rosie o’donnell
Rosie O’Donnell, the Human Rorschach Test No One Asked For
By our correspondent in the cheap seats of the global amphitheater
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the Hudson, the name “Rosie O’Donnell” has become a kind of international litmus paper, turning one color for Americans who still think Twitter is a town square, another for Europeans who treat U.S. celebrity as a tragic opera, and an alarming third shade for everyone else just trying to mind their own business while the algorithm drags them into the colosseum.
It is 2024, and the planet is on fire—literally, from Athens to the Amazon—but a 62-year-old comic from Commack, Long Island, can still hijack the feed because she posted a grainy TikTok that may or may not show a former president rehearsing fascism in his living room. The clip ricocheted from Manila morning commutes to Berlin midnight binges, proving that in the global attention economy, outrage is the only currency with a lower inflation rate than the Argentine peso.
To the State Department, Rosie is an “unaffiliated soft-power irritant,” which is diplo-speak for “we have no contingency plan for comedians armed with ring lights.” To the Kremlin, she is proof that American democracy is a circus whose clowns moonlight as intelligence assets. To the average netizen in Lagos, she is simply Tuesday: another American yelling online while the price of tomatoes triples.
Yet the O’Donnell phenomenon is instructive, if only as a case study in how the empire exports its nervous breakdowns. When she sparred with Donald Trump in 2006, it was quaint cable-TV blood sport. Now, in an era when a Brazilian Supreme Court justice can de-platform a former U.S. president faster than you can say “Elon who?”, Rosie’s every keystroke lands like a drone strike on the fragile membrane separating parody from geopolitics.
Consider the optics: a lesbian, anti-war, adoptive mother of four, once crowned “Queen of Nice,” now rebranded by MAGA media as the Wicked Witch of the North Shore. Overseas, the caricature reads like a telenovela subplot. In Warsaw, conservative pols use her as shorthand for “decadent West.” In Seoul, K-pop stans mine her old Variety-show clips for reaction GIFs. In Cairo, she trends right after the latest Israeli airstrike—because nothing comforts the doom-scrolling masses like a 2007 clip of Rosie shouting “China!” at Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
The meta-joke, of course, is that Rosie herself never asked for planetary relevance. She wanted to sell tickets to a Broadway revue and maybe keep her kids off TikTok. Instead, she became a walking Rorschach: progressives see a martyr to right-wing cancel culture; reactionaries see the specter of cultural Marxism with a Long Island accent; and the rest of us see the abyss staring back through an iPhone 14.
There is something almost touching—like finding a mint-condition Tamagotchi in Chernobyl—about a figure whose primary skill is talking very fast in a nasal register still managing to jolt the global psyche. It suggests that, despite AI, fentanyl, and the melting ice caps, humanity remains reliably distracted by the sight of two famous people calling each other fat on the internet.
And so, as COP29 delegates argue over carbon credits in Baku, and the Houthis redecorate the Red Sea with drone parts, Rosie O’Donnell trends again—this time for subtweeting a Supreme Court justice. The world watches, half-horrified, half-thrilled, like Romans who pretended to disapprove of the lions but never missed a goring.
In the end, the international significance of Rosie O’Donnell is that she has none—yet here we are, 600 words later, proving the opposite. Somewhere in the afterlife, Walter Lippmann is ordering a double scotch. The rest of us can only scroll on, complicit, amused, and vaguely queasy, like passengers on a sinking cruise ship who can’t stop laughing at the lounge act.
