A Vintage TV Rant (of all things...)
As y'all may have guessed, I like to waste time watching TV. Of course, that's in line with Bertrand Russell's excellent advice that "Time wasted doing something you enjoy is not wasted time."
Anyhow, this morning I caught an episode of "Wanted: Dead or Alive" starring Steve McQueen, which originally aired from 1958-62. Not an especially big fan of Western stuff, but I'd watch Steve McQueen read the phone book. In the show McQueen plays a bounty hunter/gun for hire, Josh Randall.
So I catch an episode from 1960 called "Witch Woman."
Synopsis: in a small Mexican village, the local schoolteacher and his wife are expecting their first child.
Being a rational fellow (and no doubt a proto-Commie intellectual), the teacher is determined to keep the local "witch woman" away from his wife. He hires Josh Randall to do this.
The teacher's father-in-law is El Jefe in the village. He believes totally in the witch woman, and pays her extra to guarantee his first grandchild will be a boy.
There's a lot of the usual TV series hugger-muuger, but in the end, the witch woman is exposed as a complete fraud and a cheap grifter who has no supernatural powers. And El Jefe's first grandchild is a baby girl.
Jebus! Try to get such a show produced today and you'd be run out of Hollywood. Can you imagine?
The show would HAVE to acknowledge that All Beliefs Are Equal, and of course brown-nose those awesome Other Ways of Knowing.
/rant
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