The Critics Respond, Part Six
Oh, Christ.
It's all the talk in the club racer/autocrosser cliques: Continental, the American distributor of the much-loved, dirt-cheap Super Blue brake fluid, has decided to immediately pull it from the shelves, citing an old section of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that mandates an "amber" color for brake fluid in roadgoing vehicles. The fact that you can't buy SuperBlue in AutoZone and that it is almost exclusively used alternately with its amber twin, ATE 200, to help tired/lonely/lazy club racers know if they've successfully flushed their brake system all the way through is irrelevant. It's blue, which is illegal, it apparently has to go.
I wrote a quick article about this. I treated it with some humor; besides the title of the piece, I referred to the United States Government as "those sons-of-bitches" and implied that, with the removal of Super Blue from the market, I'd be heading for a cabin in the woods in tribute to the Unabomber. I also included the "official" version of Pastor Martin Niemoller's First They Came speech. The idea being that if we don't stand up for Super Blue, that they'll take our R-compounds next. Or something like that.
Some of the readers went fucking nuts about this. I mean, they were really upset. They were upset that I hadn't investigated the story thoroughly before putting it up; these same people would have bitched had I waited until next week to hear a reply from Continental before running a story on it. It's also worth noting that, unfortunately, speed matters on the Internet. This was the biggest story of the day and brought us thousands of new readers. Had we waited until next week, it would have disappeared beneath the waves. I don't like it, but I didn't invent "Internet time". Al Gore did.
Other readers were upset that I equated Super Blue's removal to the Holocaust. Except I didn't. No mention of "Jews" or "Holocaust" appeared in the text. Niemoller's original quote wasn't meant to refer to the Holocaust. There's no Holocaust content in this story. Period, point blank. If you thought otherwise, you didn't pay much attention in history class.
Not to mention that this particular reader is apparently a brony. Listen, I support the right of people to generally do whatever they want but this whole brony thing really grates on me, particularly when ostensibly "straight" men are involved. God help us if China ever gets around to invading the United States. There will be about five men standing out there with rifles and the rest of the country will be in their basements cuddling a stuffed animal with a split seam in the crotch area.
If you want an example of an autowriter actually joking about the Holocaust, you don't have to look any further than Travis Okulski, who made a Holocaust joke and was promptly praised thoroughly for doing so. You have to love our modern American identity politics; as long as you're perceived to be sufficiently liberal you can say what you like. Not that I wanted to see Travis crucified over that, really. Where are we as a nation if a guy whose life consists of borrowing Lamborghinis and Jaguars for weekend jaunts can't crack a couple of Dachau jokes now and again?
My initial reaction to this whole thing was anger. Anger at the readers, for being so literal-minded and thick-headed, for having the typical lazy Internet citizen's misunderstanding of history, for demanding that we not release stories until said stories have met their personal criteria for background investigation. The more I think about it, however, the more I see it as a call to address the readers in a more direct manner. Most of them want seriousness from TTAC and they don't like it when we are anything but straightforward. It's not what I'd prefer to write, but we're in the customer service business here, and as long as we intend to keep serving a few million articles a month we'd better be aware of what the customer wants, right?