Posted on February 4th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Stuff, Sports, Untruths.
My hometown team is in the Super Bowl, for the first time in their thirty years of existence. I am reasonably excited about this, and may post about it.
But. Please, please do not send me that nonsense about Super Bowl Sunday being the number one wife-beating day of the year. It's not true, and someone sends it to me every damned year.
I think the urban myths that bug me the most are the ones that people want to be true. These are necessarily made up by someone mendacious, but the credulous lazy believers are at least as responsible for the spread of these lies. The worst ones recently have been the series of racist emails that have circulated in the wake of Katrina (you can find several of them here), each of which was of course started deliberately by some overtly racist scumbag, but were passed along, I would guess, mostly by people who would deny being racists but nonetheless found the lies easy to believe (probably because the stories generally match up well with the socially conservative political and cultural propaganda that's been spread by the right-wing media machine over the last couple decades -- propaganda that always avoids overt racism while playing shamelessly upon covert racism -- and because of the ease with which people can be made to believe that people worse off than them are basically responsible for it, even when they are victims of a natural disaster*).
That wasn't a tangent I was expecting to go off on. Welcome to my ADD rant generator.
* And, of course, victims of a corrupt, incompetent, indifferent, cynical, racist federal government and presidential administration.
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