James Randi, a.k.a. The Amazing Randi, has died. We will get to what his life and death has to do with the politics of the moment … in a moment.
The New York Times obituary begins:
James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.
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“People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them — that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been fighting all my life,” he said in the 2014 documentary “An Honest Liar,” directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”
Randi made it his mission in life to expose “pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality” to the light of scientific rationalism. What must he have thought of QAnon? Or Acting President Donald J. Trump?
I once met Randi while in college. One of the theater department professors, an amateur magician, invited him to speak and perform. A couple of things Randi wrote since about claims of the paranormal stuck with me.
Intelligence can be a weakness. Educated people who believe themselves too smart to be fooled make easy marks. Even scientists testing psychics’ abilities get fooled. They are unaccustomed to their data actively trying to lie to them.
Mountebanks and charlatans like the temporary occupant of the Oval Office lie for a living. Prior to elected office, the acting president surrounded himself with fawning sycophants. He carried that habit to Washington, D.C. His whole life he has been unaccustomed to being challenged. As recent questioning by women reporters demonstrates, he has found the experience of being a politician in the public eye corrosive to his manufactured image.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent considers why Donald J. Trump fumed and walked out of his “60 Minutes” interview this week after aggressive questioning by CBS’s Lesley Stahl. It is his second such public fight with under two weeks to go to the general election. The first was with his own infectious-disease expert, the widely respected Anthony S. Fauci.
Sargent suggests that the two stand in the way of Trump selling his marks an entirely fictional reality, one in which He-Trump has vanquished the coronavirus and built a wildly prosperous economy. Pay no attention to the piles of corpses and hungry children behind the curtain.
Stahl reportedly asked Trump tough questions about his handling of the pandemic and his rhetoric regarding the kidnap plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). The Post reported Tuesday:
Stahl also told him during the interview that allegations about Biden’s son Hunter were not verified and that the Obama administration did not spy on the Trump campaign. Many of the questions were about the coronavirus pandemic and his handling of it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the interview frankly.
“Why might this have enraged Trump?” Sargent asks. “Because Trump has gone to tremendous lengths to manufacture precisely the illusions that Stahl apparently sought to puncture, yet these efforts are failing.”
Trump demanded that the Department of Justice produce a report that made Hunter Biden pseudo-revelations seem verified. Trump expected Attorney General William P. Barr to produce a report on the origins of the Russia investigation that would make the phony “Obamagate” scandal seem verified as well.
Sargent continues:
During his recent NBC town hall, Trump grew incensed because the arguments were unfolding in reality, where the biggest domestic extremist threat is right-wing in nature — which his own Department of Homeland Security has attested to. This wasn’t supposed to happen: Extensive government resources were devoted to manufacturing the illusion of an organized leftist terror threat for him to campaign against, but that’s failed.
Trump got impeached for subverting U.S. foreign policy to the goal of strong-arming Ukraine into announcing an investigation into alleged Biden corruption — not actually finding corruption, but merely announcing it — because again all that mattered was what could be made to seem true.
Which makes Trump another of the charlatans James Randi spent his life unmasking. Daddy Fred’s money helped Donald create the illusion that he himself was a successful businessman. Donald’s ghost-written books painted him as the consummate dealmaker he was not. He gold-leafed his gaudy Manhattan penthouse and, calling himself John Barron and disguising his voice, duped Fortune magazine into ranking him a billionaire among its 1984 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. His net worth as approximately $5 million in 1982, not the billion he claimed two years later. Self-promotion is Trump’s only real talent. The only thing keeping his ego inflated is the adulation of the credulous.
Randi appeared on the “Tonight Show” multiple times. Johnny Carson began in show business as a magician (hence Carnac the Magnificent). This demonstration of psychic surgery will leave an impression.
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