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I'd been meaning to post a fairly convincing e-mail and Facebook-forward that I got this weekend, but M. Tomasky beat me to it. Ah well. It's still an excellent distillation of the arbitrary narratives that have taken hold in this election.
This took some figuring outIf you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers -- a quintessential American story.If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track -- you're a maverick.Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.Attend five different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.If you spend three years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a constitutional lawprofessor, spend eight years as a state senator representing a district with more than 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.If your total resume is: local weather girl, four years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising two beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner-city community,then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's.If your husband is nicknamed "First Dude," with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.OK, much clearer now.As a general point, I think blog posts are an incredibly ineffective way of changing people's minds. But as far as I can tell, e-mail forwards are just the opposite. They come from acquaintances rather than media professionals, are written to convince actual people rather than win the ratings game, and thus bypass our natural filters in ways that polemics and advertisements don't. Which is sort of a long way of saying that if you wanted to grab this list and forward it to some friends, an angel will get its wings. Also, you might want to add something about how if you don't forward this to five people, an august investment bank will collapse beneath the subprime mortgage crisis, and also your dog will die. People love that sort of thing.
