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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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 8:58 am and is filed under Just kind of babbling, Skippy is going to hell, Skippy was a dumbass. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.