You know how sometimes you have to explain a joke after telling it? And then you have to wonder if the problem was you, the joke, or the audience?

Well, that seems to have happened to me with the image below. Back in July of 2008, I took Photoshop in hand and built the image. The Obama photo, the flag and the feather are all separate elements I grabbed from somewhere or another. I erased the background from the photo and the feather, blurred the flag for reasons which escape me now, and used the fonts from his campaign materials for the text. The graphic accompanied a post about how I was pretty sure that Obama would ultimately be a huge disappointment to his supporters.

You’ll note that the text isn’t “Hope, For a Change,” but “Hope For A Change,” which is to say that rather than hope existing where it hadn’t before, hoping for change was about the best one could do.

The feather is something I stole from Gary Trudeau’s Dan Quayle parody; in the Doonesbury panels where Quayle was speaking, he was represented by a feather. Feathers being all lightweight and stuff. And of course there’s the Dickinson line, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Just to add a touch of literary class to the thing.

So it wasn’t meant to be a positive thing. It was meant to indicate that Obama was pretty much a lightweight who shouldn’t be expected to deliver much in the way of hope or change.

People do on occasion borrow graphics from my site. It’s okay, it’s sort of flattering, so long as it isn’t one of the photographs I care about, although it would be nice to be credited for it. Of all the graphics I’ve done, this one is the most borrowed. Many borrowers didn’t change the image name, which was “obama-hope-feathers.jpg”, so it’s easy to find. And I have no idea why, but a fair number of people arrive here via a google search for the string, “obama hope feathers”.

So I did the search myself, and found a dozen incarnations of it, and every single one of them took the image to be supportive of Obama.

Wholesale fail on my part, apparently. And I was really jazzed about it at the time, because I thought it was a really good propaganda effort. Clearly not. Oh well. I still like it.

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