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Where's there's smoke
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Only in Boulder.

If you Google “Rob Smoke” and “MySpace,” the first web page that comes up has a URL address ending in “monkeyjuice2000.” The page’s abstract shows that Rob Smoke is a 50-year-old male living in Boulder. It also includes the declaration: “I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m horny, I’m stoned … and I’m a city official.”

More specifically, Smoke is the chairman of Boulder’s Human Relations Commission. But probably not for much longer. Members of the Boulder City Council are looking to take action against Smoke for what they have deemed inappropriate content on his MySpace web page. In one post, Smoke asks whether University of Colorado officials are aware of “DE FACTO LEGALIZATION of (at least) marijuana smokifyin’ here in Boulder?”

Some civil-liberties advocates might want to champion Smoke’s side, but this is no case of government censorship. This is a simple case of one man’s idiocy.

In his “about me” section, Smoke declares he is “committed to my career as a personal trainer to people who want to learn how to do nothing.” Remember, this is a person in a public office. Regarding his position on the commission, Smoke offers this analogy: “Last year I adjudicated a discrimination case where the complainant was a man not allowed to join a woman's water aerobics class – a huge deal -– believe me.”

Smoke says his heroes are “Andy Warhol and the woman who shot him,” which is weird but not as distasteful as one of his book selections, “Vanilla Ice’s autobiography.” (Seven copies of Ice by Ice: The Vanilla Ice Story In His Own Words can be found at Amazon.com for less than a dollar.) Smoke’s strangest admission – which is borderline creepy – is that “cheap hotels are my favorite universe.”

As far as web page content goes, Smoke’s is actually pretty tame. The only thing that struck me as possibly offensive was Smoke’s friend Amanda, whose profile link displays a close-up of her posterior bent over and housed in pink underwear.

Smoke’s page is basically dumb, mindless chatter from a grown man with a government job who should know better. I am dumbfounded as to how he survived the vetting process in order to get the job. On the other hand, we’re talking about Boulder, home of hapless cops, hypocrisy and the dog-poop guy.

The most striking thing about the whole situation is that Smoke doesn’t think he did anything wrong.

He told the Denver Post, “I’m sitting here, and I’m waiting for somebody to explain this to me what I did wrong.” The Post reported that Smoke said “he does not take himself seriously on his MySpace page and that the statements are his personal, sometimes scatological, expressions. He said it would be impossible to mistake the riffs as official statements.”

No one is accusing Smoke of making official statements. Someone would be hard-pressed to mistake his juvenile banter for anything remotely governmental. Smoke’s lack of seriousness, though, seems to be the whole problem.

It would be one thing if he logged on to MySpace under an anonymous handle, like “stonergeek20.” But he didn’t. His picture is there, and he declares himself to be Rob Smoke, chairman of Boulder’s Human Relations Commission.

In other words, he is participating in a public arena without attempting to disguise his identity and thinks that what he says isn’t the public’s business. This is akin to Governor Bill Owens standing on a Denver street corner extolling the virtues of hookers and claiming his words don’t have anything to do with him being governor. If Owens ever did this, of course, citizens would surely call for his resignation.

Sitting in front of his computer screen in the privacy of his own home, Smoke no doubt felt the Internet was his own private world where he could say anything he wanted to and not face the consequences. But the Internet is not a private place. In fact it’s more public than, well, the public. FYI, Smoke: This is why people create false online identities.

The Boulder City Council should feel justified in letting Smoke go. Based on his comments he obviously does not take his job seriously, and if he is so clueless as to what he has done wrong he probably shouldn’t be working for the city anyway.

Furthermore, Smoke’s indiscretions and the entire MySpace phenomenon are just two more damning pieces of evidence that the “Internet revolution” has accomplished little more than satisfying our latent lust for instant porn, and severely dumbing down our cultural standards. Pretty soon, we’ll all just stay at home in front of our computers, stroking our diminishing intellects and waxing poetic about our pathetic lives.

To prospective government employees: Watch what you say in the e-world, or, like Smoke, you might have to face the fire.