A One-Off In Political Satire

 

Click on the graphic to see the PDF file.*

This is a freestanding work that’s actually a subset of several months duration. When I broke the content out of Facebook into this format I ran into a wall limiting the size of PDF file my version of Word could create. I did it anyway because it shows how I work with stolen materials, which is the core business of any writer and one reason I’ve worked under the radar without much self-promotion.

I had previously created a separate website called Brightbelt News, where I spoofed Breitbart’s hideously annoying use of a transcriber named Pam Key to reproduce zany rants from MSNBC and CNN without fact-checking or the inclusion of any disqualifying context. It was like an in-house fifth column nobody cared about but me.

In this project I wanted to document what I do to alter a photo+copy post in Breitbart or Gateway to take it the next step from biased reporting to jeering satire. My versions were published on Facebook in a timely fashion, usually but not always with a link to the original. This version showed both misidentified by side, so that my changes could be identified. Yes, I monkey a lot with graphics, very thoughtfully and carefully in fact. There can be a couple different layers of jokes embedded in one of my Word-based Photoshops. I know people are careless readers, and I’m not writing for those readers as much as for tomorrow’s, when the ludicrous affect of our times has been finally exposed and hopefully demolished. I wanted to show those people that some of us knew exactly what was going on the whole time.

I sidelined Brightbelt News after this project. It could have been its own full-time job, tempting but a poor choice if I couldn’t siphon more than a handful of readers from Facebook to Brightbelt. Win a few, lose a few.

*By the way, the PDF link for the Turing Test Files has also been upgraded with the help of Adobe Acrobat. If you had difficulties before, you shouldn’t now.