GOOGLE
Enter
expect it to provide us with “The
Answers,” and to do so in a way
that’s not laborious or time-intensive. But there are more things in
heaven and earth than are trawlable
by Google’s search spiders, folks.
And as near as I can tell, churches
were open on Easter Sunday, providing a venue for that sort of contemplation. So why on earth did a
drawing of Cesar Chavez anger people so much? What did it matter?
Well, the truth is
that it didn’t matter to
99.9999999999999999999
percent of Christianity’s 2.2 billion adherents. Rather, it seems
to have mattered most to those
who worship at the altar of Tribal
Political B.S., the great Golden
Calf of our civic discourse. And
to that flock, Google’s sin was not
actually ruining the Easter holiday (the Easter holiday was not
ruined, after all), but honoring the
birthday of a labor rights activist
traditionally associated with the
left. (At least, that was the second
round of braying, after they all
realized that the doodle was not,
in fact, of former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, a matter that
took more time than was otherwise necessary to sort out, given
that they could have Googled it
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
right then and there.)
I’ll give the complainants this:
It’s entirely possible that they were
victimized by a neat bit of “trollgaze” — something on the Internet
designed to engineer outrage. But
the more realistic possibility is that
Google opted to celebrate Chavez’s
birthday ... on Chavez’s birthday.
It’s a weird concept, I know! Naturally, I am open to suggestions as
to alternate days on which Google
could have run the “Happy Birthday Cesar Chavez” doodle, but I
have this strange feeling we’re just
going to keep on coming back to
March 31 as the ideal date.
When you get right down to it,
what Google did has nothing at
all to do with a drawing that they
ran on a religious holiday (that
didn’t end up interfering with the
holiday in any material way for its
celebrants). This is simply a debate in which you either believe
that Cesar Chavez, who died in
1993, is worthy of some tribute
in the public sphere (even one as
fleeting as a Google doodle) or you
believe otherwise. In all likelihood, if you oppose Chavez’s labor
activism out of a sense of political
HUFFINGTON
04.07.13
Google’s
March 31st
doodle
of Cesar
Chavez.