Don’t let spooky e-mails scare you

By Darrell Laurant

Published: October 26, 2008

I learned an important lesson early in my newspaper career when I drove out to cover a shooting at a trailer park.

As I pulled into the lot, a man scurried over to me and blurted out: “Are you with the press? Get your notebook out, and I’ll give you the real scoop.”

A resident of the trailer park had been shot by his girlfriend, he told me, and was badly injured.

“It doesn’t look like he’s gonna make it,” the man said solemnly.

Back at the office, I called the hospital to check on the victim’s condition.

“Oh, he was treated and released,” the hospital clerk said.

And the shooter turned out to be not the victim’s girlfriend, but a rival for the girlfriend’s affections.

The lesson? No matter how sure of themselves the messengers may seem, that doesn’t mean what they’re telling you is correct.

I was reminded of that the other day when a couple of anti-Barack Obama e-mails showed up in my in-box.

Normally, I just hit “delete” when I see things like this, but I happened to know the people who had forwarded the e-mails to me, and so I felt compelled to respond. One declared that Obama refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and wanted to change our national anthem from “The Star Spangled Banner” to “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” The other warned that the Book of Revelation said the Antichrist would be “of Muslim descent.”

A good source to check out at these times is Snopes.com, which exists to ferret out urban myths and e-mail rumors to determine if there’s any truth to them — and, if not, where they may have originated.

In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance, it stemmed from an out-of-context photo in which Obama seemed to have his back to people who were conducting the Pledge. Yet it wasn’t because he was trying to make a statement, but because he was doing an interview on the periphery of the crowd and the Pledge was happening at a distance and behind him. And the part about his advocating “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” came from a satirical newspaper column poking fun at the candidate — a funny line, but only a joke.

As for the warning in Revelation, nowhere does that Biblical book say anything about “someone of Muslim descent.” If it had, it would have demonstrated amazing clairvoyance — Revelation is said to have been written in the first century; Mohammed wasn’t born until 500 years later.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Election Day comes close on the heels of Halloween. For months in advance, people with a political agenda have always tried to scare us into voting “their” way.

I can recall rumors that if John F. Kennedy were elected, he would owe his allegiance to the Pope rather than the Constitution. And you may have seen Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 anti-Barry Goldwater ad in which a little girl picking flowers appeared to be obliterated by a nuclear explosion.

Given Obama’s race and his name, however, there seems to be more of that kind of thing this year. What irks me is that this happens to be an intriguing presidential election with some clear differences between the two candidates. There are plenty of reasons to vote for or against either one of them, depending on your philosophy. We don’t need all this extraneous urban mythology.

The best defense against Internet absurdity is simply common sense. If Obama — by all appearances a very smart man — really was trying to take over the U.S. for nefarious purposes, wouldn’t he go to great pains to appear patriotic and thus fool us?

There are no filters on the Internet. Anyone can say anything they like, without the necessity of proof. Remember that the next time another bogeyman appears on your screen.