Funny and Not Funny

Yesterday I got a bulk e-mailing from a minor and largely unknown comics writer/artist containing a lot of bogus photos purportedly featuring vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family--if you want to see what they look like, just do a search online for "bogus photos" and "photoshopped Sarah Palin" and you'll find the whole gamut of them. I let the sender know I found this sort of thing to be demeaning and offensive--but oddly enough, in response, he defended the disproven photos as real, and then ventured into some strange argument about how none of this should matter anyway, as long as there were teenagers contracting AIDS.

I always remain surprised that people use this sort of irrelevant non sequitur as defense for anything they might do. Did the writer/artist consciously think to himself, "Well, this might be wrong--but heck, there are teenagers with AIDS, so I'll do it anyway"? The world is filled with wrongs--but if we point to one of them every time we make a conscious decision to add another wrong to the list, then all we're doing is making the world one wrong worse than it was before.

That's the new standard of public discourse, though. What a shame...

The photo above, by the way, is the REAL version of one of the photoshopped pictures he sent to a large number of people, claiming his version was real...