Extroverts.  The life of the party.  The folks with the fascinating stories.  The people who get other people together to make things happen.  The host is sorry to see them go.

Introverts.  The nearly-invisible.  The ones who think that “talk” is a four-letter word.  The mountains who never come to Mohammed.  Well-acquainted with the snack table.

Juxtaposers.  The one-to-one ones.  Once they find you, they are always at your side, and you are beside yourself trying to escape.

Observers.  Looking on, taking in.  Occasionally joining a conversation to share one of their  studiously rehearsed opinions.  Living life as a limited engagement.

I’ve been each of the above, at various times.

I just got another one of those spams: an official of a poor African nation offers millions of dollars to some random person, out of the blue, who happens to be you:

Office of Presidency
Payment Office of Paymaster General
Accra Ghana.

Attn: Beneficiary, Approval To Your Fund Release.

It was resolved after the Board meetings 20th of January 2011 by the foreign Remittance office to release your outstanding payment of $2.5m USD waiting for transfer as we began this First Quarter fiscal payment. You are to reconfirm to us all this information below for your payment.

We sincerely apologies for our late contact with you, We are committed to serve you better.

At first, there is something almost charming about the ham-handedness of the approach, the blatant disregard for spelling and grammar and, to top it off, the apology for not having contacted me sooner about my $2.5 million windfall!

But then I ask myself: would this same spam seem so “charming” if it had been written by someone in Russia, Estonia, China or New Jersey impersonating the so-called Paymaster General of Ghana?  No, it wouldn’t.  The chuckles arise from imagining there is a genuinely unsophisticated person trying to make money this way.  The reality is, the messages come from organized crime, and the earnest attitude and misspellings are carefully calculated to elicit responses from vulnerable people.  If this didn’t work, they wouldn’t do it.

I realize this topic is old news.  What inspired me to post this is that, after all these years, the scam lives on.  This is what amazes me.  If anything, I get more “Money from Africa” spam now than ever.  Someone must be biting on it.  But who?

Tunisia, Egypt, now Libya.  Some see these events as an opening for Islamic extremists.  I see it as the end of the Bin Laden Decade.

Goodbye Bin Laden.  You no longer speak to the oppressed.  North African peoples took action on their own, and they found freedom without suicide bombings.

The Tunisians and Egyptians will live to see freedom.  Your acolytes, Osama, will not.

Farsighted people (if there are any) in the Obama administration might recognize this as an opportunity, not to increase, but to curtail our presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The people of those states will (eventually) do what our State Department and our Defense Department cannot do for them.  If we are wise, we will get out of their way.

Osama Bin Laden will go into the history books as the modern world’s most notorious, most destructive and, in the end, most ineffective terrorist.  The accomplishments of the peoples of North Africa have shown how pathetic he is.