The Native Gullibility Of Americans - Politics And The Age Old Belief In Snake Oil Salesmen

The 2002 movie Simone starring Al Pacino was the story of a film producer who created a virtual character and through canny marketing and promotion was able to convince the viewing public that she was real. Adoring crowds filled stadiums to watch her on jumbotron screens, each appearance cleverly crafted by the Pacino character to generate interest, admiration, and loyalty. 

Simone was featured on the front page of Variety and touted as Hollywood's next biggest star.  Demands for a personal appearance grew, but the Pacino character, finding himself trapped within the lie, found himself the subject of suspicion.  Was he holding Simone hostage?  A sex slave? Was he a manipulative Hollywood wretch, destroying Simone's life? 

The story has a happy ending of course, and after almost twenty-five years filed away in a Burbank film archive it is rarely seen even on TCM or other vintage movie sites.  Yet it was prescient and before its time. Long before the advent of virtual reality and AI, the idea of selling something which did not exist  had already taken hold.  As circus impresario P.T. Barnum had famously noted, 'A sucker is born every minute', and  screenwriter Andrew Niccol and Executive Producer Michael De Luca knew exactly how to translate this age-old American gullibility into a popular movie. 

Con men, shysters, shell games, Ponzi schemes, bunko, and snake oil salesmen have been part of the American landscape for centuries. 

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

P.T. Barnum made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

Beecham County, Tennessee had been Mack Peters' stomping ground, and he made his first 'million' there before the revenuers had caught on to him and he had to move west.  However he was never forgotten.  Those who had been swindled were so many that there could be no j'accuse moments.  Everyone was in the swindle together and from that community arose The Legend of Mack Peters.  He had made good, the American way, and if he had taken a few good souls' money for a ride, so be it.  He became a local hero. 

And so it was that Fielding Brand, a local politician and aspirant to high office, came to prominence in Beecham County.  If there was ever a man born with a silver tongue, it was Fielding Brand. He was endowed, blessed with the same understanding of human nature and the very American desire to believe in the impossible as was his predecessor Mack Peters. 

Fielding presented himself as a populist, a man of the common people who would represent them against the powerful elite, the inherited wealthy, the fat cats of Wall Street, and the insidious, intellectually lecherous moguls of Silicon Valley. 

 

Beecham County had never in its long electoral history ever voted Democrat.  Its farmers were cut from the same cloth as their forbears who had made their way to the Delta from the East, traipsing through malarial swamps, impenetrable thickets, and Indian country to build a future in the fertile lands watered by the great Mississippi. 

There was no room in this worldview for government and its laws, punitive regulations, and justice.  The first and latest residents of Beecham County were both defiantly Republican, conservative, and men and women of faith. 

Fielding Brand knew this, but he also knew that Mack Peters had made a killing here.  The sheer chutzpah of his claims, the absolute incredibility of his medicinal promises, and the sheer gullibility of his customers gave him confidence. If Mack Peters could fool this crowd, so could he. 

Brand did not just have a silver tongue - the gift of oratory - but a charm, believability, and a generously friendly, engaging way about him.  Men and women flocked to hear him and despite their age-old, rural conservatism, felt that he was speaking from his heart to theirs.  His promises would be their future. 

Some people are born with this innate gift and without any moral principles which would inhibit its use.  The two always go together.  An uncanny ability to convince others, no matter what the issue, and a complete lack of any moral compass. 

Recent history has given three of the most canny charlatans ever. Jeffery Skilling made billions at Enron before he helped the entire financial system collapse. Bernie Madoff suckered tens of millions out of Jewish admirers, but the genius of it was when it was all over and discovered, there was not one penny to be found.  There never had been.  All built on smoke and mirrors. 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian wine fraudster, and before he was caught he had bilked millions out of credulous, arrogantly presumptuous connoisseurs.  He bought surplus French wine, bottled, corked, and labeled it as the most sought-after French vintages, convinced investors that there was no top to the fine wine market, and made a fortune. 

The 'connoisseurs' never drank the wine but traded it as a commodity, so the fake wine passed from hand to hand without ever being opened.  Every aspect of the scam had been carefully planned and executed - he learned how to 'age' labels and corks, and find bottles that defied provenance - all this helped by buyers who had been snookered by Rudy's exquisite palate and business acumen. 

Fraudsters aside, there are two legitimate ways men use this remarkable native ability to sell a bill of goods. One is advertising where the genius of Mack Peters is mined and applied on a national scale.  The job of the advertiser is to sell a product which consumers don't need and to convince them that they do.  To do so, they use every popular meme, every cultural metaphor, every Freudian principle and every brilliant technique of P.T. Barnum. 

Those who do not head for Madison Avenue enter politics, for there their native ability to charm, engage, convince, and sell works wonders.  Anyone tuning in to today's Congressional hearings where Senators grill administration officials in a harping, demeaning, and insulting way and offer not one whit of sensible criticism, can see how politics is for charlatans and poseurs.  

The quacking, bullying, hectoring, and masquerading of these circus clowns was not Fielding's thing.  They were deformed politicians whose election conferred a sense of illogical invincibility.  Eventually their supporters see through their absurdity and blatant, fraudulent chicanery, and they are gone.  

Fielding was different.  Through his native charm, physical and emotional allure, and his unmatched brilliance in framing promises, he would be far more successful and would become wealthier than Croesus. 

 

It took Fielding no time to move up the ladder - alderman, state legislator, state senator, state Democrat Party chairman and the man most talked of for Congress.  

How he managed to blend his party's most exaggerated claims - the fluidity of the gender spectrum, the natural brilliance and forest sentience of the black man and his place atop the human pyramid, peace at any price, open borders, and the neutering of Wall Street - with his eager populism was a thing of beauty.  It was snake oil salesmanship at its very best.  He would have been the envy of P.T. Barnum and Mack Peters, and was the clandestine hero of ad men on both coasts.  

His electoral victories at every level were never squeakers.  He won handily each and every time he ran for office.  He was a shoo-in, a guarantee, a man to be watched - all on the basis of nothing but a silver tongue, a generously engaging personality, and a universal charm that won the hearts of women and recruited the most obdurate men. 

At this writing he is poised for a Washington run, has the backing of the wealthy and the passionate, and when a Congressional seat becomes available he is sure to occupy it.  A truly American success story.