I posted Manifesto of a Militant Vegan Bio-Engineer yesterday on http://missionlocal.org after first reading a link on sfgate. I did so because, 1) The article didn't ask the most interesting question. 2) They're 'mission locals' right? So in theory, they should be supportive of truly local activities, like poetry, right? Of course they aren't.
I'm so silly—what was I thinking? Website comments are supposed to be vapid and always supportive. Here is their comment policy/mission-statement: “You are free to make a comment, but do not make a dangerous comment. Do not question why we feel the need to write about people who want to rescue everything. Do not mock eating! It's what we do in the Mission! We moved to town to eat this city up and shit our hipster good-taste all over you yokels! If your verse was truly local, we would have found it!”
This is an anecdote about the power of words. If comments were so meaningless, mission-so-called-local wouldn't have put the option on their site. They wouldn't moderate the comments to permit cloying posts like this: "This is so sweet!!! Thank U and bless those people with love and tender heart to other creatures..." because such comments themselves are essentially meaningless beyond sentiment. Most webmasters censor to manage their 'brand' in the name of 'signal-noise' ratios, but there are no signal-noise ratio issues on their site worth managing. My verse had no profanity, it was relevant to the topic, it was well cited; so I conclude they belong in the coop along with the other chickens in this story. They fear the poem outdoes their story and they are correct. And this fear is a scarlet letter: 'C' and it belongs left of center, on their chests.
ps: It's interesting to note that sfgate, for all its problems (censorship and otherwise), still let me post the poem on their site. Evil Hearst is more local than missionlocals? Noooooooooooo!
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