Talking of new things - radical wise

I have been the victim of a foul prank. An ignominious and mendacious ruse the likes of which could cause decades of feuding and the pursing of lips.

It all began about a week ago when a draft leaflet was sent out to a certain list for checking. Well I've been much too busy for things like that - I trust people's judgment you see. Especially when the leaflet designer is a man the Cambridge Evening News described as "one of Britain's top experts in quantum mechanics" admittedly in a report on how he was given an ASBO. I digress.

Okay, so someone else on the list made a little comment suggesting that the "picture of the boot stomping on Jesus" should be removed.This piqued my interest, as one might expect, so I decided to take a look. My eyebrows raised to maximum and then some.

The leaflet essentially amounted to a montage of violent, and perhaps deliberately offensive, images. Now seeing as the group in question spends more time giving out free pizza and discovering new and even more inconvenient ways of being 'ethical' than it does throwing petrol bombs I thought that perhaps the leaflet was slightly misjudged. By a small fraction.

So I sent a rather tentative email to that effect. The email has long since disappeared into the ether but I do remember finishing with the sentence "something a little less 'rough boys on tour' would be more my cup of tea." I can see you wincing even now at the censorious and authoritarian tone. It gets worse - it's wasn't even REAL - the said "top expert in quantum mechanics" had been tasked to design a *decoy* leaflet so bad that it would propel others into creating some kind of masterpiece of political propaganda.

Alas it just served to humiliate. I involuntarily twitch even now at the thought of the kind of email that could have been. A rude, abrasive, condescending, patronising, lecturing, emotive response could have been sent both creating bad blood between serving comrades or even seeing the tricked party never to return to the group out of shame. Or someone could have sent an email saying how great it was and I would have had to remove them from my Christmas card list.

Bad, bad, bad idea. It got worse thought. I was then *mocked* for how polite I was about it! Damn them all - bloody young people. Is this, like, standard practice in some groups, to make statements and write leaflets / books so bad their *real* purpose is simply to drive others into spontaneous revolutionary consciousness?

Hold on, I just realised what [insert name of random left-wing group] has been upto all these years!