ManicDDaily

I even tried a bikini.

Why didn’t I get it?  Of course, I knew that a poetry/writing blog was probably not going to take the world by “hits”, not even if it occasionally featured a cute little white fluffy dog.

I figured some Robert Pattinson would help–and it did–especially before the first three Twilight movies came out.

I even mixed in a dose of bikini (although, granted, it was worn by an elephant.)

What I did not fully comprehend is that if you really want to ratchet up your blog numbers, you need to regularly post a huge amount of knee-jerk anger, prejudice, and misinformation,  highlighted by heavy doses of mascara, mosque, and… um… more misinformation.

Someone who has understood all of these facets of popularizing a blog is Pamela Geller, the extreme anti-Muslim blogger profiled in today’s New York Times; the woman who, through a variety of inflammatory tactics,  has spearheaded the fight against Park51.

I don’t really want to comment here on Ms. Geller’s various stances, only on a particular one-liner which I found especially intriguing.  Calling for a boycott of Campbell’s because of its marketing of certain products as halal: “Warhol,” she said, “is spinning in his grave.”

Hmmm….

Of course, no one can truly say what Andy Warhol is doing post-morten.  To me though, he does not seem like a grave-spinning kind of guy.  It’s simply hard to imagine him, a life-long student of commercialism, to be shocked by the idea of any company trying to expand its market.

I also can’t think of Warhol as particularly anti-Muslim–he did portraits of the Shah of  Iran and his sister.  (Though I have to confess, I don’t quite know what that reflects other than their willingness to pay Warhol’s portraiture fees.)

Still, there’s a certain irony here.  Warhol, after all, was a master of self-promotion,  a manipulator of outrage (as well as mascara), the person who coined the phrase “fifteen minutes of fame.”   It seems he might have understood Geller better than she does him.

ManicDDaily Warhol Campbell's Soup