Veil the World Black
24 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in General Ironic Situations, We Should be Enraged About This Tags: "Minister's Black Veil", American short stories, black banner, Google, horror, Nathaniel Hawthorne, PIPA, Puritan, SOPA
Earlier this month, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) infuriated millions of Internet-users, and frustrated just as many intelligent Internet-savvy individuals. Among the issues presented to the advocates of the bill was the notion that once these restrictions were constructed, the worldwide web would become somewhat of a tangled net as people would create new ways of bypassing the restrictions. Wikipedia was temporarily shut down, and Google placed a black banner over their icon in solidarity. That same day I was instructed to read ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. One of the first great American novelists, Hawthorne used a single major symbol in each of his works to represent a larger idea. In ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’, a Puritan community is shocked and horrified when their minister appears with a black crêpe veil over his face. Throughout this short story the community becomes more and more scandalized, wondering what secret their minister must be hiding from the world under his veil. They are horrified at what could have been hidden, as the veil evokes terrorized shudderings during his powerful but calm sermons. The veil itself has such an effect on the people that the minister’s own fiancé comes and tries to make him take it off, fearing their relationship might be compromised because of it. The minister refuses and later dies with the veil intact.
The similarities between Google’s black banner and the minister’s black veil is astounding. Both used the black covering as a sort of announcement, a declaration of a higher and a more transcendental purpose, one being sympathy and solidarity, the other being isolation and guilt. When accessing Google’s website for the first time the day it put up the black banner, and upon seeing the strangely blank ebony rectangle over what should have been the jolly ‘Google’ sign, I also felt a bit eerie. Just the absence of a constant in my life was jarring enough, but to be replaced with a plain black box? It was horrifying, to say the least. My heart beat faster, and I immediately wanted to look away, much like the puritanical people wanted to look away from the minister’s black veil.
Just the fact that both these instances were meshed together on the same exact day was ridiculously ironic. It was as if God had proclaimed, “Veil the world black”. And it was so.
