and tossed in the Zenne River then pelted with rotten vegetables as they float out of Brussels into the North Sea…
I guess I sort of lost track of where that sentence was going.
But anyway, the EU passed a law that would make it illegal to post screen grabs from movies and TV shows on Facebook or Twitter. This would mean Europeans — or serfs and slaves as they are now called — would not be allowed to make those little visual/verbal jokes that enliven the internet with their rollicking hilarity.
In a statement issued after the ban, EU President Claus Von Blunderschmuck said, “Although these so-called memes may appear fun and harmless, they are, in fact, the beginning of a slippery slope that could lead to the sort of satire that mocks and belittles absurd abuses of power like this one by petty politicos like ourselves. We must protect the leaders of Europe from the wit of the common people.”
Dutch MEP Yunk Havdungferbranes addressed reporters under the moosehead on the wall at his hunting lodge, saying, “A Europe that can recklessly publish pictures and ideas is only one dangerous step away from becoming a land of widespread artistry and freethinking and those are not the sorts of things we want to see going on in Western civilization.”
Previous to this, voters in the United Kingdom reacted to the EU’s officious intrusions by voting to exit the union entirely, but elites are calling for that referendum to be held again until those darn voters get it right.