Can’t be. It’s too efficient a goof on Obamamania: Part zero, part prayer gesture, with allusions to goatse and an especially dorky Trek episode tossed in. It’s so perfect a parody that it has to be parody. The alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.

But given some of the excesses of other Obamaphiles, contemplate it we must.

Husong tells me that he was pretty depressed by the reaction to his idea and free design offered on the website of Loyalty Inc., his California creative company. That is until he heard of a fan walking on Venice Beach wearing a T-shirt displaying the artwork. In fact, despite the tsunami of criticism, the artwork has been downloaded 7,700 times and his site has been hit 214,000 times since the first Whisper went live. “I would call that a raving success,” he says, adding that he plans to make his Big-O the “peace sign of our generation.”

He also E-mailed me last night to say that the hits on the artwork have inspired him to push even harder to build a movement around the hand signal. Here’s what he wrote: “Our symbol ‘O’ is about much more than Barack Obama. It’s a symbol of unity, hope, solidarity, and an end to the divisiveness that has plagued this country for too long. It is the peace sign of our generation; a sign for those who are tired of the fear, the hatred, the greed, and the ignorance. There will be resistance, democracy requires it, but we believe that the good in the American people will persevere.

Nothing there that you haven’t heard before, but it’s one thing to say it when you’re married to the Second Coming and another when you’re trying to hawk t-shirts. If it’s for real, I hope it catches on; nothing would drive home the alleged fact of the left’s free-thinkin’, skeptical intellectual superiority like seeing them greet each other with the political equivalent of Robin Williams’s “nanu nanu” gesture from Mork & Mindy. Exit question: This has to be a false flag op by a McCain supporter, right? Conservatives unite for Obama Hand Gesture Truth!