something like a phenomenon

My buddy Mal forwards me the usual menagerie of chain emails that accumulate dubious beliefs in the neurons of those less critical like plaque in an artery. He probably pokes sleeping dogs with sticks, too. Most I delete without opening, some I skim. Of those, I whack many back to him with the debunking Snopes link attached, hoping for once he'd have the cojones to forward that back to the person who deluges him.

I've never knowingly met anyone who fabricates long emails about the wacky state of the country - does one lonely person sit down and rattle off essays of ignorant conjecture, half-truths, and winking implication, or is the process more like a Ouija board, with subsequent yahoos adding their two cents to the original kernel, eventually building an open-source tarball of perceived grievances? And do they always have that populist tone of, 'this is just common sense - it's us against the immigrants/New York liberals/activist movie stars/intellectuals/overpaid cowardly teachers/welfare queens?' (The ones that really stick in my craw are the pro-military ones written by people who know nothing about the military, like the email a couple years ago trumpeting the 'U.S helicopter gunship' painted like an eagle's head that was hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, which was really a Soviet-bloc Hind.)

Have you ever seen a chain email that's all fired-up and indignant about the flat tax, abortion clinic bombers, the corrosive effect of religious fundamentalism, or the cowards who signed the PATRIOT Act? Are liberals cooler, too busy actually having sex, or just more distracted with their Wiis? Maybe this is what Karl Rove is doing in his office at 3 a.m. If he's not, he's likely mining them for policy tips.