Maya Angelou - Forever a Plagiarist

Maya Angelou (not her real name, of course, she faked that too) is FOREVER a PLAGIARIST.

One of the worst "poets" in America, this ex-nightclub singer is best known for playing the race card through a series of memoirs. When America desperately needed a black woman to admire, sob about, and declare to be the Earth Mother for the nation, she fit the bill.

Oh how she suffered. Oh, the black woman's burden. Oh, this. Oh, that. Oh the drivel she wrote that pleased all the Hallmark card-loving white people, and all the illiterate blacks with no taste.

And oh, she carried herself with dignity, just as Bill Cosby does right now. Teflon Angelou is now on a stamp with one of her famous quotes.

Except, she stole it. Which is OK, because the original author isn't about to fuss over it (as long as everyone knows she really wrote it).

You know what's coming:

If this was a WHITE MAN, that stamp would be GONE. The U.S. Post Office would issue an apology.

Let's give the fabulous Maya credit for coming up with a catchy book title, in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." But let's take the credit away due to the stolen line, and the fact that even the original is drivel. It's pseudo-profound bullshit.

IF I'M BEING HONEST, I wouldn't have paid much attention if I saw that fucking line on a fortune cookie:

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."

So? So fuck you.

"Black bird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see."

There you are. More drivel. You know, of course, that Macca intended this as a civil rights statement. He was being so poetic, turning a black person into a black bird: "...you were only waiting for your moment to be free." Free as a bird. How fucking clever.

Maya Angelou, who had a very easy full-time gig in Academia, getting paid to be some kind of professor somewhere, and getting to write rotten poetry for Obama's inauguration, got a royal send-off when she died. This, the obligatory "we need more blacks on stamps, especially women" honor, will be a FOREVER tribute. Few will know or care that this line was stolen, because few have ever read Angelou's crappy poetry anyway.

"Forever" is the designation on postage stamps now. Due to the utter confusion of raised postage rates every year, and the post office not wanting to waste money on one penny or two penny or three penny stamps to be added to the old stamp, they say, "Fuck it, the stamp will FOREVER allow you to mail a first class letter, no extra postage stamps needed."

And postal workers have to explain this, FOREVER, to idiots who don't understand why the stamp has no price designation.

They might also want to explain what's so profound about "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." We already know that, fer Chrissake, we've heard "there will be an answer, let it be."