Bert is Evil

» see fractalcow.com/bert as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the picture traveled and the site behind it did not. in the second week of october 2001 a reuters photographer at a rally in dhaka filed a frame of a protester holding a large collage of osama bin laden. up in the corner, over bin laden's right shoulder, was an orange muppet with a unibrow. western newsrooms spent a day trying to work out how it had got there.

the answer was a page that had been online since 30 march 1997. dino ignacio, then a fine arts student at the university of the philippines, had built a small site arguing in a flat documentary register that bert from sesame street was responsible for most of the twentieth century's atrocities. bert stands beside hitler. he is in the crowd at the kennedy assassination and at the oklahoma city bombing, and there are photographs of him with saddam hussein and robert mugabe. the images were crude by any later standard and the writing never winked once, which was the entire method.

turkey had sesame street. it ran on trt for years as susam sokağı, so the characters were common property to anyone who grew up there, which is why the joke was legible in turkey and not legible at all in dhaka. the shop that printed the poster had never seen the show and treated the muppet as decoration. that gap is the whole incident.

ignacio took the site down on 11 october 2001. sesame workshop had raised the prospect of legal action and sent a dmca notice, but the note he left behind is insistent that he was not pushed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mirrors ~

by the summer of 1998 the site was too popular to pay for. ignacio's answer was to zip the whole thing up and offer it to anyone willing to host a copy. dozens of people took him up on it, which bought him another two years of reach and cost him any ability to switch the thing off later.

the mirrors also wrote their own material. dennis pozniak, who ran the first one, added bert to the ramsey case and to jack the ripper. at the end of 1998 pozniak posted a submission from a humorist named j roen showing bert over the shoulder of a then largely unknown saudi militant. that image was never on ignacio's server at all. it was on somebody else's mirror, made by somebody else again.

~ the poster ~

the bbc found the printer. azad products in dhaka had run off around two thousand copies of the poster and sold them into a street demonstration against the us strikes on afghanistan. the collage had been assembled out of whatever bin laden imagery could be found online, and the muppet came along with it. nobody printing or carrying the poster had any idea what they were carrying.

sesame workshop's public statement had no humor in it whatsoever. the organization said its characters stood for mutual respect and understanding and that it was outraged to see them used in that manner. privately it went further, and ignacio was given to understand that a lawsuit was on the table.

~ the note he left ~

the page that replaced the site is dated 10.11.01 and titled good bye bert. it thanks sesame workshop for its patience and restraint over the years and asks every fan and mirror host to stop spreading the site. then it gets defensive in a way that dates it perfectly: "this is not selling out. i was not bullied." the reason given is one sentence. he felt it had gotten too close to reality and chose to stop it there.

underneath that there is an update, added after readers wrote in to criticize the decision, in which he reprints his reply to one of them. he says he killed a part of himself that day, and that his motive was to stop the idea getting any further into the mainstream, because he feared what it would do to the character in the eyes of children watching the show. the mirrors mostly ignored him. one dutch copy at bertisevil.tv kept running for years afterward, with a notice on the front page explaining that parody is legal in the netherlands.

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