Photoshoping the world
There is no one ugly in the world anymore. If you don’t like your appearance is not the fault of DNA but laziness. We are all beautiful, ask Photoshop and see. Few tools for human deception have bitten, with such success, for the jugular of the perceptions of others. It’s devious, but democratic style, has achieved in less than a generation, which the Spartans -with Taigeto- and Nazi eugenics -with their laboratories- could achieve. Photoshop is the new brush of the gods.
With Photoshop, the whiteness of models that don’t know what a ray of sunshine is in the tropics is reduced, flirty eyes of women and men with lycanthropic interests are clarified; orange peel dims until blending it with the texture and volume of a medicine ball. With this tool, available to any with tutorials on the network -and a click away from a free download- you can get into the tightest jeans, fitting gracefully into dresses, conform to tiny shoes, and shine without dark circles –or wrinkles- in the eyes, supporting even the perfidious extreme close of the most candid camera.
Now, this lethal creation of technology has its perfect moments, most of them distant from physical contact, but what to do when the magic of digital life ends? How to cover when the virtuality breaks and you end up face to face with the victims of deception in an elevator… especially those miserable ones with dim light, direct self-esteem aggressors?
Editor’s Note: Joaquín Ortega delivers this issue to us, Photoshopping the world, which lets out not only his good prose but delights us with the subtle humor that characterizes him. I see Photoshopping the world as the mischievous brother of any of the wonderful issues from his latest text, The Millennium Culture, now available in digital format. Photoshopping the world is part of the emerging column Humor. An article by Joaquín, Madman of God has just been published in the IWP (International Writing Program), a very interesting project I will write about soon.
