[nostatic]

So a colleague at work was all excited the other day. They are doing construction next door and had 4 large scrapers lined up nose to tail on the dirt lot. From our building it is roughly the same angle as the famous "tank man" photo from Tiananmen. He was running around with a camera and wanted to get someone to take a photo of him standing in front of the row of scrapers.

I took him aside and said that original image is pretty serious and using it as a meme, especially with him in the photo, was insensitive at best, and for some, rather insulting trivialization. I asked my wife what she thought - she was at Tiananmen as a student activist when the shooting started, and is working on a new edition of a book that she and another dozen or so of the students wrote following the massacre. She said the proposed shot would be pretty insulting.

So a few days after we had the conversation, said colleague posted the photo without him on his FB feed talking about the "threatening site". Then someone mentions Tiananmen and he got excited that someone "got it." Then another friend photoshopped Tank Man into the scraper picture.

So for the peanut gallery:

a) is being somewhat disturbed/annoyed by this an over-reaction?

b) is this a teachable moment to bring it up to him - I was going to post a link to a google image search of tiananmen square massacre so he could see part of what the meme actually means.

For the record, this colleague is a late 30's white male with a phd - i.e. not a clueless young kid. But evidently firmly in geek status imho.