Meredith Willson's Broadway hit, The Music Man, opened in 1957, ran for 1375 performances, was adapted for a 1962 movie, and has been endlessly and successfully revived.
Professor Harold Hill punches peoples' buttons to incite unreasoning fear in order to accomplish his venal commercial purpose. Sound familiar?
Here's my question: the humor of the play absolutely depends on the audience seeing through this transparent con job. The popularity of the play is evidence that a wide public has no trouble doing so.
If this is the case, why do so many fall over and over again for EXACTLY THE SAME CRAP when it is fed to us by real con men such as the ones currently running the country?
After the fold: Ya Got Trouble.....
UPDATE: Now, below, in response to Hunter's very readable diary equating Palin with Harold Hill:
My McCain/Palin Update, plus a few tweaks to the original diary, WITH ELECTROLYTES
"Ya Got Trouble" is a beautiful compendium of fallacious argument. By all rights, a careful parsing should immunize all to the lame shenanigans that occur daily on Fox and in the White House Press Room.
To wit (Lyrics by Lyrics on Demand:
Taking an insignificant and spurious distinction and blowing it up into a cause celebre:
Well, either you're closing your eyes
To a situation you do now wish to acknowledge
Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated
By the presence of a pool table in your community.
Why sure I'm a billiard player,
Certainly mighty proud I say
I'm always mighty proud to say it.
. . .
But just as I say,
It takes judgement, brains, and maturity to score
In a balkline game,
I say that any boob kin take
And shove a ball in a pocket.
How about a slippery slope?
I say, first, medicinal wine from a teaspoon,
Then beer from a bottle.
Xenophobia:
And list'nin to some big out-a-town Jasper
Hearin' him tell about horse-race gamblin'.
A red herring:
Not a wholesome trottin' race, no!
But a race where they set down right on the horse!
Like to see some stuck-up jockey'boy
Sittin' on Dan Patch? Make your blood boil?
Well, I should say
.
Moral rot in our youth, a classic from Socrates to the present day:
And all week long your River City
Youth'll be frittern away,
I say your young men'll be frittern!
Frittern away their noontime, suppertime, choretime too!
Appealing to parents' powerful instinct to protect the babies!
I'm thinkin' of the kids in the knickerbockers,
Shirt-tail young ones, peekin' in the pool
Hall window after school . . .
How about some sex and, oh yeah, racism?
One fine night, they leave the pool hall,
Headin' for the dance at the Arm'ry!
Libertine men and Scarlet women!
And Rag-time, shameless music
That'll grab your son and your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instink!
Mass-staria!
Idolatrous sham patriotism (as opposed to a principled love of law and country):
Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule!
And most of all, spewing all these red rags, decoys, and fallacies at a rate of ten a minute, so that by the time that anyone with integrity has had a chance to refute one, they are nineteen behind.
My best guess is that it is analogous to being let in on the secret of a magic trick. Stage magic is ingenious but fundamentally prosaic. Traditionally, magicians carefully guard the secrets of a trick because once the audience understands how its done, the trick falls flat. In the same way, in The Music Man, the omniscient audience is allowed to look down on the people of River City for falling for such nonsense, but then they leave the theater and somehow fail to detect when someone makes them the real life marks.
All I can come up with, exhausting but true, is to CALL THE PERPETRATORS ON IT EACH AND EVERY TIME. It would be helpful if, put in the position of the good but gullible people of River City, commentators would start their reply by simply making a blanket identification of what is really going on. Something along the lines of: "I spent my time counting the number of flavors and brands of bullshit in what I just heard but I lost count". Then proceed to what really needs saying.
This has to be done consistently, creating an awareness in the public over time of this sort of con job. When it's sufficient to counter line of BS by calling attention to the tactic, our job is more than half done.
McCain/Palin UPDATE:
Could it be that the cavalcade of ineptitude and wrongheaded assholery perpetrated by the Republicans over the last eight years, with painful, present and looming consequences, has worn thin enough that the somnolent and ever gullible public is finally paying attention? Is there such thing as acquired immunity to huckterism? Will River City run Professor Hill out of town trussed to a rail, with tar and feathers liberally applied? McCain and especially our woman Palin seem determined to push the envelope and find out.
Regards.
Baz