The Manifest: Cleaning Up Our Act

FROM THE EDITORS

Cleaning Up Our Act

ANNOUNCING A NICER, CURSE-FREE,
SEXLESS NEW MANIFEST

WE’VE BEEN PUBLISHING THIS E-ZINE FOR THREE MONTHS NOW, and already there are signs of trouble. Without our consent, we have developed a reputation as a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed, and even puerile e-home for egos run rampant, and this bothers the shit out of us. Yet as baffled as we are by this revelation, we think we know the reason behind it.

After an all-night porn-fueled staff meeting down at a local bar on Pearl Street, we made a shocking discovery: our automatic content monitor, Turbo-Edit XJ-7, was broken. Apparently, and beyond our awareness, Turbo-Edit XJ-7 was letting words like “shit,” “fuck,” “piss,” and even “cervix” slip through the HTML cracks and out onto the live Internet.

Folks, we NEVER intended for this to happen.

We set out this past November to create a sterile, boring web publication to appeal to tight-assed P.C. Baby Boomer liberals (because they have all the money) and no one else. We wished to create as few waves as possible, to provide barely a shred of entertainment value, and to pander to the lowest common grandma.

We were happy to just have one reader, a lesbian knitter who bags groceries down at the local co-op and can’t smile. We understood that “integral” meant “no dick jokes,” that behaving in a “spiritual” manner meant “don’t ever be mean, even if you’re hanging out with Hitler.” We wanted to be a nice, pastel alternative to the shocking blasphemy of the regular, non-integral Internet.

But we fucked it up.

We first realized this in December when we solicited a prominent spirituality web publisher for some honest feedback. He labeled us “angry and a bit uncouth.”

In response, we composed “I Will Nail Her,” which was supposed to be a polite, kid-friendly New Year’s Resolution all about stuffed bears and a chaste girl named Poppy Carmichael. We wanted to respond to our interlocutor’s challenge to “prove to me you are integral” with the most AQAL-appropriate topic we could think of: collecting Beanie Babies. But alas, that damn Turbo-Edit XJ-7.…

See, we didn’t want this e-zine to be an “integral tit show,” as it was called on a recent post to the Shambhala Publications web forum. We didn’t want to get rejected by Google Adsense for trafficking in “adult content.” We didn’t want to perpetuate a form of “yellow v-Meme nihilism,” as former TM mascot Corey deVos has started calling our work. We didn’t want a faithful reader like Andy Acker to “feel dirty” each time he clicks a link to a Manifest article, nor to encourage bitter rants about us being rabid T&A “hacks” by young futurists / bloggers in Australia.

One reader even threatened to sue us, jokingly, for the following offenses:

• "Torturous interference with maturity"
• "Intentional Infliction of Red vMeme"
• "Conspiracy to commit mirth"

Well folks, the “fuck” buck stops here. Turbo-Edit XJ-7 has been decommissioned, and we have hired a real live content editor to cut out the curses and excise the ejaculations. His name is Penis McGee.

And Penis McGee is going to make sure that The Manifest is no longer the embarrassing kid brother mocking Grandpa’s toupee at the dinner table, nor the reason that guy is sitting in the corner of the local dive with a laptop stroking his mule, nor the foul-mouthed outkast of the entire Buddhist pantheon (not that we’re Buddhist). Penis McGee is going to pore over every feature, column, and gallery entry with a fine-tooted magnetic laser scalpel in order to remove anything--and we do mean anything--that might give you, our darling thin-skinned humorless lesbian co-op cashier reader(s) the impression that we aren’t dead from the neck down.

It was not our intention to excite or entertain anyone. If the integral e-scene is the Democratic Primary race, consider us its John Kerry, round and smooth with all the rough edges ironed out.

The Manifest. We never meant to put the “id” in “bodily fluid.”

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