What can you expect under a headline like Sasha And Malia Obama's Cutest Inaugural Moments?
Cute-kid pictures have been a staple of photojournalism ever since the invention of cameras, and if some cute-kid tableau had appeared on a Civil War battleground, Matthew Brady would have taken the god-awful picture.
But that isn't really what's happening with the wee Obamas on Huffington Post.
The kids are cute enough, but most of the photos are just random snapshots, and the image I hot-linked here is about average for the whole group. It's nothing.
It isn't even kitsch, like the typical cute-kid photo. The kittens are not playing with a ball of twine. The children are neutral.
Considering their extraordinary situation, the littlest Obamas are likely to have unusually vivid personalities, but there's nothing personal about most of the HuffPo photos.
The photos are nothing, but the featurette that brackets this nothing still maintains a quasi-existence for itself, analogously with the empty set postulated in the standard development of set theory.
"All that we are ever informed about the empty set is that it (1) is a set, (2) has no members, and (3) is unique amongst sets in having no members. However, there are very many things that 'have no members', in the set-theoretical sense-namely, all non-sets. It is perfectly clear why these things have no members, for they are not sets."
For example, a hat has no members, but it isn't the empty set, because it isn't any kind of set. A hat was never intended to be a set, according to the peculiar meaning of intension in linguistics and the philosophy of language.
But the empty set maintains its delicate grip on existence because of exactly the intension to include something that's the essence of set-hood, even though the empty set totally fails to include anything.
The empty set is accordingly nothing except the will to define a set, and analogously, the featurette on Huffington Post which totally fails to deliver the kitsch intended by a headline like "Sasha And Malia Obama's Cutest Inaugural Moments" is nothing except...
The Will-to-Kitsch.
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