It has come to our attention that someone around town is stickering our noble little magazine racks. First, there was a sticker with the strange invocation to “Fight Commonism.” Now, either the same party, or someone else, has decided to emend that bold statement with “Republicans Suck” in a few true, blue locations.
After a great deal of street-walking, note-taking, and question-asking, we now know who was responsible for the first round of stickering.
It was us. As it turns out, our good friends at AB advertising helped us develop this little campaign, which at one point grew ambitious enough to make the leap to cable TV. In that ad, we poked a little fun directly at our friendly colleagues in high places, who had suffered the embarrassment of getting caught, uh, sycophanting the same person at the same time.
We have had some small reservations about the opportunity for misunderstanding this whole “commonism” thing, particularly on the radio ads. In the mouths of less-experienced or more-harried broadcasters, it has been audibly mispronounced as “communism.” While the invitation to “fight communism” is rakish in a pleasant sort of way—who doesn’t like to be put in the game when the score is out of reach?—it is not a precise representation of our politics around here. (We leave it to you to decide what those are. The one thing you can count is that we love a good argument, and by the time we’re done, we don’t remember what our opinion was in the first place. If there was a party called “Devil’s Advocate,” we’d join up faster than you could say, “Paul Magers is actually kinda complex, I could read a thousand magazine articles about him, and die wanting more.”)
So but! What is with these “Republicans Suck” stickers? We are not happy about them. The vandals can’t possibly believe we here at The Rake are so unseemly in our affiliations as to have a declared party. The possibilities boggle the beleagured mind. Do they know that we stickered the “Commonism” bits, but they misread it as “communism,” and assume we are old-school, red-baiting McCarthy-ites? That would be a middling kind of ignorance—smart enough to recognize the irony of us stickering our own racks, but not smart enough to spell correctly, nor to read the magazine very closely. Are they rushing to our defense, thinking we are under attack by old-school, red-baiting GOPers? That would be a sort of charming naivete, compounded by the spelling and reading problem. Are they just silly kids looking for a safe place to put a provocative sticker? That would be the most-likely, least time-wasting conclusion a busy editor could make.
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