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To further complicate the issue, posting satire on the internet presents special problems. Quotes not only can be taken out of context by ignorance and stupidity, but by the innocent use of a search engine. For example, say the satirist want to be amusing and writes the following:
�Texans are upright, strong, principled and manly (especially the women), and the one thing a manly and moral Texan just can�t abide, especially our great president George W. Bush, is a lying, sniveling, worthless, piece-of-shit usurper who has fucked the country like a blind, humping dog on viagra.�
If one were looking on Google.com for a useful and thought-provoking quote on what the president has done about the FDA time and again expediting the approval of recreational drugs that appeal to rich white men while research on breast cancer treatments flounder for years, they might submit �George W. Bush� and �Viagra� and get only the following section of the above quote:
�George W. Bush, is a lying, sniveling, worthless, piece-of-shit usurper who has fucked the country like a blind, humping dog on viagra.�
This cutting, of course, takes the quote completely out of context and is way off the mark, as the satirist was trying to be funny, not truthful. So imagine if some young theatergoer who has a great deal of admiration for a local Artistic Director, say the fictional �Nate Slap,� and wants to find out more about him. Imagine now the horror of this young person, her parents and possibly board members of his theatre, the Titanic Independent Theatre Symposium, when the name search on �Nate Slap� yields:
�NATE SLAP LIKES TO.DO GOATS FROM BEHIND�
Of course this would be shocking if one missed the punctuation, and didn�t realize the entire section read:
�Who writes about animal mythology these days? Nate Slap likes to. Do goats from behind the Iron Curtain yield any decent legends? �Yes!� says Slap, �But it�s hard to write new works these days, as the Titanic Independent Theatre Symposium is a growing endeavor. Though I miss writing adaptations of goat mythology, I�m really enjoying the T.I.T.S. keeping my hands full!�
So if an innocent blurb can be taken so horribly out of context on the internet, imagine real people�s names attached to all kinds of profanity and nastiness coming up in an innocent internet search. The hapless computer user might not dare link to the selected site to discover the truth for fear of hooking up to a porn site, or worse, a liberal blog. So it has become clear to me that the use of real names in such a context was the wrong choice.
But of course, there�s artistic license, freedom of speech and all that, so is it fair for me to pull the article completely from the public never to be seen again? Well, I�ll let the four or five of you that visit this website argue that one amongst yourselves. I wouldn�t exactly call you the public at large. The article in question received a whopping thirty hits in total, and some of those were probably repeats, so the stakes here are, quite frankly, not very high. Some pages on this site haven�t even been hit at all. I do all this damn writing and that�s the thanks I get?! Well, you can have your stinkin� article back, but you�re gonna have to look for it! I�m sticking it back in the archives disguised as a past article, so if people really want to read it, they can dig through my other past articles that I worked so hard on (Did I say �hard on?� � mustn�t� digress�). Posting the article as an old archive also masks the location of the city in question as it is well known among my four or five readers that I moved at one time. Plus, of course, all the names, people, places and the city, have been changed to protect the innocent and the satirically-challenged.
So go to my archives, read some of my past, brilliant articles! The "Clone" one is one of the best things I've ever written, and according to Geocities, nobody's ever read it but me! What's the problem here!? I need new publicity people. Or maybe graphics. Of naked unicorns. Or Artistic Directors laughing.
Ha! Try finding one of THOSE!
Unicorns I mean! I didn't... Ow! My kneecaps!
- EAP