Nadeem, did AOL Time Warner hire your photoshop hand for some freelance work recently?

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that Time Magazine's December 17, 2007 cover looks like it could have been taken straight from of the KABOBarchives, has gotten me a little worried. Initially, I wondered if I should be so surprised. This was the same reputable publication who brought us O.J. Simpson's doctored mug shot an entire generation before.




Perhaps we should blame Mumu for refusing the request to pose as a dupe for Time's photographers. Does it really matter? Is Time correct in thinking that no one would really care? During the O.J. circus, Time figured there would be no backlash -- this is America, where people recognize that crime comes in any color as long as it's black. If rival Newsweek wouldn't have run the same mugshot on their cover in its unaltered state in the same week on the same newstands, the study in contrast would not have been so great.

Today, Ahmadinejad's caricature seems to be a new sort of sensationalism, this time riding the wave of the ever popular gossip rags and BREAKING!!! news items stemming from the infotainment channels. If this were a political cartoon this wouldn't be as problematic, but such messages are usually left out of the domain of photography where the "real" is communicated in infinitely more salient ways. What concerns me is that many of us really believe that what we see, read, and hear from the mainstream news is truth.

That Time is being quite satirical but pretending it's not (perhaps they believe their own lies as soon as ink hits paper?) reminds me of earlier this year during the California wildfires, when Nadeem, Fayyad and I began conspiring a KABOBspoof with Chaim Sugarman, KABOBfest Senior Terrorism Expert/Reporter without Borders, to report our outrage on how no one had yet considered how it may have been the terrorists who started the fires because, as everybody already knows, along with balancing nuclear bombs in their knapsacks over their heads while swimming across the Rio Grande, this was exactly the sort of thing the terrorists would do.

But the next morning on Fox & Friends morning show, co-host Steve Doocy announced that he and thousands of his fans would like America to know that probably, Al Qaeda was behind the burning of California. And he said that with a straight face.

I hear it feels good to be so coked out.

Learning that for an increasing number of people making shit up is their actual job-job from which they can actually buy groceries and pay rent, has really put the role of KABOBfest as a volunteer-run forum into new perspective. See, I just learned that I'm not allowed to give capitalism the finger by filing for bankruptcy after graduation and default on my student loans because Sallie Mae with get her brother/baby daddy Earl to like, hunt me down and kill me, so now I have to contribute to capitalism's own demise in another way, like, by getting a job. That like pays. So Will, you might want to consider the possiblity that some of your KABOBers (I too, have a PhotoShop hand Rupert!) are prime to get lucrative positions at places like Faux News where crime is available in any color you'd like, but like their cocaine -- it often comes white. I may have to stay out of the sun.