The Onion Sells Out

For any form of satire to be considered truly great, I believe it has to walk so close to the truth that it's barely distinguishable from it. Whether exaggerated or slightly understated, satire is probably my favorite form of comedy. It often brings about some of the most sophisticated, clever, and disturbing genius comedy has to offer.

Many years ago, my sister introduced me to The Onion, and its brilliant satirical walk through fake journalistic history called "Our Dumb Century". By creating imaginary past issues of a newspaper that would often make either terrifyingly true or intentionally false predictions about the future (which was actually the past or present), "Our Dumb Century" underlined much of the stupidity and ridiculousness of human progress and historical events. The 1969 Moon Landing, for example. Taking into account the entire scope of human history, it seems a little less exciting today than it probably did 40 years ago.

Today, after a long hiatus from reading The Onion, I clicked on it this morning before heading off to work, and was simultaneously awed, disturbed, and greatly amused by the Onion's latest meta-joke. The owner of the Onion, one T. Herman Zweibel (think the Simpsons' Monty Burns with a bad case of Alzheimer's) has sold the paper to China. Today's issue features disinformation, propaganda galore, self-aggrandizing nationalistic rhetoric, harsh criticism of Americans and American culture, and a lot of censorship. Included are such hilarious articles as:

• Internet Adds 12th Website (see next paragraph for more on this)
• China Strong
• Nothing At All Happens to 28 Tibetan Protestors, Their Families
• Weakling President Asks Imaginary Man In Sky To Bless Nation
• And much more.

This "sale" comes on the heels of many terrifying stories reported from China, such as the blocking of the wildly popular micro-blogging site Twitter due to the fact that it seems to have allowed too much communicating between Chinese citizens that directly contradicted official, sanitized government reports. The paper's sale also seems to have roots in the many shutdown scares of long-respected American newspapers on the verge of bankruptcy.

In any case, I applaud the Onion for bringing attention to such full-blown fascism, and doing it in such a way that makes us laugh instead of cry. The political and social climate in China remains fascinating food for thought, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't stop and have a few much-needed laughs along the way to whatever solution might lie on the horizon.

Theft or Flattery?

After reading an interesting article on spam email and how it is generated, I decided to Google my email address. I was a bit disturbed to find that one of the search results was a post on some weird Italian pop music discussion board containing an outright theft of one of my favorite design pieces, a CD cover I made for a dear friend a few years ago.

Although I'm a bit annoyed that someone would steal my work without my permission, I realized that in this age of 1s and 0s, "borrowing" someone's digital artwork is only as easy as the artist allows it to be. I have been neglectful of this until now, thinking not only that my work was not popular enough by any stretch of the imagination to be stolen, but also that nobody would have the gall to do such a thing.

Part of me is also somewhat flattered, however. The idea that someone looking for an image to illustrate the phrase "Rainbow in the Dark" stumbled upon my work in a Google search (or whatever) and decided it was a perfect match, well... it's reaffirming in a way. Perhaps theft is an even more sincere form of flattery than imitation.

My solution at the moment strikes me as inelegant but necessary, at least until I find a better one. I plan to watermark all of the work on my site. I hope to achieve this in a manner that is subtle and obvious at the same time. Apologies in advance.