The Weekly Screed (#733)

Internet zombies
by David Benjamin

“Yea, thou [sic] I walk through the valley of the shadow of death/ 95,000 Americans killed by illegal aliens since 9-11.”
                               — Americans for Legal Immigration PAC

MADISON, Wis. — Good old Homer has cut me off. This is a shame, because I like the guy. I met him at a book fair last spring, where Homer was both the master of ceremonies and the most gregarious of my fellow authors.

Then, he went home to Arizona and started sending me dispatches from the Right-Wing Chain-Letter Network (RWCLN), including one that seemed to promote White Supremacy. I gently chided him for cozying up to the skinhead crowd and he responded that his interest was without malice. He was simply quenching his historical hunger to set straight the misbegotten notion that the Civil War (er, the War of Northern Aggression) had something to do with slavery.

Slaves? What slaves?

Homer stayed in touch despite that little tiff. But since I criticized his sourcing on another popular RWCLN urban legend, I think I’ve lost him.

The item in question can be googled with the phrase, “If this doesn’t open your eyes, nothing will.” It laments the loss of California — referred to as a sort of 160,000-square-mile “insane asylum” — to a criminal enterprise that involves state bureaucrats and bleeding hearts, who are conspiring with millions of barbaric banditos (without papers) from south of the border down Mexico way.

By my count, this RWCLN warning about the Brown Peril appears on at least 28 websites. Its essence is a list of ten (why do these things always come in tens?) terrifying incontrovertible statistical facts — none of which is actually a fact, or even an educated guess. Two examples:

The RWCLN reports that 40 percent of all workers in Los Angeles County are working for cash while not paying taxes. “This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card.”

Although I hunted on all 28 sites, there’s no visible source for this extraordinary factoid. However, in a 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times, writer Hector Tobar traced this brazen fallacy to a study done by the Economic Roundtable four years before “which estimated that 15 percent of the [L.A.] county workforce was outside the regulated economy in 2004. Illegal immigrants getting paid in cash, it said, probably made up about 9 percent of the workforce.”

Another breathtaking stat in the RWCLN dispatch asserts that “Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.”

Holy tool-rack, Batman! Could this be true?

No. There’s no source to indicate that this gobsmacker is even vaguely accurate. Tobar traced this claim to a Times story on residential zoning  in 1987 — that’s 28 years ago! — about “unauthorized garage conversions.” The Times estimated that about 200,000 people were living in converted garages, but offered no insight on these garage-dwellers’ ethnicity. Tobar noted that “living in an ‘illegal garage’ doesn’t make you ‘an illegal.’ You might just be a starving artist, or a guy who recently lost his job.” (Or a future high-tech millionaire?)

In every case, the RWCLN’s distorted data are at least a decade old. Most trace back to the previous century.

The curious feature of this superannuated Ten Worst list is that all of its nativist alarums have a single origin. On every post, this comic-villain myth comes with a devastating clincher that reads, “All 10 of the above are from the Los Angeles Times,” allegedly published in 2002. In other words, this stuff must be gospel because it comes straight from one of the pillars of the Establishment media.

Try to overlook the irony of the press-despising dittohead crowd using a “lamestream” bogeyman to validate its own neurosis. Instead, let’s take a look at the record, where three times — in February and November 2007, and again, with Tobar’s story on 7 September 2009 — the Los Angeles Times denied ever fomenting these spurious stats and debunked them one by one.

The RWCLN’s xenophobes — including, bless his heart, my friend Homer — pledged temporary allegiance to the otherwise satanic Times to demonstrate the legitimacy of their racist fables. But the Times, repeatedly, refused to pledge back. The fact-check website, Snopes.com, added its own rebuttal last year.

But never mind. The oldest posting I could find for Homer’s “open your eyes” list popped up on the Internet in July 2008. Every other posting — two dozen in all — appeared after the Times’ third effort to clear the record. The three most recent reincarnations of the phony list came out this week — at the Conservative News Forum, Tea Party Nation, and some gun-nut outfit called The FAL Files.

What we have here is another episode of “The Internet Walking Dead.” Lies, slanders and fantasies planted on the Worldwide Web live on, even after they’ve been apparently snuffed by fact-checkers and their misquoted sources. The Internet undead are immortal, because they have no head to blow off with a shotgun. A fresh lie, as it ages, becomes an Internet zombie. This monster slowly shuffles its spastic way into the deep, ignored back pages of Google until, one day, one of its words or phrases reappears in an entirely unrelated, completely innocent post about some other subject. (The RWCLN’s phony list is paired, for example, with Queen’s 1975 hit recording of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”) Happenstance suddenly sweeps the beast back to Page One, googling it full of new life and giving comfort to the whackos, bigots and hysterics who first sank their fangs into its toxic bloodstream.

We’ll always have Internet zombies because we’ll always have guys like Homer, who are old, prosperous, comfortable, fortressed in white enclaves and yet — somehow — pathologically insecure, convinced that hordes of the impure, armed by the Pentagon, will roar into their cul de sacs in convoys of gun-mounted Humvees.

Friends like Homer never explain to me this irrational terror among people who can’t actually cite any personal harm from the Others whom they deplore. I can only suspect that the main wellspring of this gated-community senior-citizen prejudice is boredom.

Life is more of a thrill if you spice it with a frisson of fear, especially if what you’re afraid of is a many-headed, multicolored fairytale dragon who lives just on the other side of a wall atop which — every day — your undocumented handyman mortars another row of imaginary bricks.