Simulacra

I popped by Google yesterday, just to see what they might be doing to acknowledge Easter. Turns out they weren't doing anything. Just the same old primary color letters. No clever links. Just Google. I was a little let down, since I thought they might take the opportunity to something really interesting, given their ongoing feud with "Fox and Friends."
The day after their mildly elaborate ruse of renaming their site "Topeka" for one day: April Fool's Day. The next day, they chose to alter their splash page again by honoring the two hundred and fifth birthday of Hans Christian Andersen. Not big news for a Friday morning, unless it happened to be Good Friday morning. Why would Google choose to commemorate the author of "The Ugly Duckling" instead of our Lord and Saviour, the Friendly Fox Folks wanted to know. They weren't as concerned that the search engine didn't choose to feature a graphic last week smeared with lamb's blood in honor of Passover. Where was their Good Friday spirit, after all?The powers that be at Google were happy to point out that even though a third of the world's population call themselves Christian, they chose to remain more secular in their tributes, aside from the Dutch author's middle name, at least.
And that's when the bell went off in my head, reminding me of a spring some thirty years passed. My high school sweetheart's mother and I had a bit of a rocky relationship, but one evening we started talking about religion. She was Jewish, and said she never understood what all the bunnies and eggs were for at Easter. I suggested that it was probably a lot more comforting to kids than the image of Christ nailed to a cross, and we agreed that it wasn't exactly fair to appropriate all these pagan images of fertility while celebrating the death of a great prophet. With that, she bid me goodnight and left her daughter and I to "watch TV" downstairs. Rather than use that opportunity to make out on the couch, I asked if we could get some paper and some markers to help get the place ready for Easter.
The next morning, my girlfriend's mother came down to see a very gory Jesus tacked up on the cross that was created by her stereo's FM antenna. I was pleased and honored to see that it was not only still there when I came by to pick up her daughter the next day, but he stayed up there on the wall for the whole weekend. It was a twisted bit of humor that we shared, and it gave us something to laugh about together. For a while. Too bad we can't expect the same from the Friendly Folks at Fox.