one of the paradoxes of racism

so, i received an informative text message today from my pal TM. it was loaded with stereotypes about african-americans and played off a spoof of (what else?) the new prez. i'm almost certain another friend of mine has gotten it, because it seemed familiar:

i just received my stimulus package from obama. it was a 3 piece chicken basket, kool-aid, and a ounce of weed. did u get urs?

sigh. so you can obviously see the ignorance threaded through this text. however, it's not just the racial ignorance here, people. we've got factual and grammatical errors as well! let's take a deeper look.

first, it's yet to be reported that barack obama has issued any individual 'stimulus packages'. ignoramus must be referring to the bush stimulus checks, which were issued last year. obama signed a broad national stimulus bill, which may or may not give ignoramus a leg up in this economy.

and if ignoramus, you know, read every once in a while, he/she would know that obama's liquid crack isn't kool-aid. it is indeed honest tea, which apparently is brewed right here in maryland. and seriously, honest tea is the TRUTH (except that it costs like $2. it's an occasional treat). the new york times reports that obama has his fridge stocked with honest tea (and possibly its spinoff beverage, honest ade, also the truth. pun intended).

okay, now on to grammar. the three items referred to in this imaginative individual stimulus package are in a list. a list in a sentence usually doesn't have a comma before the last item in said list. i didn't make that up. strunk and white told me so.

the term 'and a ounce of weed' is also incorrect. ignoramus fails to realize that in the english language we generally use the article 'an' before a vowel sound. 'ounce' isn't an exception to that general rule.

and if '3 piece' is used to describe the 'chicken basket', we should hyphenate that term. it appears to be a compound adjective. speaking of adjectives, 'chicken basket' sounds like a basket made of chicken, not a basket containing chicken. it should probably read 'basket of chicken' or something of the sort.

and 'did u get urs'? that must be some new-fangled texting speak.

what did we learn today? we learned that ignorance generally fails to be smart/clever because one of its main components is stupidity. or at least that's what i learned...