Written by Dennis McCarty
I first encountered the word “doppelganger” in the 6th grade, when my best and only friend Jonathan would talk about a villainous character that he called “Double Ganger” in a Sega Genesis game he owned. “Double Ganger” was Spider-Man with six arms, possibly derived from the Spider-Man cartoon’s version of The Clone Saga, and his extra appendages were all that made him special.
I don’t remember exactly what made the poor freak a “bad guy,” but something else truly villainous is afoot today, as thousands of scuttling crabs on the sewage-soaked compost heap of Facebook are snatching copyrighted images of celebrities and placing them as their profile pictures.
Some people benefit from a few minutes of feeling clever when they place a picture of Elmo or Sir Lawrence Olivier, and some people place pictures of Blake Lively or Rachel McAdams to profess their vanity to the masses. I hypothesize that most people have done this just because it is, like all things of its kind, a cheap thrill for people who spend too much time online and will someday be eating whole brownies full of antidepressants.
(Psychologists at the University of Leeds in England have said recently that long hours of internet use may lead to depression.)
Is this something I care deeply about? Not really. In fact I don’t really care at all, but why should all the columns on the opinion page be about some kind of cause or sermon that has been rehashed a trillion times and will continue to be rehashed with no actual progress until the heat death of the universe?
The internet is still anarchic enough that Facebook will probably do nothing about the nefarious purloining of copyrighted images (if it is even illegal; I’m still not quite sure), and if you believe the law is ridiculous, then I guess everything remains justified for you as long as things stay loosely regulated, but take a step back.
Everyone who uses Facebook should stop and ask themselves, “Just how much of my Facebook usage amounts to a pathetic cry for help?”
Celebrities’ faces are nothing but more electron gun flashes – splotches of color sometimes expensively modified to look good on HD television – and the faces on Facebook are all representations of the same wretched meat soup. No celebrity has a legacy that will completely or even partially withstand the irresistible force of cultural erosion, yet how often do we rely on comparisons to celebrities for psychological validation? Do we rely on them as often as we rely on quizzes to determine which Harry Potter character we should date, or what Dr. Phil would say about our choice of pet?
All day today, I was Marty Feldman’s character “Eye-gor” from Mel Brooks’ fantastic “Young Frankenstein.” I thought it was hilarious. “Crackerjack!” I said to myself, “I’ll bet all my friends and neighbors will have a good chortle at this!”
But they didn’t, and neither did I. I found the picture amusing for all of five seconds and then logged out of Facebook. Later on, I changed it to a drawing of Zhao Yun.
Zhao Yun was a Chinese general who lived sometime in the third century. He is celebrated in literature and song, but no one can say what the real man was like. I like his picture. I like his character as it’s portrayed in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Am I still crying for help by posting his image?
Ooh! I should have placed a pic of a velociraptor!
