I loved it. Not just the story, but it being here, with this title, and the ensuing confusion. I'm no expert, and trying to explain short fiction and poetry i

I loved it. Not just the story, but it being here, with this title, and the ensuing confusion. I'm no expert, and trying to explain short fiction and poetry is probably a mug's game (one of the themes of this piece!) but here's my two cents worth: this story isn't about Snowden, the man; it's about Snowden, the cause, and the idea that causes can be political and wrenching and divisive in a way that is divorced from what they're ostensibly about. The protagonist spends the entire story wrestling with whether or not to sign the petition (how would it affect him professionally? what would his friends think of him signing it? is it okay to be associated with a popular cause if it means supporting someone he doesn't like?) without even a cursory thought about whether Snowden ought to be pardoned or not. That theme - people being more concerned with how their stance on a political issue reflects on them and how it makes them feel than with the content of the issue - seems very relevant right now, and as relevant here at HN as anywhere else. This thought gnaws at me every time there's a political controversy being discussed: that so many of the comments seem so obviously to be about the writer and how they see imagine themselves and how they want to be seen. Virtually every accusation (that someone or something is racist, or sexist, or blinded by political correctness, or what have you) comes with the unspoken, "...unlike me." A good example of this was the brouhaha over Curtis Yarvin being disinvited from Strange Loop a few years ago. If you missed that one, an obscure developer of an obscure open source project got blackballed from an obscure conference over his incredibly obscure political writings because someone you've never heard of said they were racist on twitter. And for a day or two, a lot of HN had an opinion on it! Not on what he wrote, mind you, which is dense and contradictory and not very interesting. Just the fact that it happened was, to many people, yet another piece of irrefutable proof that Silicon Valley is being ruined by either the right-wingers or the left-wingers. So, that's what I got out of this. The protagonist is faced with a very simple decision (sign a petition or don't), but he is so wrapped up in his own insecurities that, by a weird sort of alchemy, that boolean choice becomes a referendum on how he feels about aging and poetry and Bob Dylan and so forth. The story ends with his decision, but you can easily imagine him justifying that decision in an email or a forum with some made-up guff about Snowden and privacy that has nothing to do with his real reason for not signing. And in this light, how amusing that it should cause a few HN commenters to launch back in to the "Edward Snowden is a hero / Edward Snowden is a traitor" wars without actually clicking the link! It's a cliche that life imitates art, but that doesn't just happen by accident - life imitates art IFF the art has successfully managed to capture a real and relevant piece of life. I think this story did that, which is why I liked it.