http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/ga ... 75766.html

It has a certain wag the dog flavor to it doesn't it?

Man, you just can't trust the Internet these days

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303848104576383861153713734.html

A Blog, a Hoax and a Literary Tradition
*JUNE 18, 2011
*By JOE QUEENAN


Earlier this week, it was revealed that a popular, inspirational blog supposedly written by a Syria-based lesbian was actually the work of a male graduate student in Scotland. Immediately, the media—the very ones that helped to create the myth of A Gay Girl in Damascus—began lecturing the public about how easy it is to be duped on the Internet, where no one has any way of knowing whether you are a dog, a Syrian, a lesbian or a Scot. This, by the way, is not news.

There are two ways of looking at the Gay Girl in Damascus hoax. On the one hand, it exposes the threadbare values of people in the West who thrive on bogus exoticism. Much as people who do not actually care about the poor feel their spirits soar when they go to see a movie about the downtrodden of East Los Angeles, reading the Gay Girl in Damascus blog allowed people in free countries to feel a phony rapport with a putatively brave woman in a repressive but colorful country.

It is the same mentality as the Starbucks campaign for "The Kite Runner"—the idea that by purchasing a book about unfortunate denizens of the Third World, along with your double Frappuccino, you not only relieve their misery but somehow, vicariously, participate in their fight against the forces of darkness. It's what inspires people to put "Darfur: Not on Our Watch" signs on their lawns, as if that's going to make any difference. We are here for you, people of Libya! Oh, Bosnia, we stand on guard for thee!

This is rubbish, like sporting a Che Guevara T-shirt at a Beverly-Hills fund raiser. There's no such thing as waging a vicarious war against the forces of evil. Either you are out in the streets risking your own life or you are not. Heroism is not a spectator sport. Reading a blog is not firing a gun.

The second way of looking at the Gay Girl in Damascus fiasco is: What great fun! The fact that the phony blogger is a man is terrific, but the fact that he's in Scotland is priceless. I'm not sure why; it just is. It drives home the point that anyone with reasonable literary gifts can easily pass himself off as anyone else, that you don't have to be a woman to get into the head of Emma Bovary or Lisbeth Salander, or to be a man to penetrate the psyche of Darcy or Rochester.

The idea that gay men and women are fundamentally different from straight men and women is not only preposterous but offensive; we are all in this thing together. The Gay Girl in Damascus takes an awful lot of air out of an awful lot of balloons.

Hoaxes like this are a rich part of our cultural tradition. People love hoaxes. In the 18th century, the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have unearthed a collection of poems that were supposedly written by a Celtic bard named Ossian. Some people thought he was as good as Homer. The poems were fakes. Then in the early 20th century the sinologist Edmund Backhouse published (with a journalist) a counterfeit memoir supposedly written by a member of the royal court of the last Empress Dowager of China. He wrote it in Chinese, an impressive feat.

More recently, a German journalist purported to have unearthed Hitler's secret diaries. They were actually the work of a cheeky Stuttgart forger. Each time, a bunch of academics and journalists who should have known better got completely snookered.

So what? I'd love to find out that the Motley Fool investment site is actually written not by Wall Street experts but by a couple of lifers at San Quentin. I'd love to discover that a snooty classical-music blog is actually penned by the Wu-Tang Clan. It would be fun to learn that Matt Drudge does not exist, that everything that appears in his Report is actually written by the drummer from Weezer.

Best of all would be finding out that Bill Simmons's brilliant sports columns are actually written by a lesbian in Damascus who couldn't tell an infield fly from a safety blitz. Gay Oklahoma City Thunder Fan in Damascus, anyone?

That's excellent!

I love when the media get sucked into something and then they tell us we should be outraged because they got sucked into something.

Four Loko wishes you had made this post last year.