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Shaman You From the next-you’re-gonna-tell-me-Santa-Claus-is-really-just-an-alcoholic-trying-to-make-a- few-bucks-over-the-holidays department comes the news that the Federal Trade Commission has sued Miss Cleo, the cable TV psychic, for fraud. The government claims Miss Cleo—born Youree Del Harris stateside in 1962—is not really a renown psychic from Jamaica. Jamaica, Queens is more like it. This begs the all-important question: Is she being sued because she’s a fake or because she’s a fake fake? Can you sue a hooker for not really being in love? Would the FTC be satisfied to learn Miss Cleo’s been scamming gullible, unemployed, infomercial-watching insomniacs in the Caribbean too? The FTC claims it is acting on over 2,000 complaints. Make that 2,001. I just filed a complaint that while our shores are being flooded with inferior steel, mad cow disease, anthrax, and Nikes made by eleven year old Malaysian kids raking in a buck-fifty a day, the US government is going after circus sideshow acts who have graduated to the post-4 AM slot on the Game Show Channel. And they wonder why we’re losing the war on terrorism. These days, you might as well ask Miss Cleo when to avoid visiting lower Manhattan. Instead, the government ought to be investigating other, more important questions. Like why so many psychics weigh over 350 lbs. Can’t these people envision the massive myocardial infarctions in their own immediate futures? While we’re at it, do they order in Dominos Pizza with everything via phone or telepathically? And what makes them so well equipped to dole out advice on the love life of a stranger when the only way they’ve ever held down a man was to sit on him? Other ironies abound. Why are so many people in this country obsessed with the next life when they’re too lazy to get up off the futon to urinate in this one? You really want to know what death is like? Try running up a $5,000 Discover Card bill in 1-900 calls. Forget Miss Cleo, John Edwards, and the entire Psychic Quacks Network. The only thing these people have ever crossed over is the 39.6 percent federal tax bracket. If we really could talk to the dead, they’d tell us to stop wasting our money. Enlightenment philosophers with names like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume demonstrated a long time ago, without the aid of a satellite dish, that human beings can convince themselves of almost anything they want to. TV psychics of the new millenium--armed with only a GED and a step-father who ran a three-card monte game--know instinctively that they can never run out of desperate bereaved food service retirees, Darvon addicts, and soccer moms more than willing to grasp at straws in the form of a shameless TV shaman. Their formula is simple—call out enough letters in the alphabet, and eventually you’re going to be rapping with Aunt Gizzie about the 1983 Thanksgiving spat over who was supposed to make the stuffing. So here, then, is my own psychic prediction on the Federal Trade Commission’s action against Miss Cleo: After a slap on the wrist and a sealed agreement that she retire to her fifteen-bedroom Daytona Beach estate for the next 36 months and limit her bogus business ventures to selling anti-aging facial cream franchises on the internet, a hundred other phony psychics will spring up in her place like heads of Medusa and make billions more. Click here to rant back. |