Every Hoax Deserves a Sucker
In certain respects, it could be considered a hoax to invent old campaign buttons that never existed and then share them to social media. According to the Wikipedia entry for “hoax” (which is quite good, btw), “A hoax is often intended as a practical joke or to cause embarrassment, or to provoke social or political change by raising people’s awareness of something.”
But the original image was a political cartoon, which should absolve it of being a hoax, and rather put it squarely in the realm of satire (ala The Onion or Borowitz Report). As a cartoon, these buttons should be taken with a wink-wink nudge-nudge. Fakery is totally allowed.
However, at some point, someone cropped the image to deliberately remove the cartoonist’s tag and the easy-to-disprove fakery of an Obama-era button (realize this cartoon ran contemporaneously in 2009). Removing these details removed the very things that gave-away the joke. Did this cropping then change the satire into a hoax? Probably. When that person did that thing, the intent was to fool people into believing something that’s not true. The image was no longer thought-provoking or ironic or whatever, it became a ruse. It could even be that the degradation of the image (the JPEG artifacts) was done deliberately to add patina and make it look more authentic. Something shared so-often must be true. Right?
My addition was to clean-up the buttons and make them pristine. I found a high-resolution image of a blank button, scrounged around for an original art of the GOP elephant (from roughly that era, but found as an iron-on transfer at Etsy), and then I typeset the slogans, with fonts similar to those of the day, being sure to make the two buttons as similar as possible (even though they were 30 years apart). It’s possible that what I did could make the buttons look even more believable than the cartoonist’s illustration, but it was actually my intent to make them look sterile and unreal — they are as crisp and clean as the day they were (supposedly) made. Mint condition.
fauxsimile, /fōˈsiməlē/ (noun) a retweet of something that never existed; a hoax.
Am I wrong for doing this? I don’t think so. IMHO, the cat was already out of the bag. The cropped image that Robert Reich tweeted has been Liked and retweeted many thousands of times, and over the previous 10 years (since the original cartoon), these fauxsimiles have been shared countless MORE times. An investigation at TruthOrFiction.com identifies the buttons as fake, but also goes on about how the buttons were at least decent-looking fakes with a grain of truth.
There’s been a lot of hoaxes lately. The recent conveniently-edited video of Diane Feinstein supposedly chastising kids about the Green New Deal was a hoax. So too was the viral video of the MAGA kid and the Native American elder. Jussie Smollett’s supposed hate crime was a hoax. The so-called National Emergency that Trump has declared is a hoax. We are now discovering that Paul Manafort was a walking talking hoax for decades. Each of these phenomenon is easily disproved, but does that make the perpetrators wrong? Or is everyone just being suckers?
My primary motivation is what I perceive to be an enormous swindle being perpetuated on the American people that is casting “socialism” as an evil to be feared. This will be the GOP’s 2020 campaign. Just as they did with the ruse of “Hillary’s emails,” the Republicans will be relentless, repetitive, and convincing. The Russians will join-in (which is oddly ironic), with the intent to paint Democrats as people who will take-away everyone’s money and give it to good-for-nothing lazy people. As far as I am concerned, THAT is the hoax, NOT a couple of fake campaign buttons that are mostly true anyway.
Now, I’m not one to think that two wrongs make a right, but this hoax about the buttons is really not wrong in my book. As any hoax-busting exposé may say, at least these buttons are good fakes with a grain of truth. What’s the harm? That people might believe that Republicans railed against Social Security back in the day? Even though they actually did? And Medicare too…
Maybe Socialism wasn’t always the boogeyman, but only because the tizzy for a lot of years was Communism.
So, I suppose I’ll leave these buttons up. At the very least, they will be like messages in a bottle, floating across the oceans of internet, shared and retweeted here-and-there until the JPEG artifacts turn them from mint condition back to a patina worthy of someone with a million followers. By then, no one could possibly know it came from me, but should I care? In the future, everything will be a hoax.
