Comet Conspiracy: Mass Delusion Is Nothing New (But Still Lucrative) - by Gene Lyons

[DonViejo]

How fading and insipid do all Objects accost us that are not conveyed in the Vehicle of Delusion.

— Jonathan Swift, “A Digression Concerning…the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth,” 1704

Americans have always thought themselves a practical, commonsensical people, a nation of Thomas Edisons and Henry Fords. (Never mind that industrial genius Ford was also a political crank whose treatise The International Jew, influenced Nazi race theory.) In reality, we’ve always been a nation of easy marks. As Mencken wrote: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

Anybody glib and shameless enough can sell Americans damn near anything. Very few faith-healers, astrologers, crackpot diet enthusiasts, peddlers of love potions, self-anointed prophets and messiahs—not to mention political mountebanks and conspiracy theorists — have ever lacked for a large and credulous audience.

I once had a neighbor with an artificially deep, booming voice I suspected he practiced in the shower. Although a businessman, his great passion was casting horoscopes. Upon hearing my wife complain about my disorderly home office, he chortled knowingly and said, “It’s a sure thing he’s not a Virgo.”

Of the 12 signs in the Zodiac, a Virgo happens to be exactly what I am. On the cusp of Libra no less, which supposedly indicates what adepts of the rival Freudian superstition would call an “anal-retentive” passion for order.

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