By R. Cort Kirkwood
June 18, 2002

(AgapePress) - If we’ve learned anything from advent of the Internet and e-mail, it's that the average American, and perhaps the average human being, is as gullible now as he was nearly a century ago.

You can find the evidence on e-mails with “Very Important” or “urgent” in the message line, or one that closes, “send this to everyone in your address book.”

Chances are, it’s a hoax and should be sent to the trash can.

The cyberspace hoaxes are nothing new, and neither is their challenge to the insignificant cerebral capacity of the people who swallow them whole.

‘602P’
On Monday, this writer received yet another cyber-rendition of that famous conspiracy, hatched by the Post Office, to impose a 5-cent fee on every e-mail. This fee is contained in federal legislation “602P,” and the e-mail says Republican “Congressman Tony Schnell” wants “$20-$40 surcharge on all Internet service.” It quotes “a March 6th, 1999 editorial” in The Washingtonian that said an e-mail tax was a “useful concept whose time had come.”

This latest reprise of this hoax, exposed long ago, rings true because the first line grumbles about the coming price hike for stamps from 34 to 37 cents.

But no such bill exists, as a 10-second search on the Internet reveals. Bills in Congress are not designated with the letter “P,” but with “H.R.” and “S” for House and Senate, and the bill number does not appear before the letters.

“Congressman Tony Schnell” and the editorial are fictive as well, but these happy little truths haven’t stopped the cyberidiots. They just keep sending them along.

Hilariously, on May 17, 2000, Congress passed a law banning Internet taxes, and in October that year, Sen. Hillary Clinton and her opponent, Republican Rick Lazio, lustily debated the non-existent fee during their race for Senate.

Other Internet hoaxes include those about the myriad health risks of aspartame, the artificial sweetener and the macabre photo of the doomed tourist standing atop the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

The Bathtub Hoax
But gulping down tall tales the size of Paul Bunyan’s ox is not the exclusive preserve of the Internet or even television generation. Merry pranksters have hatched hoaxes since time began, some being so convincing they now appear in the history books as fact.

One of them, “A Neglected Anniversary,” appeared in the New York Evening Mail on Dec. 28, 1917 under the byline of H.L. Mencken.

Mencken’s risible fabrication supposedly laid down the inauspicious nativity of the bathtub, famously claiming that President Millard Fillmore, our 13th federal nawab, installed the first such device in the White House.

“My motive,” the cynical scrivener said, “was simply to have some harmless fun in war days. It never occurred to me that it would be taken seriously.” It was.

“Soon I began to encounter my preposterous ‘facts’ in the writings of other men,” Mencken wrote. Thirty years later, President Harry Truman retold the story to visitors in the White House, and today you can find the historical “fact” of Fillmore's ablutionary innovation all over the Internet, including on a “Historical Facts and Fiction” Web page.

The Washington Post, victim of the famous heroin-addict hoax in its own newsroom, repeated it just last year.

The Lesson
Such is the ingenuous gullibility of the average American, even the crusty, intellectualoids at big newspapers.

Lesson? The more things change, the more they stay the same; a sucker is born every minute.

Gullibility is the ageless constant of the human condition.