By Rawlins Gilliland
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-858548.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Years ago, I wrote about the disturbing proliferation of raw political e-mails circulating nationally. I voiced alarm and amazement watching the grand gossipy content being forwarded on to others essentially unquestioned. This despite being scripted anonymously or tagged with unrecognizable bylines.
Why are computer partisans so loathe to recognize how often these sometimes toxic wastes of time are shameless pot shots from crack pots, aimed both Left and Right? And how, unlike yesterday's journalistic accountability passing editorial muster, today's blogosphere allows anyone to write anything purporting false alarm and legions of lemming readers will accept each unsubstantiated statement as fact? To prove this point, let's examine a couple of experiments conducted where, so to speak, I wrapped some virtual garbage in online news unfit to print.
Currently making the World Wide Web rounds is a series of essays pronouncing "The Brilliance of Thomas Jefferson" in which our remarkable founding father is "Paul Revered" as a militant libertarian. Aside from Jefferson having fathered countless children with his slaves, what's not to like?
For starters, who would know if the words sent to "Concerned Americans" were in fact those of Thomas Jefferson? Would any of us take time to check; our online impulse being to swallow whole any patriotic pastry. I hyperventilated opening an e-mail containing the following Jeffersonian "quote": "To deny the humanity of sexual nuance is to thrash the cowardly who seek satisfaction in the brothels of government." I gasp not because that sounds absurd, but because the author of that claptrap was not our third president. I wrote it as a satirical response to an unsigned rabble-rousing email with the subject line: "Share Jefferson's Wisdom with People Who Love America."
Which apparently no few persons have done since my bogus boomerang verse has now returned home to me twice, attributed intact to Thomas Jefferson. Only in Internet America could one become a legendary President's posthumous ghostwriter!
More recently, I've hurled into cyberspace an addendum to yet another bloated essay whose author signed it "A God-fearing Citizen Tyrant." This time I attributed my attached fictitious rogue "quote" to Thomas Jefferson's vice president, Aaron Burr. It goes: "The ravages of purloined government seek force to bantering rams of heretical inferiors whose usurped authority laments the name of God and good."
Having surreptitiously posted that nonsense earlier on a national blog's comments section (under the weighty nom de plume Morality Mongoose'), I watched the frenzy as my counterfeit quote was rowdily debated despite neither I nor Aaron Burr having a clue what it means. Which helps explain the mounting demise of traditional media's fine print in favor of computer populism. Buyer beware.
In a galaxy no longer far away, the unfiltered anger of our age has enlisted platoons of online warriors brandishing concealed weapons in sedentary comfort. Their invisible battleground turf? A mutating minefield where the arsenal of improvised explosive devices includes complacent ignorance and calculated misinformation masquerading as pious outrage.
Rawlins Gilliland is a writer from Dallas.
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