“While two billion Christians around the world celebrate Easter Sunday on this 31st day of March, Google is using its famous ‘Doodle’ search logo art to mark the birth of left-wing labor leader,” Twitchy.com notes, adding that “Google’s Easter insult sparks Twitter backlash, mockery,” as well it should.
The timing of latest in-your-face politically correct homepage is oddly appropriate. As Dennis Prager has written, “You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion,” and one with its own sources of mythology. Back in 2006 at Tech Central Station, Lee Harris described French Marxist Georges Sorel (1847-1922), and the concept of the Sorelian Myth:
Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist’s life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed — yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism — if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual’s lives. Thus for Sorel there was “an…analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual — a gigantic task.”
I wonder if anyone at Google has read Miriam Pawel’s The Union of Their Dreams, or read Caitlin Flanagan’s 4500-word review of it in the Atlantic in 2011: “The Madness of Cesar Chavez: A new biography of the icon shows that saints should be judged guilty until proved innocent.” Read the whole thing.
(Cross-posted at Instapundit.com.)
Update: A Happy Easter to Kathy Shaidle’s readers, and to Mark Steyn’s readers clicking in from the Corner. And note that, as spotted by Twitchy, “While Google honors Cesar Chavez, Bing delivers Easter eggs:”
Google has had Easter Eggs as well.
Back in 2000, that is. According to Wikipedia, which may actually be right on this one, it was “Google’s first and only Easter doodle to date.”
The 2000 date might be significant. For most of America, the most important — horrific, soul-searching, angry, depressing — day of their recent lives was September 11th, 2001; for America’s hard left, that day was almost a year prior. “For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives” wasn’t 9/11, but an event that occurred in the previous year, which was the Florida presidential recount, Daniel Henninger perceptively noted in the Wall Street Journal on 9/11’s tenth anniversary. “The 2000 election ended only when the Supreme Court resolved it in favor of George Bush. Republican and independent voters moved on, but many Democrats never did; they were now being governed by an illegitimate president,” he wrote.
Google never seemed to be the same after that as well; these days, their urge to push the PC/transnational agenda simply continues out of reactionary inertia.
More: “Psst! Cesar Chavez Opposed Illegal Immigrants — Google should google it,” Mickey Kaus quips. But that’s the great thing about a Sorelian myth; it allows the self-described Reality-Based Community to morph history any way they like.
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