Why I won't add Steve Novick and Jeff Merkley as Facebook Friends

Any self-respecting human needs a Facebook.

This nugget of wisdom, of course, comes at no surprise to you. You're totally hip; you ditched Friendster and MySpace while you were still in diapers. Maybe your first words were even similar to mine: "It's kind of neat that MySpace layouts are customizable, allowing America's true colors to shine, but Facebook is the future, so sleek and sexy, certainly never to release their precious source code to renegade developers! Goo goo ga ga."

Any self-respecting politician needs a Facebook. Perennially uncool, this demographic has only recently discovered social networking. Jeff Merkley recently got a Facebook of his very own. Steve Novick has one too.

But there are grave differences between these politicians and a regular fellow like me. Like just about everybody else, I came on Facebook to find true love (mission accomplished LOL).

These politicians, on the other hand, signed up for Facebook accounts in search of a different sort of a love, the kind that requires them to press the flesh and spend a lot of time away from family.

I'm talking about S&M, of course. But they also use Facebook to court likely voters. And in this brave new world of superficial interaction, it's obvious that certain candidates want my vote more than others.

Indeed, I get the sense that most of the activity on Novick's profile is The Candidate himself, whereas Merkley has outsourced the updating of his profile to Chinese teenagers obviously too strung out on World of Warcraft to remember to add data like Merkley's Favorite TV Shows and Favorite Movies, the kind of important information that we voters will ultimately base our decisions on.

But I could be wrong. I don't spend a lot of time on these profiles, for I am not their Friend. I suppose I should just come out with it: I'm not comfortable adding local politicians as Facebook Friends.

But it's not because I would be too tempted to suggest extremely profane Friend details. I wouldn't feel weird about that at all.

It's something else that concerns me. I'm hesitant to add local politicians, you see, because of the hundreds of nude photographs that perverts have secretly taken of me and posted on my Facebook.

I could care less about the national level. Presidential candidates wouldn't dream of wasting time logging onto Facebook themselves; it's likely many of them don't even know what Facebook actually is. Ron Paul didn't know about YouTube until he was the hero of the elite libertarian class of n3rdy hax0rz that controls Digg, and by extension, the rest of the internets.

Here's what I'm getting at: do I care if some low-level John Edwards staffer sees my ass? Absolutely not. In fact, I'd kind of like it. Ames, Iowa, this moon shines for you!

I'm less comfortable baring it all to these local politicians, who easily could log on to their account themselves, and who I could easily run into on the mean streets of Portland, at any time. Encountering a powerful stranger downtown who recognizes your ass, I daresay I need to tell you, is quite embarrassing, and can lead to truly tragic misunderstandings.

So where does this leave us? Well, Jeff Merkley's ingenius Evite to George W. Bush really inspired me, so I thought I'd try my hand at the electronic card fad.

To the Novick and Merkley campaigns:


Please accept this card with my deepest regrets, but also know that someday, in the future, I just might work up the courage to show you my ass.