We're sorry, world ... or maybe not
At sorryeverbody.com, Americans offer apologies for the president's re-election. Of course, there are sites for those who aren't sorry, too.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published November 20, 2004
In one photo, a red-haired girl with black-rimmed glasses holds a hand-printed sign in front of most of her face: "Dear World, I couldn't vote because I'm only 16. But my grandma voted for Kerry, and I'm sure she's sorry too. SORRY! Brea (XOXO)"
In another, a couple of dozen denim-clad baby boomers hold up banners: "Hello from Texas! We're so sorry but they hijacked our votes again! We're not giving up!"
Another photo has no human face, just a sheet of paper with a sketch of a monster and the words, "We're sorry we let him loose on you. Don't hate me, I'm already invisible. The Christian Lesbian."
Those photos and more than 4,500 others are the main content of sorryeverybody.com, conceived by a California college student on Nov. 3 as a way for him and his friends to express their disappointment that President Bush had won the election.
Two weeks later, the site had received 15,000 photo submissions from around the world and more than 50-million hits, as well as spawning at least half a dozen response sites such as werenotsorry.com and sorryeverybodymyass.com.
Within its first five days of existence, Sorry Everybody reached one of the benchmarks of pop culture validity: an online retailer approached its founders about selling T-shirts. Visitors to the site can buy everything from lunch boxes to thong panties with two different Sorry Everybody designs.
Founder James Zetlen says he's astonished at the response. "Originally it was just supposed to be my friends and me holding up our pictures." The photo on the site's home page is Zetlen holding a notebook page with a sketch of the globe and the words "Sorry World (we tried) - Half of America."
Zetlen, 20, is a junior at the University of Southern California, majoring in neuroscience. After the election, he says, "I bought the domain name sorryeverybody.com. It was a combination of being a joke and being sincere."
One friend mentioned the site in his blog, another put it in a Web cartoon he draws, and suddenly Sorry Everybody was a phenomenon.
Zetlen originally put the site up on USC's server but had to move it because it was getting so much traffic. "It was absolutely heartbreaking," he says. "I assumed it would be gone in a day" after it was off the Internet for eight hours.
But photos kept pouring in, some sad, some funny, some defiant. Zetlen and about a dozen friends around the world are running the site as volunteers, and he says they have rejected far more photos than they have posted. In most cases, he says, it's because they "weren't apologetic enough.
"By far the most were too hostile to the other side. If they call people idiots, rednecks, morons, that kind of thing, we reject them."
The site also got plenty of negative response. "Oh, God, the e-mails," Zetlen says. The site doesn't post e-mails, but in the FAQ, he responds to some of the common questions:
"Why are you apologizing to the terrorists?
"We prefer not to confuse terrorists with the rest of the world.
"Don't you understand that an apology is a sign of weakness?
"You are free to think so; we are of the opinion that the willingness to apologize is a sign of courage and strength."
Some people were so incensed by Sorry Everybody's message that they created sites of their own. One of the first was werenotsorry.com, which copied the design of the original site and posted photos of happy Bush supporters, the majority of them brandishing guns. It was a short-lived site, though, vanishing by Tuesday, its domain name back up for sale. Taking things a step further, notsorrynoteverybody.com combined the galleries of the original site and the response sites side by side, with such pairings as a shot of a doe-eyed girl holding a note saying "Peace and apologies from Oregon" next to one of a grim man aiming two guns at the camera over the words "Go f-- yourself!! I'm not sorry."
At sorryeverybodymyass.com, the home page features the infamous photo of Bush flipping a finger at the camera while he was governor of Texas. "That's my favorite," Zetlen says. "It's a pitch-perfect parody of our site.
"I know what we're doing is a target for satire. I don't agree with them politically, but I think they're hilarious." Most of the gallery at sorryeverybodymyass.com consists of doctored photos of such people as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Michael Moore, and they have not been edited for rude content.
Other response sites maintain a more civil tone, such as the blog notsorry.com, run by Philadelphia lawyer John Petersen. A veteran of the information technology business, Petersen, 40, was Web savvy but had never blogged before.
"The only reason I put up the site was as a counterpoint" to Sorry Everybody, he says.
"These people don't speak for those of us who voted for Bush. I don't believe we have anything to apologize for.
"You can complain all you want about the administration, but as soon as you start sending messages to the rest of the world, that's just not right."
Petersen had a gallery on his site at first but soon took it down. "The photos for some people are an opportunity to joke around. For me this is a pretty serious thing."
While photos are a way for people to vent their feelings about the election, he says, a blog encourages the exchange of ideas. "This is a partisan site, but we're here for discussion."
Some of the e-mail he has gotten has been "pretty vicious," he says, but he has also gotten supportive responses. The site had received more than 80,000 hits by Tuesday, and Petersen said its traffic had doubled in the past 24 hours.
"I have no ill feelings toward the folks who did Sorry Everybody," he says. "My ambition is to stimulate debate. Not necessarily agreement, but debate. It can be positive. It's within our power to make it that way."
Zetlen says he isn't sure what Sorry Everybody might evolve into. "We can't become demagogues. We don't have the right to parlay the support people have given this into a platform for our own ideas."
But he would like to find a forum for fostering "a spirit of civil discourse in American politics. I know it's highly unlikely, but. . . ."
For now, he is bemused by a marriage proposal from a 14-year-old in Britain and overwhelmed by the unread e-mails in his inbox. "I have homework, man. I have a test in an hour."
But he's encouraged, he says, by the volume of response to Sorry Everybody, from every side.
"Some people have said this site has fostered anger and acrimony and resentment. You know what I want to say about that?
"I'm sorry."
- Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com