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This Means I’m Either Awesome, Or An Asshole*

February 10th, 2010 by skippy

So last week I received an informative email**. The kind of informative email that has been forwarded somewhere around a billion times, contains really big font, and contains almost nothing but lies.

You all know it. Everybody has one or two relatives, or workmates who send you this sort of thing. Well thanks to my website, my address appears in a great many folk’s email applications. And so I get dump-loads of helpful emails on a simply staggering variety of subjects.

Well this email hit me around the same time that my children had received their first immunization shots. So I was frazzled, and stressed from dealing with unhappy babies. I glanced at the rather large list of recipients, and caught the name of my supervisor from my last place of employment. This was sent to me by a former coworker.

“Well,” I thought “most of the people on this email thread know me well enough to know how I am likely to react to something like this. And anyhow it’s not like I’m ever going back to that company. So who cares if that bridge gets a little singed?”

And so I hit “reply all” and wrote a response.

It should be noted that the state of mind that I was in, I got confused. I did not, in fact see my old boss’s name. I saw the name of a famous web-cartoonist who happens to have the same last name as the guy I used to work for. When I went back and double-checked later, after a nap, I realized that I had, in fact, sent my response of to a bunch of total strangers, a few businesses, and the author of PVP.

Oops.

Well here is the letter I received, and my response to it, for your amusement. (Note I have preserved the original format as much as possible)

__________________________

Fw:Fwd:send to all you can

Some Guy [someguy@yahoo.com]

To: OMG, every email address on the planet! (note: I am paraphrasing here)

Yeah I think we’re screwed.  Sending this to my entire contacts list.

—-Forwarded Message—-

From: Some Lady [somelady@yahoo.com]
To: Some Guy ,<someguy@yahoo.com>
Sent: Mon, February 1, 2010
Subject: Fw:Fwd: send to all you can
—-Forwarded Message—-

From: Some Other Guy [somelady@yahoo.com]
Sent: Mon, February 1, 2010
Subject: Fwd: send to all you can

Everyone of voting age could (should?) read these two books. Don’t buy them, get them from the library.

From Dreams of My Father: ‘I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.’

From Dreams of My Father : ‘I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.’

From Dreams of My Father: There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.’

From Dreams of My Father: ‘It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.’

From Dreams of My Father: ‘I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself: the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.’


And FINALLY,

From Audacity of Hope: ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction..’

If you have never forwarded an e-mail, now is the time to do so!!!

And my response:

Well this is certainly important.

After all, the font was so artfully and professionally laid out in really big and bright font.  And there is certainly no context in which those quotes could mean anything other than the total subjugation of all white people everywhere.

After all  “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction…” couldn’t mean anything other than that our President intends to turn on all Christians when the inevitable religious wars start.  Certainly he couldn’t be suggesting that he would support Americans who are Muslim if , through a tragic combination of fear and ignorance, their countrymen turned against them as a reaction to the current political climate.  After all, it’s not like people firebombed mosques after 9/11 or anything.

And certainly when Obama said “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.” He was most assuredly not frankly describing what it was like to be a mixed race child growing up in a culture with some racial issues.  After all, we definitely need every person with dark skin color ingratiating themselves to the whites at every opportunity.

As for the phrase “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.”, it’s not like that phrase doesn’t actually appear in either of the books named.  Anywhere at all.  I mean how likely is it that an anonymous internet author would take a quote from an article about Barack Obama, and mistakenly attribute it as from his own book?

It’s not as if these books came out a long time ago, and certainly there was no way that thousands of members of the press had read them.  And even if they had, it’s not like those commie liberal fascists in the news media would dare to say anything negative about the current president.  Especially not those pinko hippies at FOX news, with their 1/3 of the TV news market share.  Which is why it took an email created by an anonymous source to get this news out.

And the message even tells us to read the books in question.  It’s not like they could be counting on people just being too lazy and ignorant to follow up on that.

And as we all know, it’s not like you can go to websites such as Snopes.com to fact check emails you get before passing them on.  I know that I won’t.

So I too will forward this to every person whose email address I happen to have, because I really want to look like an ignorant garbage bleacher, with no concept of how the internet works.

________

*Probably the later

** To avoid embarrassing the sender, we will just call him “David Watts”.  Or “Jeff Olaey” .  In either case I suspect he will not be sending me any email again.

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12 Responses to “This Means I’m Either Awesome, Or An Asshole*”

  1. Arcanum Says:

    Wait….why “or”?

    Reply

  2. Tim Covington Says:

    Can’t you be both?

    Reply

  3. Wyvrex Says:

    sounds like skippy needs the sarc mark!

    http://02d9656.netsoljsp.com/SarcMark/modules/user/commonfiles/loadhome.do

    Reply

  4. Anna Says:

    Rock on Skippy!

    captch: suited that – your response was perfectly suited to that email!

    Reply

  5. Shadowydreamer Says:

    Dear Sir, Ma’am.

    Thank you for contacting me with the important news of Timmy being in the well, that Dell is giving away a free laptop by mechanics moronic, that if I don’t tell fifteen of my friends I love them their brains will be eaten by gypsy moths and that Oprah is secretly a nazi sympathizer.

    I know you know that those fools over at Snopes never let the truth to get out. Why all their long-winded, supposedly logical, articles about emails like this one are just to fool the ignorant masses. Thank goodness we have people like you to set us straight and keep the truth going, opportunities for STUFF available and most importantly, that conspiracy nuts are kept frothing.

    I’m so very glad I gave you my email address and that you, wanting to make sure everyone of like mind knew each other’s email address, have now passed it on to thirty other people instead of employing BCC.

    Congratulations sir! I’m sure you’ll be helping locate Timmy via Google Earth on your very new laptop soon!

    Yours in gratitude.

    Reply

  6. Captian Scurvy Says:

    Wow, you are really quite loquacious when you are tired. I think the world needs more responses like the one you wrote. You should be a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. A round of applause for you!

    Captcha: biases yesterday. When Skippy replied to those.

    Reply

  7. Jinn Master Says:

    I now hope someone sends me that email, so I can recycle your response.

    If you don’t mind, of course :P

    Captcha- as lemony

    Eh?

    Reply

  8. Sarsippius Says:

    Skippy, I would just like to say that you rock. As a member of the Army, I’m a little freaked out by the level of racism and the blind acceptance of everything Republican. Thanks for showing me that I’m not the only one.

    Reply

  9. AFP Says:

    Indeed, that email was awesome. I get these emails from time to time (I wish more often, actually), and it’s fun to rip them apart. My recent favorite is the one about Nanci Pelosi and the Boeing 757 she had demanded (turns out she did not demand anything of the sort, and the 757 in question had been in the Air Force inventory since the 90’s).

    I’ve also had people claim that Snopes was a liberal media mouthpiece propaganda site, including the younger sister of a girl I dated in college. To think, her sister used to seem pretty smart, but now I wonder. My favorite “Snopes is a liberal propaganda tool!” email was the one that claimed that Snopes had been debunked by Wikipedia, a neutral fact-finding organization.

    Yes, Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia that *anyone* can edit. Hell, *I* can edit Wikipedia.

    Dunno if I can find it anymore, but David Willis, the guy who draws Shortpacked and used to do It’s Walky! posted a reply to an email forward about how the silent majority should all wear red shirts on Friday to show their solidarity. His reply was the email with his smartass commentary interspersed. He also did a parody of that weird painting with Jesus in Washington DC with the mouseover captions.

    captcha: abuser first. When regular “First!” isn’t good enough.

    Reply

  10. StoneWolf Says:

    I think the internet has made people stupid. In the past, places of learning existed where new facts where cheked, analyzied by others, and finally accepted and written down, then stored in libaries and universities. They weren’t always correct, but there was still a process of checking the information for accuracy. And when one went looking for information at a library or university, one could be reasonably assured the information was correct.

    Now, however, any gibbering idiot can say anything and thousands of people will read it, via email, blogs, websites, etc. And worse, the public will believe it. We have a systemic fault in our society, the fault of ignorance. People believe only those facts that support their pre-made opinion, rather than seeking the truth in all things. In in their failing, they become mere tools. They speak on their rights and forget reponsibilites. They speak of freedom without understanding what it means. Knowlege and wisdom are the first steps to freedom. Yet we drown in a mire of ignorance and missinformation.

    I believe there is some quote about how the Devil can cite scripture for his own purposes. Well anyone can cite anything for their own purposes, and it is a powerful skill to lie with the truth.

    And yes Skippy, you are an asshole, and we love you for it. ;P

    Reply

    AFP reply on February 12th, 2010 7:46 am:

    Looks like there are quite a few quotes about it, including at least one bit of poetic verse.

    The best fit is from Shakespeare:

    The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.
    [1596 Shakespeare Merchant of Venice i. iii. 93]

    Reply

  11. Speed Says:

    I kinda wished you could have worked in “zombie clowns,” but otherwise pretty sums up my disgust at these day late-dollar short “important messages.” In the past I was too lazy and just deleted them, but from now on may just have some fun at the expense of others. Bwa-hah-ha-haaa.

    Reply

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