Scott's Random Thought For The Day (The Mysteries of eBay)



A few days ago I got trade paperback I won on eBay, Adam Warren's Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious. It's a semi-parody comic book version of the Japanese anime about two scantily dressed women who fight crime in the future. Got it for a good price too.

Here's the weird part. In the package there was a bunch of photocopied pages, all extreme right-wing literature. A subscription card to the New American (a magazine that once said South Africa was "turning its back on a proud heritage" by abolishing apartheid) was also inserted into the book itself.

My question is, is this a common practice? Are people now trying to use eBay to spread their political messages? It's really kind of odd that anyone would think a person who wanted a Dirty Pair comic would be interested in literature encouraging a halt to all immigration into this country.

But I have some more questions as well. One of the articles included is about Gorbachev, published in 2003. Are right-wing extremists still obsessed with the guy? Hasn't he been out of power for more than a decade?

There's also a page with three quotes, all questionable. one is from from former New York Times editor John Swinton saying that journalists are forced to lie, but he was a pro-labor Marxist, so you'd think he would be given little credence by conservatives. Then there's a quote from Thomas Jefferson about how liberty comes from God which may well be accurate as far as it goes, but probably doesn't begin to represent what Jefferson felt about religious matters. The third is, I suspect, bogus. It claims to be from Benjamin Franklin and it says, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" I could almost believe the first sentence may appear somewhere in Franklin's writings, but the second is a little too on-the-nose for me swallow. Plus, it essentially advocates fascism, something I doubt the founder of a democratic republic would be comfortable doing. I attempted a little web-mojo to find a good source for the quote, but it's so widespread it was tough to nail down. The only additional attribution I could find was "1759," which is not terribly helpful. I found a couple places that attributed the first line to "Anonymous," so I think it's pretty safe to assume that the whole thing is an old anonymous quote expanded and attributed to an authority who was probably long dead before it was first written down.

Posted: Sun - April 4, 2004 at      

©