Click for a Free Press column about SorryEverybody.com and the response sites that have sprung up...
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/13/2004/1000
The site is the brainchild of James Zetlen, a 20-year-old neuroscience student at the University of Southern California who, along with a group he describes as a "network of irate nerds nationwide," started the site the day after the last election.
"It started as one of those sly Internet jokes," he said. "And it started in part because I was sorry I wasn't enough of an activist (in the weeks leading up to the election). The point more than anything else is to try to support civil discourse between countries, between America and the rest of the world. It's particularly gratifying to see the kind of response it's gotten."
Naturally, the idea that anyone in America might feel the need to apologize to foreigners is enough to cause some Bush supporters and other conservatives to see red. Much of the presidential campaign between the Republican Bush and Democrat John F, Kerry, you'll remember, centered on whether or not Kerry was too much of an internationalist, and whether he was weak on defense.
So, naturally, Zetlen and his friends have received the expected amount of hate mail, and a host of opposing sites have sprung up sporting such names as We're Not Sorry, You're Welcome Everybody, Sorry Everybody My Ass and Kiss My American Ass. Copying much of the look and feel of the original, many of these sites feature photos of presumably red-blooded Americas holding signs saying they're not sorry, posing with guns, insulting liberals and tossing off foreigners, particularly the French, to boot.
"I'm not sorry that you elitists lost the election--Go Bush!" says the sign of one young man on yourewelcomeeverybody.com, photographed in what looks to be a bedroom in his mother's house. "To the leftist traitors: We're not sorry and f*ck you," says the sign of another young man with a backward baseball cap on and a small hoop earring on the same site. "All gay freaks that wish to marry take note: Not here ya queer," goes a third hand-scribbled sign, held up by a gentleman proudly sporting a National Rifle Association pin. And so on.
Many disinterested observers--and more than a few journalists looking for one more wacky election-related story--might be tempted to write this little Internet battle off as nothing more than one more sign of a hopelessly divided nation.
But there's more to it than that, actually. Zetlen and his friends have stumbled onto something that gets to the core of what it means for many of us to be an American, particularly in the post-9/11 world: terror at our own weakness.
That's what much of the election was about, after all--questions over whether we were going to allow even the slightest bit of self-doubt creep into our national self-image, a stance popularized by the victorious president who, famously, couldn't think of a single mistake he made when offered the opportunity to do so.