Sunday, January 31, 2010

They All Look Alike, Don't They?

Jenny Crusie linked to a blog called Failbooking, from which she quoted this bit:

A couple of commenters pointed out that the added lyrics should include "E-I-E-I-O." Another suggested the line "There was a farmer had a god..."

Browsing around Failbooking, I found this more sobering example:

Oh well, countries full of poor black people, how can an American be expected to tell them apart? Even when they're in different hemispheres, or movies. (Notice, though, that "Chris" spotted the mistake right away. Not everyone is ignorant.)

And they need Jesus. I noticed that some of my Facebook friends first reacted to the news of the Haitian earthquake by waving around their Christian piety. Offended by Pat Robertson's remarks, but apparently more for reasons of Christian PR than by their falsity or truthiness. Many calls to prayer. But before long they remembered that Christians think of themselves first, not about foreigners who are already poor anyway. Another viral cut-and-paste job, of course. (Someone else noticed and blogged about it.) Here's the text, posted by one of the former prayer-mongers:
A country with millions of homeless children going to bed without eating, elderly going without needed medications and mentally ill without treatment- yet we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 stations. 99 percent of people wont have the guts to copy & repost this.
Of course I was one of the the few, the proud, the Socialist. I reposted it, and taunted the friend who'd posted it by pointing out that she was calling for universal health care. She indignantly replied that she did not, because she didn't want to help illegal immigrants. We got off into a short debate about whether universal health care would help illegal immigrants, which was fun but beside the point, though it did show how far her Christianity extended.

Still, it's not the Haitians' fault that Americans don't have decent health care or a better general welfare system, nor is it the fault of the bleeding-heart Obama-voting liberals who organized the Haiti earthquake relief-Telethon. It's not even the fault of the mass of Americans, despite Christopher Hitchens (via), who "sometimes think Americans want to live dangerously. They think this wouldn’t be America if you had health coverage." Some of Roy Edroso's liberal commenters agree with Hitchens, bashing Joe Sixpack for opposing health care reform even though it is well established that most Americans favor a government-run health insurance plan, if not a government-run health care system. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. It's hard for me to tell who's nuttier these days, my fellow members of the Hoosier-American Diaspora, or the liberal blogogentsia.