In November 2003, I started YouForgotPoland with just a single picture of George Bush knowingly pointing his finger at us all, a perfect representation of the attitude with which he uttered the now-famous phrase. It just sounded ridiculous, and he needed to be called out for such a inane retort to an otherwise serious accusation by John Kerry.
YouForgotPoland was online less than two hours after the Presidential debate, and word spread online almost instantly. I registered the domain the night of the Thursday debate, and on Friday I put up the first picture before leaving town for the weekend. Sunday morning, 1000 miles away from home, I was getting prank calls on my cell phone from people asking about You Forgot Poland. Unknown to me at the time, the site was registering hundreds of thousands of visitors just days after conception. The images I added to the site were seen in popular culture seemingly every day, in magazines and newspapers as well as on television. From posters, newspaper articles, t-shirts and bumper stickers, the images and phrase became a worldwide joke in only a matter of days.
The original YouForgotPoland site was registering close to a million hits per day at it's peak. I was contacted by a Polish radio station located in Britain for a live interview. I was also contacted by a number of newspaper and magazines in Poland for email interviews. Even better, a handful of additional Polish newspapers decided to forego an actual interview and just make one up and send it to print. What they said about me wasn't very flattering, which just fueled the massive amount of broken-English hate mail I received from their readers. Of course the hate-mail was hilarious, so I wasn't too upset by the whole thing.
The images here are the same images that were displayed on the original YouForgotPoland site for a number of months, along with some comments about each.
Additionally, I still am selling various YouForgotPoland merchandise at my CafePress store.
Enjoy!
