Art imitates life

I got a bit of a shock from something a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me yesterday.

I was emailed a link to an article claiming that a 1950s television show had predicted the future -- because it featured a character named Trump, a snake-oil salesman who convinced a town that he knew how to prevent an invasion of aliens (and the collapse of civilization).  All they had to do, he said, was to build a wall around the town.

My immediate reaction was that it was going to turn out to be like the similar claims made a couple of years ago that Adam Sandler had repeatedly predicted future events.  In other words, entirely bogus, complete bullshit, and made up from the get-go (the Adam Sandler claims came from a satirical website called Clickhole that was up front that they'd invented the whole story, but thousands of conspiracy theorists evidently missed that part).

But the weird thing about the Trump television show is...

... it's true.

The show was called Trackdown, which was an obscure western series starring Robert Culp as Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman.  And in the episode called "The End of the World," a huckster named Trump -- at least it was Walter Trump, not Donald -- comes into town claiming that there's going to be a worldwide invasion and subsequent destruction of civilization, and the only way to prevent the town from being destroyed was to pay him money so that he could oversee the building of a wall around the town.

"I bring you a message, a message few of you will be able to believe," Trump tells the townspeople.  "A message of great importance.  A message I alone was able to read in the fires of the universe.  And at midnight tonight, without my help and knowledge, every one of you will be dead."

When he's challenged on whether he's telling the truth, he says to the doubter, "Be careful, son, I can sue you."

Walter Trump, who at least doesn't look like the President-elect [image courtesy of Snopes]

The doubter, of course, is shouted down, and the townspeople fall for Trump's lies.  Later in the episode, we hear the following:

Narrator: Hoby had checked the town.  The people were ready to believe.  Like sheep they ran to the slaughterhouse.  And waiting for them was the high priest of fraud. 

Trump: I am the only one.  Trust me.  I can build a wall around your homes that nothing can penetrate. 

Townperson: What do we do?  How can we save ourselves? 

Trump: You ask how do you build that wall.  You ask, and I'm here to tell you.

Fortunately for the town, Hoby Gilman unmasks Trump's duplicity, and the con man is arrested and jailed.

Weird, no?  The whole thing has been vetted by Snopes, and apparently is 100% true -- in fact, on the Snopes link you can watch a clip from the show.

So a lot of woo-woo types are claiming that the show was prescient, as if television acted as some kind of electronic version of the Magic 8 Ball that was popular with kids when I was young.  (E.g., "Is Donald Trump's Mexican wall idea a complete and utter boondoggle?"  Magic 8 Ball:  "It is decidedly so.")

Be that as it may, the race is on by the wingnut contingent to scour other obscure 1950s television shows to see what else might be in store for us.

Honestly, however, all we're seeing here is the law of large numbers, plus a heaping measure of dart-thrower's bias.  If you have a large enough sample size and no parameters for narrowing down what you're looking for, eventually you'll notice weird coincidences; and of course we're going to pay more attention to cases where there was a weird coincidence than the tens of thousands of times there wasn't.  (I, for one, am glad that most television shows don't predict reality.  I would prefer not to live in a world where The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, or (heaven forfend) Lost in Space was an accurate predictor of future events.)

But I won't deny that it's peculiar.  And if it is going to play out the way it did in Trackdown, I wonder who our version of the Hoby Gilman character will be?

The lying game

It's become almost axiomatic that politicians lie, but what I absolutely fail to understand is why we not only cast our votes for proven liars, but give them a pass when they're caught at it.

For the best example of this, we have to look no further than our President-elect.  I'm probably going to be accused of being partisan, here, but I don't care.  Donald Trump's record of telling outright lies goes back far before the election, and honestly, has nothing to do with whether he's a Republican or Democrat.  Here's a sample of the complete, egregious untruths he was guilty of before the citizenry of the United States chose him as their next president:

• He stated that "violent crime is higher than it ever has been before," when in fact violent crime peaked in 1991 and has been declining ever since.  In the U.S. you are half as likely to be a victim of violent crime as you were in 1991.
• He claimed that global warming was "a hoax created by the Chinese," and then when Hillary Clinton called him on it in a debate, said, and I quote, "I did not say that" despite the fact that the tweet was still in his Twitter feed.
• In an interview, he called pregnancy an "inconvenience," and then later lied and said he'd never said that.
• He denied using the words "pigs," "slobs," and "dogs" to describe women, and said "no one has more respect for women than I do," when in fact he did use those words, more than once.
• He claimed that the U.S. jobless rate was 42%, and didn't back down when he was challenged.  It's actually 5%.
• He was asked, under oath, if he had ever associated with people associated with organized crime, and responded, "No.  Not that I know of."  Two years before that, he was interviewed by journalist Timothy O'Brien, and was asked about his connection to Danny Sullivan, who has ties to the Philadelphia mob, and he bragged about it. "They were tough guys," Trump said. "In fact, they say that Dan Sullivan was the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa.  I don't know if you ever heard that."  (And in fact, Trump threw a New Year's Eve party last week and invited Gambino family "business associate" Joey "No-Socks" Cinque.  Cinque runs a sham business called the "American Academy of Hospitality Sciences" -- which bestowed a five-star award on Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, and at the New Year's Eve party gave Trump a "lifetime achievement award.")

Had enough?  I haven't even considered the campaign promises he's broken already -- and we're still almost two weeks from the inauguration, for fuck's sake:

• Trump fired up his audiences before the election by pledging to jail Hillary Clinton -- "Lock her up!" was chanted at most of his rallies.  After the election, he said, and I quote: "That plays great before the election -- now we don't care, right?"
• This past summer, Trump proposed stopping illegal immigration by building a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.  "I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively," Trump said.  "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.  And I will have Mexico pay for that wall."  Just two days ago, he announced that he was going to ask Congress to fund the building of the wall, at an estimated cost of $10 billion to taxpayers.  Confronted about this apparent breaking of a campaign promise, Trump (of course) responded by tweeting about it.  "The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!"
• Another of his big campaign promises was to "drain the swamp" -- by which he meant removing the corrupting influence of lobbyists, big money, corporations, and Wall Street from the government.  His cabinet picks include billionaires who donated to the Trump campaign, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, and a hedge fund manager from Goldman-Sachs.

And almost no one who voted for him is objecting to this bill of goods they were sold.  I don't care how much I supported someone -- if a candidate I voted for blatantly broke campaign promises before they'd even taken office, I would be pissed.

On the other hand, the one thing you hear his followers yelping about is his following through on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- something that is now appearing to be a near-certainty.  Sarah Kliff interviewed Trump voters and asked them about how the repeal was going to affect them, and uniformly they said it was going to be terrible.  When she asked them why they had supported Trump, given his unequivocal position on the subject, their responses can be summarized by what one woman told Kliff:  "I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many people's lives.  I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?"

So wait just a minute here.  He lies outright, makes campaign promises and breaks them before he's even been inaugurated, but then he actually does something he promised he's gonna do, and that's what you object to?

Okay, look, I'm not saying other politicians haven't been guilty of hypocrisy, or haven't waffled, evaded, or lied outright:

But you know what?  "He does it too!" is not a defense. It's absolutely baffling why we, as citizens, accept such behavior, and more importantly, keep voting these same clowns in.  You hear people complain all the time about how corrupt politicians are, how awful Congress is, how you can't trust any of 'em -- and yet, overwhelmingly, incumbents were voted back in.  In 2016 90% of Senate races went to the incumbent, and 97% of House races -- even though Congress's overall approval rating was 13%.

Can someone please, please explain this to me?

But as far as Trump goes, I can say it no other way: he is a compulsive liar, a con man, who will say anything or do anything to get what he wants.  He is also dangerously impulsive, and already -- again, before taking office -- has endangered our role on the world stage and inflamed tensions with China, Russia, and the Middle East with his incessant loose-cannon tweeting.  We are all going to have to live through what all this will cause, and try as hard as we can to do damage control.  But I'm wondering when the Trump voters are going to realize that he has never had any intent to follow through on anything other than impulse.

To put it succinctly: you've been had.