You could make a strong argument that bro-speak is the lingua franca of young American males. I once thought it was primarily a west coast thing — in beach towns like Santa Cruz, “bro” is used for exclamation, punctuation, and to fill any dead air. Then I moved to Chicago to find that yes, people in the midwest aren’t past using a well-placed “bro” here or there. Over the past couple of weeks, the bro meme has been seemingly everywhere, first with the Onion article Bro, You’re a God Among Bros and now with the unavoidable and stomach-churning Internet meme “Don’t Tase Me Bro.”

The quote refers to Andrew Meyer, who was tasered and arrested on Monday at the University of Florida when he refused to stop asking speaker John Kerry a series of pointed questions about the 2004 election, using Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse for a playbook. When police apprehended him, Meyer freaked out and the Police reacted extremely. Unlike the Onion piece above, there’s not much funny in this, even though many are playing it for laughs:

There’s certainly been plenty of debate over whether the guy was an ass (yes) and whether the police went way out of their jurisdiction by tasering him (yes). There’s also discussion about how this event illustrates the tiny margin of error (“error” including dissenting speech) that is allowed in any event where the people have an opportunity to interact with power one-on-one.

In an exhaustive post about the event and the Internet response on Wired’s Threat Level blog, Sarah Lai Stirland writes:

Policemen, Intensive Care Unit trauma unit nurses … even concerned individuals on the other side of the planet in Australia — everyone is weighing in on whether Meyer was acting like an ass, and whether he had it coming to him. The incident has opened up the floodgates of an eye-opening debate over First Amendment rights here in the United States, police brutality and the limits and boundaries of how we as a society should deal with the unruly among us.

Despite all this high-minded debate, there are already a slew novelty t-shirts up on Cafepress and a joke domain registered. This draws attention to the blurring of news, spectacle and parodic novelty in the public square of web 2.0. This could be a ripe opportunity to delve into those issues of First Amendment rights and police brutality — the uproar has demonstrated that these issues strike a very raw nerve in our society. While a spirited debate has been struck, the event will soon be obscured by the all-spectacle, all-the-time hyper-sensationalism of the Youtube era, in which people cash in on sensationalism in Technorati rankings and novelty Cafepress dollars. The net effect is that there is no essential distinction between a guy yelling the admittedly catchphrase-worthy “don’t tase me bro” while being unreasonably brutalized by the police and Britney’s trainwreck of a performance at the MTV Music Awards. It’s all grist for the aggregated feed of disdainful laughter, and bodes ill for a strong, engaged democracy in a time when our constantly receding rights need to be seriously discussed more ironically mocked — bro.