An Incomplete List of Bad Ideas I Have Had Online
Dedicated to Ken Bone
Early this morning, Gizmodo broke a story about sweater-wearing meme man Ken Bone: It appears, in his lifetime, he has had some bad opinions online.
Ken Bone Forgot To Delete His Porn Comments
Bone did a Reddit AMA for his new fans Thursday using his personal account (StanGibson18), and because he is not a professional public figure, he forgot that people were going to click on his handle and check out his commenting history. Among them are posts announcing Trayvon Martin’s shooting was “justified” and that he’s committed “felony insurance fraud,” so, not ideal PR-wise.
Here’s the thing: Ken Bone’s comments are bad. You’d probably be hard pressed to find someone unwilling to agree with you there. But he’s also not running for office or claiming some moral high ground. He’s a guy who wore a red garment on TV during a time when everyone in America was scraping the bottom of the brownie bowl begging for some levity. So why the S&M dynamic? Why is the media rock hard to punish this man specifically for doing what tons of people do on Reddit all day long? And, I guess, the bigger question: When will it stop being shocking when someone living a private life doesn’t seamlessly launch into being a high-profile media figure?
To my point, here is an incomplete list of bad ideas I have had online:
- Kony 2012 is good
- I should write, at length, about why I, specifically, did not enjoy the film Frances Ha
- I should have a Tumblr
- this poem is going to blow the minds of everyone on this message board
- I should post a selfie to Myspace with a caption that insinuates it was taken by someone else* (repeat offense)
I could keep going, but you get the idea. If any private citizen were suddenly subjected to the attention of millions of eyes, there’d be stuff there not to like. In some cases, it might even be damaging. Granted, not all of us are condoning shooting children online, but there’s a reason Ken Bone isn’t a newspaper editor or politician—social issues aren’t his cup of tea! They’re actually so much not his cup of tea that he’s still undecided about which candidate to vote for! In mid-October! Of 2016! That’s the whole reason he’s a meme in the first place.
So maybe it’s fine that he wasn’t both a sweater-wearer and a hobby-level-McGorry. Not many of us are. And that’s not to say that any of his comments are good, it’s just… we don’t have to take him to task for them if we don’t want to. Let his shitty friends talk to him.
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*hahahaha weird!! my friends keep taking gorgeous close-up photos of my good side!!! stop it you guys!!!!