THERE’S a particular kind of joy that doesn’t quite feel like joy. It arrives sideways, unexpectedly, the way grief does. It sits on the chest a little differently, because you’ve spent so long not expecting it that your body doesn’t quite know what to do when it comes. That’s what I felt watching Iran troll the most powerful man on earth. Not pride exactly. Not celebration. Something older and more complicated than that. The feeling you get when someone in the room finally says the thing everyone has been too tired, too afraid, too beaten down to say. And they said it not with a speech or a press release but with a six-word tweet from an embassy in Zimbabwe: “Trump, please talk. We are bored.” I laughed.
It wasn’t really about Iran. It wasn’t really about Trump. It was about every time a country in this part of the world absorbed an American threat, an American sanction, an American bomb and was told to be grateful for the attention.
As you may know, I lived in Vietnam for several years. I arrived in Hanoi more than three decades after the war ended, and against all odds, had rebuilt itself. The American war didn’t come up much in conversations. But its images were never far. And underneath everything, quietly, the numbers. Three to four million dead. Twice the tonnage of explosives dropped on Vietnam than the allies used in all of World War II. Agent Orange still spreading across 58 provinces. Undetonated bombs still killing people — around 40,000 deaths since the war ended in 1975, with 18 per cent of the country still contaminated.
The US showed up decades later, opened an embassy, signed trade deals and called Vietnam a success story. And Vietnam let it happen, because what else do you do? There is no accountability. There never is. The aggressor gets away with it every time, across every decade, on every continent where American foreign policy has decided somewhere is worth destroying. This is what lives in the body of everyone who watched the latest war from the Global South. Not analysis. Not outrage. Something heavier and quieter. The accumulated weight of knowing how this goes. Of knowing that the powerful will do what they want, deny what they did, and (re)write history.
The meme war isn’t resilience. It’s refusal.
And then the Lego video dropped. Iranian soldiers. Miniature Trump. AI-generated missiles. Set to rap music. Followed by an Inside Out parody showing creatures inside Trump’s brain frantically hammering a lie button, ending with: “Inside Out: Epstein’s Client.” The embassy in Pretoria posted the Strait of Hormuz filled with coffins draped in American flags. Iran’s parliament speaker told investors on X to literally short Trump’s Truth Social announcements. “If they pump it, short it. If they dump it, go long.”
When NPR asked the White House for comment, Press Secretary Anna Kelly responded: “Why is NPR writing puff pieces about Iran’s social media strategy?” Not a rebuttal. Not a counter-strategy. A complaint to a reporter. That, somehow, was the most clarifying moment of all.
Here is what the Western press keeps missing when it covers this story as quirky internet content: the meme war isn’t frivolous. It is the sound of decades of humiliation finding a language the powerful actually understand and despise. Finally. Trump built his entire political brand on mockery and humiliation. He reduced opponents to nicknames. He used ridicule as a weapon of dominance. Iran looked at that playbook, learned the dialect, and spoke it back to him — from embassies in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Pretoria, Thailand, even Islamabad. From capitals that have their own long memories of what American power costs.
We used to call our ability to absorb all of this resilience. You know how I hate that word applied to us in Karachi. It is what people say about you when they’ve decided your suffering is admirable rather than preventable.
The meme war isn’t resilience. It’s something sharper than that. It’s refusal. It’s the moment when the grief stops turning inward and finds, briefly, an outward form.
Iran may not have conclusively won this war. The military toll is severe. But on the terrain of dignity and narrative and who gets to be laughed at, they found a cheat code. And for those of us who have watched American power operate without consequence our entire adult lives, who have stood at the gravesides of countries it destroyed, who have buried our outrage so many times it barely flickers anymore — the six words from Zimbabwe landed like a window opening in a room that had been sealed shut for years. “Trump, please talk. We are bored.”
We are not bored. We have never been bored. We have been exhausted and furious and defeated and silent. For one brief, ridiculous Lego-animated moment, we got to laugh.
The writer is a former journalism instructor.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, April 12th, 2026
