Yesterday the Post Office unveiled its new Maya Angelou stamp. The earlier announcement of the stamp had me sighing; Angelou is proof that affirmative action can be applied to the arts, distorting artistic taste, standards and values in the process. I would rank her talent as a poet near that of the recently deceased Rod Mckuen, but he was not black, a civil rights advocate or female, so his work was judged more or less on its merits. Angelou, in contrast, is called “an icon.” The idea of a stamp honoring the much derided McKuen would have been reflexively mocked; ah, well, fame is fickle.
There is no excuse for the stamp itself, however. Fame may be fickle, but the Postal Service is obligated to be professional, diligent and competent like any other government agen—STOP LAUGHING!!!.
The poet’s “quote” on the Angelou stamp is “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
Maya Angelou didn’t say it or write it, at least, not before another author did. The exact quote appears on Page 15 of “A Cup of Sun,” a book by Joan Walsh Anglund, copyright 1967.
According to Postal Service spokesman Mark Saunders, the Postal Service’s crack research team approved the quote because it has “come up in different media interviews Maya Angelou had done” and using it had been approved by her family members. Oh, and President Obama attributed the quote to Angelou (at the presentation of the 2013 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal), so it had to be right—you know, like the fact that you can keep your health care plan under Obamacare, the stat that women only are paid 77% of what men are, and that one out of five women are raped. The man is an unimpeachable source.
(That was an unintentional play on words, but I’ll leave it as it is.)
Saunders also pointed out that the ace researchers used the internet, and, you can hardly blame them; I mean, how often is that wrong? A 2013 blog post quotes Angelou saying: “I wrote the book because ‘Bird Sings Why The Caged I Know’ [sic] is a song. A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer it sings because it has a song, ” he notes. “Maya Angelou was widely quoted ” as saying this, the Postal Service insists.
A lot of actors have said “To be or not to be,” too. Did you know that was a Mel Brooks quote?
“There are numerous references in books, magazines, blogs and on the internet crediting Angelou with having said it as well,” the Post Office adds, helpfully.
There are a lot references in books, magazines, blogs and on the internet crediting Rick with saying “Play it again, Sam,” in “Casablanca,” too. But he didn’t.
This rank incompetence isn’t just unfair to Anglund, it’s unfair to Angelou. She was a writer; she did say original things. It is an insult for the words used to represent her on a a commemorative stamp to belong to another author. It’s an insult to all of us, really. “Here, what the hell, this is good enough,” is the government attitude that leads to these incidents. Ironically, Angelou was the one who indignantly blew the whistle on the false quote engraved on the Martin Luther King monument. This would not surprise her.
There are people who check the origins and accuracy of quotes for a living. They often will do it for free. One of the best and most accessible is Fred Shapiro, who created the Yale Book of Quotations. Another is my long-time friend Tom Fuller, who I will try to lure into the open to comment of this fiasco.
Being responsible, competent and diligent just isn’t as difficult as the agencies and departments under the Obama Administration manage to make it seem.
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Source: Washington Post 1,2
Ethics Alarms 
I wondered if you would pick up this howler. Let me start by extolling Garson O’Toole’s “The Quote Investigator” at http://quoteinvestigator.com/ as the premier publicly accessible source for verifying quotatations. Garson is truly astonishing.
This whole mess reminds me, of course, of the flap over the “drum major for freedom” misquotation on the Martin Luther King Memorial. After a campaign to correct the error, strongly supported by — surprise! — Maya Angelou, the Memorial Commission finally just chiseled off the whole darned thing and covered the area with striation.
Distressing sign of the times: People readily and unthinkingly accept that a single misplaced backslash will render a url incomprehensible and useless, while a misspelling, misquotation, or grammatical error in actual human text is too often dismissed as trivial.
Mr. Fuller, I am pleased to meet you. Any friend of Jack’s…
“People readily and unthinkingly accept that a single misplaced backslash will render a url incomprehensible and useless, while a misspelling, misquotation, or grammatical error in actual human text is too often dismissed as trivial.”
In part, that is because people tend to think of computers as mistake free (they aren’t) and people as mistake-ridden (they are. “To err is human” can be reversed to “To be human is to err”).
You may be thinking of this, possibly bowdlerised, variant: “to err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer” (who or what split that infinitive, I wonder?).
Personally, I rather like “to err is dysfunctional, to forgive codependent”.
“Being responsible, competent and diligent just isn’t as difficult as the agencies and departments under the Obama Administration manage to make it seem.”
For them, it is.
Difficult, nothing – it’s the one thing that’ll get one of them fired!
My point, exactly.
This is just a government agency living up to its usual high standards. I’m baffled as to why people think that nationalizing and centralizing services and products will lead to improvement. As to her pointing out the mistake; that would be the first thing I would do, to get ahead of it lest I be accused of attributing the quote to myself. Loved the Seinfeld reference; one of the great TV shows of this age.
Silly political correctness fanatics! Everybody knows that a bird sings because its species has evolved abilities to introduce perturbations into the acoustic environment for purposes of facilitating sexual reproduction, natural selection and survival of the species.
You’re welcome. Just call me Knowit Laureate Aztec Diablou.
Zinger! Good one, Lucky.
The politically correct version of your explanation would have the addendum ” “…however, it’s worth noting that this behavior results in 1 out of 5 female birds being the recipient of unwanted sexual congress.” Even more correct: “A bird sings because Obama wills it”.
Somewhere, I am sure, scientists are scrambling to spend their grant money to prove that the female birds get to eat only 77% as much as the male birds get to eat; all that singing probably takes so much more energy than nest-building, egg-laying and -sitting, and chick-feeding…
I don’t understand why the stamp can not be recalled. Or, invalidated, but refundable with turn-in, through a certain date. I may be imagining or wishing that our world is far less complicated than it actually is…
There is a saying in the submarine service:” The boat cannot get underway until the weight of the patrol paperwork meets or exceeds the displacement of the boat”.
Someday, a federal agency building will disappear when the weight of paper undergoes gravitational collapse and forms a black hole. Nor will it be particularly missed!
Let’s see; IRS, ATF, Dept. of edumacation,EPA, to name but a few that wouldn’t be missed.
It’s a matter of finding one that WOULD by the bulk of those who pay taxes and at least lip service to the Constitution. The Postal Service itself is the next thing to obsolete.
Rape is actually a very natural phenomenon.
Good thing we don’t look to nature for our ethics.
Being a male baboon would be great. Or being a muslim, for that matter.
Just a quibble: the Mel Brooks quote actually originated with Jack Benny.
Shakespeare?
Shakespeare was a great fan of Jack Benny.
And Roger Bacon wrote Jack’s jokes.
You remember that Jack Benny was only 32 when he passed away.
Thirty-NINE.
Ah, yes. Thank you. I had forgotten.
“WELL!”
“Oh, Rochester!”
Extremely subtle sarcasm by losannambulo?
It is also a bizarre quote for someone whose importance is based on the idea that her work contains important meaning on the subject of civil rights. The quote suggests that her words just sound pretty, they don’t necessarily have any deep meaning in them.
Yeah what the heck does it mean anyway? The bird sings because it has a song. So what?
I take it as meaning that a person can blabber endlessly about something and it isn’t important if the person is correct regarding what he or she is blabbering about.
“Listen to the warm”
—-Rod Mckuen.
Not to be unkind, but Angelou’s body of work is so hackneyed and precious that this bad Hallmark quote seemed in character. It’s meaningless, essentially. This is what the culture elevates to greatness.
Where have I heard “celebrate mediocrity and formless, abstract art” before?
Not to be unkind, but Angelou’s body of work is so hackneyed and precious
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I think she sucks.
I mean really.
And her voice makes me want to stick a screw driver in my ear.
The only reason she’s on a stamp is because black still trumps gay.
Mckuen was quite popular in the 70s and is still a favorite of mine and I’m not even big on poetry.
We had albums of him reading his poetry and I still remember some of it.
I tried to find some of his books or albums several years ago and it was really slim pickings.
That’s a shame.
Not “precious”. Pretentious.
Yes, you were trying to be unkind and it worked.
My cat sings because he’s hungry, or because I’m teasing him with a laser pointer. I wonder what he’s named me? Probably “Asshole”.
I wonder what he’s named me? Probably “Asshole”.
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Heheh.
I’m sure you’re right.
Well, I do let him catch the red dot from time to time.
I take it to be the artsy and nearly indecipherable version of
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Howard Thurman
which actually is clear and powerful and less open to enigmatic interpretation that is the favored goal of people who want to sound deep when they really aren’t.
It’s better than the stamp with Abraham Lincoln’s quote:
“If you are racist, I will invade you with the North.”
Good News! The Postal Service is coming out with a Rod McKuen Stamp! Its quote reads “April is the cruelest month.”
Has Alan Ginsberg been honored yet?! I keep remembering what Bob Heinlein said on this score. “Poets who read their own verse in public may have other nasty habits”!
That reminds me of a serendipitous typo I once saw: “unimpeccable”.
You mean spirited people, it is not about the quote on the stamp, it was about a black women on a stamp.
I have no idea what you are trying to say, but I suspect that I’d find it obnoxious. Neither the post, the stamp, the quote or the issue involves race in any way.