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Sunday, September 17, 2006

Sunday sockpuppet postscript

I know I should take it easy on poor Lee Siegel.  The guy has undergone the singular misfortune of making himself a laughingstock just before his book of collected reviews and essays was published, and that can’t be pleasant. 

So I understand why he’s had to make the rounds of the New York print media and answer embarrassing questions about his sprezzatural alter ego.  It’s got to be a painful exercise, because even as Siegel tries to blame his fatuousness and self-regard on the blogosphere in the most remarkably fatuous and self-regarding ways (“I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn’t want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level”), he has to do so in articles that inform people—especially those people who don’t read “web” “logs”—that he’d spent a few months of his life praising himself as brave and brilliant and handsome and witty and charming and talented and also really brilliant.  Even the New York Observer profile, in the course of hailing him (oddly) as “an increasingly rare breed—a combative intellectual generalist” (quoi?—there are entire neighborhoods in New York zoned CIG-1 specifically for combative intellectual generalists), had to let its readers in on the back story:

Mr. Siegel was first drawn into Internet anonymity last February, after his condescending column offering advice to Jon Stewart before he hosted the Oscars inspired dozens of nasty comments in response. Under the heading “Siegel is my hero,” the first of 15 posts by “sprezzatura” read: “How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn’t like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos …. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” It followed later with: “Groupthink from a mob of bullies cowering behind their user-name aliases. Groupthink! Groupthink! Naaa naaa naaa-naaa naaa!”

So for a moment, I had a soupçon of sympathy for the guy.  Really, I did.

And then this morning I find that I’m cheek-by-jowl with him in the Sunday Times Magazine.  That’s me in “The Way We Live Now,” and that’s him in the“Questions For” feature.  Quelle surprise!  C’est bizarre!  Et quelle coincidence!

All right, just one thing.  I actually don’t want to get on Mr. Siegel’s case—there are far greater evils in the world, like smooth jazz.  But this one thing vexed me mightily:

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried the headline “Siegel Is My Hero”?

Every man is a hero to his alias.

Now, come on already with the attempt at light-wit cleverness. People!  Citizens!  Stop him before he alludes again!

Because the allusion here is to the phrase “no man is a hero to his valet.” We got that.  But, of course, that line suggests that the valet sees the clay feet underneath the heroic dress, whereas Siegel slyly (but not that slyly) suggests that all of us have heroic self-images that we’d indulge if only we could get away with it.  “Come, come,” Siegel’s repartee says, “we would all name our sockpuppets ‘sprezzatura’ if given the opportunity, would we not?”

Er, no.  I’m afraid you’re alone on this one, Mr. Siegel.  My own personal sockpuppet is called “Cyberpunk Composite Entities,” and I invented it on this sinuous thread last February.  When I asked people to stop calling U. No. D. Ho., Rich Puchalsky wrote in to say,

Can I still keep calling him “Horowitz” and speculating about him as a sort of cyberpunk composite entity?

To which Cyberpunk Composite Entities replied,

We really wish you wouldn’t pawn him off on us.  What did we do to deserve this?

CCE then mysteriously appeared this past May in this twisted thread over at The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony, in which a commenter named “nobody” wrote, rather nastily,

Oh man, I truly do hope Dr Bérubé sees fit to kick Siegel’s sorry pompous ass.

To which I replied, in my own name,

You know, I’ve long believed that nobody reads my archives.

To which a person now calling himself “dr nobody” said,

Now that’s what I call service! And with an eerily prescient post too. Thank you, sir. Your archives are truly incomparable.

Well, that degree of synchronicity, combined with praise for my incomparable archives, must’ve smelled a bit funny, so a commenter named “Thomas Nephew” appeared a couple of hours later to demand an explanation:

Admit it, Berube—you’re nobody.

To which I replied, under the name “Cyberpunk Composite Entities,”

I admit it three or four times a day, Thomas, but I’d never choose it as a blog comment name. Nobody would.

I signed that comment with my own url, though.  And everybody left the room happy.

OK, so now you know.  For every man is a cyberpunk composite entity to his . . . uh . . . to his . . . oh, never mind.

Posted by Michael on 09/17 at 07:05 PM
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