Puce Naugahyde
On Satire and its Impossibility at times like this
By Ross Elfline
There has been a fair amount of ink spilled about the ways in which the Internet, and the computer age in general, has changed the ways in which we view our individual personae. There is a certain degree of remove from those we communicate with. We can be as passive-aggressive as we would want to be over e-mail. Don't want to face confrontation with your friend head-on? Fire off a nasty e-missive! In chat rooms, we become whomever we want to. Steal an image from a porn site and suddenly you're a new person: taller, thinner, blond.
And the great aspect about this computerized age is that you can try on all the proverbial hats you could dream of AT THE SAME TIME. Click the windows at the bottom of your screen and WHAM! you move from the tall, blond porn star to the opera lover buying tickets to the next show at the Lyric. Move your mouse again and suddenly you're buying supplies for your studio classes this semester. Within a few clicks, you can be porn star, opera nerd and art freak. Sherry Turkle sums up this phenomenon in the introduction to her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet thusly: "The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds and plays many roles at the same time (p.14)."
Sure, I myself play this very game every day. I can sit at my computer, just as I am now, and flit from the chat room on gay.com (where I have created one persona) to my weekly grocery order (which shows my life as a non-red meat-eater and waffle lover) to my thesis (where I get to indulge my art nerd-ish leanings) to this piece for F News. And readers will be quick to note that what you've read here in the past constitutes the musings a persona as well in the form of "Puce Naugahyde," a design- and media-whore who pokes fun of Madonna and goth kids.
What I am finding today are some of the holes in Turkle's argument. She might have overstated things a little bit in getting at this idea of decenteredness. You see when we are clicking from one window to another, we're making a conscious decision to put on these various roles. There remains this very centered being actively mousing from one public guise to the next. I, for one, feel that I know quite well where my center is when I decide to be the tall porn star. My center may not BE the porn star himself, but I can look at him from this side of the computer screen and like what I see.
Once in a while there are moments that force us toward our center whether we would like to find it or not. Today is such a day for me. As I sit here, I am still waiting for a call or an e-mail from a friend who lives in New York City. She works in Lower Manhattan. Yesterday (Sept. 11), a couple of people decided to use a pair of Boeing 757's as multi hundred-ton projectiles to be hurled toward her and many, many other equally radiant people. Somehow the highly witty and satirical piece I had prepared to write on fashion tips handed down by the Olsen Twins via their website seems insignificant. I am sure that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are wonderfully centered individuals, but right now I could really give a rat's ass about what they have to say about sarongs this season. (Come on, it's fall anyway, update your damn website already!)
I don't generally have a problem with people trying to have a chuckle in the midst of disaster. We all need to laugh to get ourselves through tough times now and again. So it's not that I feel it inappropriate to expose the Olsen Twins' position on girls between the ages of 10 and 14 having well-defined abs (they're pro-abs), I just don't particularly have the energy or the desire to flex Puce's satirical muscles today. Rest assured, in one month's time, Puce will be back and badder than ever with a subtly sardonic article, but right now I'm reminded of the opening line to the theme song to Full House, the Olsens' first hit TV show: "What ever happened to predictability? The newsman, the paperboy and even TV?"
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