The Memorial Day Google doodle that wasn't the right thing
As Noel S. Williams noted here a few weeks ago about Google's doodles on its home page:
Doodle means to scribble absentmindedly. But Google Doodles are intentional iconography that attempt to redraw America's great history. They elevate peripheral figures to iconic status and relegate religious holidays to amorphous greetings.
Google (now under the Alphabet umbrella) leverages its ubiquitous platform to doodle about holidays, anniversaries and famous people.
But yesterday was Memorial Day, previously called Decoration Day – a day to, as the name implies, memorialize, to remember the veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice so we could live free as a nation, so that a few days earlier President Barack Hussein Obama (D) could visit Hiroshima, the Japanese city bombed by the U.S. that finally forced Japan's surrender, and gurgle insulting clichés about war and moral equivalence between Japan, which started the war, and the U.S., which fought back and was gracious in victory.
The Google titans were not much better than the U.S. president. Google, whose new motto since its reorganization as Alphabet is "do the right thing," replacing "don't be evil," has a twisted concept of doing the right thing. Their code of conduct bluntly states:
Employees of Alphabet and its subsidiaries and controlled affiliates ("Alphabet") should do the right thing – follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect.
Yesterday was Memorial Day. Google's idea of the right thing was encapsulated in the doodle for the occasion, which was...
Well, here is the problem: there wasn't a Google doodle. Because they don't do them for Memorial Day. Eventually, after the internet noticed, the home page added a tiny symbol (right) under its Google Search and "I'm feeling lucky" search box, but not in the word itself.
Just a few days earlier, Google had given full-fledged honors in the Google word itself to honor the birthday of a Japanese-American woman interred during World War ll and who subsequently praised Mao and Osama bin laden among others.
Incidentally, below is how the decidedly less used Bing search engine honored the holiday.
As a Google stockholder (full disclosure: I probably own less than 0.000000000000000000001% of their outstanding stock), I have a right to demand more from those in charge of my investment. Basically, they should do the right thing by not being evil. And they could start by acknowledging the country that enabled them to do their thing, which brought them great wealth.