There is a lot in the news today about an American in Edinburgh who started a weblog a few weeks ago pretending to be a lesbian Syrian. He charted some events and a final arrest, at which point his hits went from around 70 through a few hundred to two hundred thousand and an online campaign to free his persona. He realises that a lot of people want to hit him and some gays in Syria have said he has put their cause back years.
He is an idiot who was found out, but let’s be honest here thousands of people are not who they pretend to be and online life just makes the deception easier. After all the president of Syria can never again pretend to be an educated man of reason. He’s a butcher and he’s not online. Up until he realised it had gone too far and he blew the whistle on himself even the BBC was reporting about this woman who was being abused by the Syrian Government. The sadness of the weblog was not that it was fake, but that he couldn’t keep it going until Assad fell and revelations wouldn’t be harmful.
If there is one thing great pretenders know its, if you are going to pretend then pretend till death. Take a leaf out of J Edgar Hoover’s Book. Let history find the dresses not your contemporaries.