Dan Savage Schools The New York Times
It’s funny how confused the entire world is right now about Santorum’s little Google problem. I am particularly enjoying all the people who think Santorum is some sort of unfortunate but long-standing homonym. (Heh, heh, Beavis, he said…) But when even the New York Times starts getting the story wrong, Dan Savage (who, for my money, deserves recognition as one of the greatest memetic engineers of the 21st century) gets to set the record straight:
My readers and I did not redefine Santorum because he disagrees with us strongly about gay marriage. We redefined his name after he compared gay relationships to dog fucking and child rape–”man on dog, man on child”–in an sprawling interview with a freaked-out AP reporter. In that interview Santorum insisted that Americans do not have a constitutional right to privacy. Santorum defended sodomy laws that criminalized private, consensual, adult sexual activity–between gay or straight couples. It wasn’t Santorum’s opposition to same-sex marriage, it was his support for bringing felony charges against gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexuals for private, consensual, adult sexual conduct that inspired the campaign.
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=7689
Santorum’s anti-gay stances would be enough reason to Google bomb him in my book.
So would his apparent desire for a Roman Catholic theocratic state to replace the United States.
The whole dog, multiple, and child marriage thing should probably be addressed by reminding folks that a marriage is a contract and that generally a contract requires two or more consenting and competent adult humans. That leaves out animals and children simply and cleanly.
Multiple marriages are a more complex issue. In general, I’d favor legalizing them (for adult humans) but there are difficulties with things like medical insurance, pensions and estates that probably need to be addressed first.
I have found it to be awfully self-amusing to ponder why certain politicians keep equating “dog fucking and child rape” with same-sex love.
Why DO they make these associations?
Shakespeare’s “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (a.k.a. the oft erroneously quoted “Methinks he protests too much”), always comes to mind in these instances. I would imagine that Freud might say that Santorum (and his ilk), seem to have a passionate (albeit irrational), fixation on what they personally fear to be shameful or aberrant sexual behavior.
Having his name become synonymous with skeet scat, somehow seems more poetically appropriate in a way that I’m not even so sure Dan Savage originally envisioned…
I lost a lot of respect for Dan Savage over the Santorum thing. It struck me as a dick move, also childish and immature. Also disgusting. I resent the association, and even more I resent feeling sympathetic toward Rick Santorum, as oily, nasty and depraved a politician as you could ask for, because of it. I was so impressed with Savage over the “It Gets Better” initiative, an effort that showed class and intelligence and general human goodness in every way. But the Santorum Google bombing was so … pathetic.
Wow, Pat, I could not disagree more.
I don’t see anything immature or childish or dickish in mocking the powerful when they persist in attacking the (relatively) powerless, as Santorum does every time he gets in front of a camera.
Although this particular bit of mockery is extremely gross, that’s exactly why it’s such a bit of genius here — Santorum obviously views most sorts of transgressive sex with horror and revulsion, so metaphorically rubbing his nose in it (in a way he cannot escape and which becomes more visible the more visible he gets) is poetic justice of the highest sort.
I see nothing dickish or pathetic about that. Not one thing.
& so, to keep the Google bomb up, remember, folks: SANTORUM is the mixture left after a bout of anal sex.
Note to Pat Powers:
It is said that in 1820, caricaturist George Cruikshank received a bribe from the royal family “not to caricature His Majesty (George III of the United Kingdom) in any immoral situation.”.
Today his prints attacking leading politicians of the day can be appreciated in fine museums across the globe.
Er, just out of curiosity, what sort of effective alternative defense strategy would you propose for the relatively powerless average Joe against powerful government officials?
The key word here being “effective”…
I don’t know, I have some sympathy with Pat’s view. The Senator is vile, but the Googlebombing has two downsides for me:
1) It provides ammunition for those who claim being socially liberal is the same as glorying in filth. Everyday people googling Santorum will find the Savage-inspired results and conclude that the opponents of Santorum are into faeces.
2) It lowers us, who believe that informed consent is the only standard that counts, from the high ground to the low ground. It feeds into the persecution complex of the religious right. (“This is the kind of people we’re fighting.”)
Imagine a pro-choice candidate being Googlebombed by Catholic bloggers so that the first few matches for their name were to a redefinition of it as a “mixture of blood and brains from murdered babies”. Would that, as a tactic, be acceptable?
And, although ‘It Gets Better’ is a fantastic initiative, Savage’s faux-apology over the Andrew Meyer incident showed that he doesn’t recognise the bully in himself.
First I’d like to note that Googlebombing is a somewhat democratic tactic; you can’t do it unless you have a great many more people on your side than the target has on his side. (Although data literacy among “your people” is a substantial force multiplier here.) The result is that “how would it be if [someone we like] got googlebombed with [some horrifying label]” is unpersuasive, because unlikely. The widely shared sense of justice behind Santorum’s labeling is a huge part of why it was successful. The fact that he and his are too digitally clueless to effectively defend, mitigate, or respond in kind? Icing on cake.
Mike, your #1 is true but does not move me. It boils down to “if you fight effectively in the culture wars, the other side will have more reasons to hate you and your cultural values even more than they already do.” Duh. Also, so what? They not gonna love us anyway.
The first sentence of your #2 assumes the argument you are trying to make. It only “lowers us” if we already agree that Googlebombing (or this particular bombload of Santorum) is on the cultural low ground. And I do not so agree. In fact, I think this sort of tactic in the culture wars is brilliant and clever and 100% morally justified, which is why I have several times posted praise of Dan Savage who thunk it up.
I’m all for mocking the mighty, and doing it effectively. I guess the key point here would be the definition of “effectively.” I debate on some political message boards, and I don’t see the Google bombing changing any minds about Santorum in the middle, which is where the changeable votes tend to be. The right will see it as more disgusting gay left-wing conspiring, the left will see it as poetic justice, and the middle, I suspect, will feel pretty much the way I do.
Far better would be to mock the man for his publicly stated positions. I mean, most in the middle would probably think the man/dog marriage statement as an outlandish piece of stupidity, you can mock him straight up for that. And Santorum opposes, not just abortion, but CONTRACEPTION! Every last voter with a teen or young adult daughter is gonna shudder when they hear about that. Hell, back in 2006 Santorum was named one of the three most corrupt Senators in Washington by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
I think the Google bombing has enormous potential to backfire, making moderates actually feel sympathetic toward Santorum. There is PLENTY on his public record to attack, the guy is a sleazy, bigoted scumbucket and has made very little effort to hide it. Go after his actual positions and deeds. THAT is an effective attack.
Pat, we aren’t gonna change each other’s minds here. So I’ll let you have the last word as to the main points you’re making. I do want to highlight some additional points of disagreement, though:
1) I don’t agree with your characterization of those of us who see poetic justice in this as “the left”. Broadly speaking, the constellation of cultural views that is pro-sexuality, anti-guilt, and anti-bigotry in connection with sexual lifestyle diversity? Overlaps with the left, often enough, but the mapping is far from perfect. There are lots of sexual free-thinkers (allies of mine in the culture war) who are free marketers, foreign policy hawks, and otherwise identified politically with parts of what we call “the right” in this country. So I don’t see this as a left-right set of issues, not at all. Did you see Sen. Alan Simpson on Fareed Zacharia’s CNN show on Sunday, talking about how “everybody has a gay family member and loves them, so what’s all this to-do about nothing?”
2) You might be right about the lack of “effectiveness” with respect to the googlebombing if your only measure of “effective” is “changing minds”. But that’s not the axis on which this attack was effective. Rather, it was (among other things) a search engine denial attack; it seriously degrades a politician’s ability to get his message out via internet searches, without the searchers encountering a seriously-distracting message about the politician. That’s devastatingly effective even if the particular results change nobody’s mind — it’s like an attack on a military unit’s command, control, and particularly its communications.
Politically speaking, Santorum is a dead issue and has been since he lost his Senate race by a near record margin. The good people of Pennsylvania saw him for what he was and dumped him in embarassing fashion.
In Iowa he got some 30K votes. Many losing state assembly candidates get that. It is a tiny minority. Loud, but in the end, not important.
Presidents and Presidential candidates become more and more referred to by their last names, as those names become more well known.
Public awareness of the Santorum/Google issue continues to mushroom, and as titillating two and three word headlines such as “Bushes support Santorum” begin to emerge, some voters may well rethink the wisdom of the voting for anyone with such a name association.
As the snickering level rises, my guess is that there will be a corresponding swelling of effectiveness as well.
I doubt that any significant level of voters will mistakenly invert the original intention of tolerant thinkers’ associating Santorum with unpleasantness, as a “glorification of filth” or of “faeces”.
The spreading of “Santorum” has become somewhat of a barometer of the level of the populace’s growing support of tolerance of same-sex couples.
My guess is that Dan Savages campaign against intolerance and faulty logic, has been much more “effective” than Santorum’s campaign against gays and lesbians.
This display of energy, against the hateful kind of speech demonstrated by Santorum, is the proof of the effectiveness of Dan Savage’s redefinition. Any candidate in the future with half a brain would have to think twice before parroting the sort of foolishness that Santorum has espoused, and therein lies the majority of the “effectiveness” of Savage’s tactic, not the mind-changing in a direct sort of fashion…