Did they teach you about “psychic income” in school? Great stuff. If you like your work, for example, you’re getting more income, “psychic income,” than your paycheck indicates. If you love your work, you’re getting even more. If you love your work and meet people who become lifetime keeper-treasures, you’re a psychic billionaire even if you can’t meet your mortgage.
Journalism puts you pretty far up there, with a ringside seat on the world and first-name friendships with all the glowing people your insurance broker and roofing specialist can only dream about.
One of those people who sent my psychic income all the way up to a Donald Trump-level was the world’s greatest stage hypnotist, Hungarian-born Franz Polgar. Years before I met him I sat gratefully in the audience at the University of North Carolina as he converted thousands of higher-educated students into a roaring, screaming mob. Polgar did some of the normal stage hypno-stunts – “Bark like a dog when you wake up and I count to 10.” “Jump up and yell, ‘The Albanians are coming!’ when I stomp my foot.” But his “magic spyglass” was the greatest moment of entertainment I’ve ever seen.
Polgar would approach the brawniest of all among the 20-plus transfixed male subjects, a football player, and ask him, “Have you ever seen my magic spyglass?” as he handed the subject nothing but a plain piece of scrolled-up notebook paper. “This spyglass lets you see through any textile in the world. Here! Take a look!”
The football player would look out upon the audience through that ordinary piece of notebook paper and “see” thousands of young men and women naked. The look on his face alone was worth a losing night at Las Vegas. He’d slowly pan left to right, up and down, smiling deliriously. The screaming of the enraptured audience never deflected his gaze. Not even when it multiplied itself by four or five; a volume-escalation brought on when the football player zeroed in on the head cheerleader, the most attractive woman in Orange County, N.C., and he – seeing her “naked,” mind you – gasped, moaned, squealed and twisted in cataleptic ecstasy.
What came next was the epicenter of this entertainment earthquake. Eventually, he turned the “magic spyglass” down upon himself and saw that he, too, was “naked” on-stage with thousands of screaming onlookers. Once, when I saw Polgar perform this stunt, the football player thereupon dashed off the stage, out of the auditorium and across the campus. It took four other football players to catch him and bring him back to where Polgar could “fix him up.”
Now, why all this?
Many of us who do not support the Obama administration feel heavy-duty “hypnotism” is at work to conceal the true state of our union today and make everything appear as appealing as Polgar’s “magic spyglass.” This may be the biggest political hypno-scam since Nazi Germany.
Every slightly significant improvement in the dreadful numbers afflicting the American economy is shouted out by an unembarrassedly pro-Obama media as though it were the conquest of Poland. The steady flow of negative news is, by comparison, whispered, played like a failed air-raid on Cologne or ignored altogether. Every Republican candidate’s nasty jape at another one is treated like the shattering of the Anglo-Soviet-American alliance. All the failures of Solyndra and the other energy-misadventures and the $15 trillion debt and the flakiness of the dollar are treated as nothing more than the loss of a German minesweeper in the Kattegat. The upscuddles of Romney are treated like the fall of France, while symptoms of fear, panic and outright rebellion within Democratic ranks get no more attention than Nazi Gen. Rommel losing Tobruk for the fourth time.
The success of a Democratic candidate in a special congressional election somewhere calls for another parade through the Arc de Triomphe, while the outright rebellion of the religious community and the mounting prices at the pump are dimmed down with splashy squirts of “news novocaine.”
How, then, do the likes of me deny the polls that actually do give the Obama crowd cause to crow? Easy! I don’t dismiss it all quite as handily as Sarah Palin, who bluntly disbelieves the numbers. What’s going on now is the “warm-up” before a football game. They’re throwing passes without defenders. They’re kicking field goals with no rushers. The first 10 minutes of post-convention real campaigning will render all numbers calculated so far as relevant as the Dutch Underground stealing a truckload of cheese from a German mess hall.
I understand the hysteria of the “hypnotists.” Obama “cannot lose” for a multitude of reasons – racial, redistributionist, historical, liberal, big money, big hopes, big dreams.
Sorry. Sometimes the hypnotists can give us a big laugh. Other times they’re destined to be the big laugh.
My juvenile dream was always to be there “When the Saints Go Marching In,” even though I was never quite sure what that meant.
Now, my dream is to be there close to midnight next Nov. 6 when the “hypnotists” look down without a “spyglass” and wonder where all their own textiles went.
