the past is another country
Sunday, November 24, 2002
There are a number of things that are, even the most dedicated Francophobe would admit, best experienced au francais: New Wave cinema, cave-ripened cheeses, Jerry Lewis appreciation. To this list, one might add "anti-religious rhetoric". Seven years after the most famous American atheisst was murdered, Madalyn Murray O'Hair still has people worried that she's going to boot God off T.V., but "America's most hated woman" was in many ways a rather bland figure, living quietly in Austin and scratching out "In God We Trust" from coinage. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are all in good fun, and even Mark Hoffman, the "Mormon bomber", was at least partially motivated by covering up his many criminal enterprises while he attempted to destroy the Latter-Day Saints through the power of explosives and embarassing forgeries. Hoffman was murderous, but somehow he just doesn't seem as meanspirited as someone like Michel Mourre's, who infliltrated the 1950 Easter Mass at Notre Dame in Paris. Dressed as a monk, Mourre stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead. If it had been available, he might have played a recording of his fellow Frenchman Antonin Artaud.
11:45 pm 
Monday, November 4, 2002
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has produced a marvelous taxonomy of the con; like her, I'm not quite sure about the fine lines of the distinctions she draws (where would something like the fiddle game fall? Is it a bait-and-retraction or simple misrepresentation?), but it's a pretty comprehensive list, covering everything from phony bonds to the tax avoidance methods sold by con artists to a ready market in people who really, truly, honestly believe that the I.R.S. is illegal.. In some cases, like that of Frank Agnable, the categories just blur; in his teens and early twenties, Agnabale, who was apparently an unflappable actor, passed himself off for two years as (among other things) a doctor and a Pan Am pilot, but his money mostly came from kiting checks, using both his impressive abilities at convincing people he was who he wasn't and some early exploitations of the national check processing system. Agnabale now makes his living as a wildly self-promoting lecturer and security consultant; I'm not sure quite where that falls in Teresa's taxonomy. A movie based on his life and directed by Steven Spielberg will be out this winter; I'm relatively certain I know where Hollywood falls. But Teresa has covered every major variety of con game that I know of; there's only so many basic ways to convince people to hand over their money, although there's a vast number of variations. One of these, the Nigerian 419 scam, is (as Teresa notes) simply an updated version of the Spanish Prisoner.
(more...)
11:34 pm
