RICKRUCKER.COM
4/19/04
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Top Story: Turning Base Metals into Gold. |
Not Ready for Primetime
Have you noticed how copies of newsmagazine programs diminish in quality like traded bootleg tapes? Each degree of separation loses that much more integrity. 60 Minutes started the whole thing. 20/20 was a good knockoff, with its own style. But 20/20 is no 60 Minutes--it's just slightly less credible. And with the next newsmagazine generation, standards dropped precipitously.
Enter: Primetime Thursday . I don't actually watch this show, mind you, since when at home I do not leave my smoothly contoured computer chair. But fortuitously my DSL provider lets me watch streaming ABC news programs in a tiny 2 by 2 inch box. Good enough for who it's for.
When I saw the headline "Second Lives: Could a Little Boy Be Proof of Reincarnation?", with the option of watching this incisive story, you can imagine I was enthralled and riveted. Being a materialist atheist leaning toward nihilism, inhabiting a bleak, horrendous psychic world where committing suicide is on par with taking a walk or going to the movies--well--this is proof we're talking about here. I might have to change some assumptions. And it's the fucking top story! It might be presidential assassination, or aliens landing. I just mean, if they did find proof of life after death, you'd expect it to be right at the top of your news page. And there it was.
Alas, the narrative was not so compelling at its TOP STORY status implied. Actually, it's one of the weaker reincarnation narratives I've heard. I had a miserable class at my university with a wack-job old philosophy professor trying to trick himself into believing in life after death. So we read about some of the more meticulously documented cases. A lot of them pop up in India, obviously, and there are a lot more systematic, efficient deceptive schemes used there. Whole extended families and communities get into the bullshitting action. Here's one story from India about a kid who conveniently died before the hullaballoo commenced. Scientists are investigating--I can't wait.
Some people at the core of the social circuses that arise in Indian reincarnation cases may be maliciously scheming, but for the rest, they're more than happy to warp their own memories and roll along with whatever bullshit's on the burner that week. It's just like how you get the best miracles around villages full of Catholics. "We all saw the Blessed Virgin wink at us! All 367 of us can verify it!" But in this Primetime story, it seems like nobody's acting disingenuously except the Primetime Thursday producers, hence the details are dull and obvious. On old shows like Sightings they could always drudge up some asshole saying the "reincarnated" child say, told them their past-life address, or knows how to speak French spontaneously, or knows a safety deposit box number or something.
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Affleck: the reincarnation of the square-jawed, give-em-hell American spirit. |
Nope--not on the cutting-edge Primetime Thursday. They've just got some kid in Louisiana who likes planes--who: get this--is the reincarnation of an American Air-Force Pilot shot down in the Pacific in WW2! Know why it's "proof"? Because when his Mom asked him what kind of plane he flew in his past life, he said a "Corsair." They didn't say whether the kid was interested in planes before or after he said "Corsair"--but who cares? Five minutes of The History Channel, the kid likes planes, he says "Corsair." I've found eerier things growing is abandoned, moldy cups of orange juice. Here's a worldview-annihilating, paradigm-shifting excerpt from the web article on the story:
From an early age, James would play with nothing else but planes, his parents say. But when he was 2, they said the planes their son loved began to give him regular nightmares. "I'd wake him up and he'd be screaming," Andrea told ABCNEWS' Chris Cuomo. She said when she asked her son what he was dreaming about, he would say, "Airplane crash on fire, little man can't get out."
In summation--kid plays with planes, imagining violent dogfights--kid has nightmares imagining actual human consequences of the exploding planes that get his little-boy-toy-murder-rocks off.
Andrea says her mom was the first to suggest James was remembering a past life.
At first, Andrea says she was doubtful. James was only watching kids' shows, his parents say, and they weren't watching World War II documentaries or conversing about military history.
But as time went by, Andrea began to wonder what to believe. In one video of James at age 3, he goes over a plane as if he's doing a preflight check.
Another time, Andrea said, she bought him a toy plane, and pointed out what appeared to be a bomb on its underside. She says James corrected her, and told her it was a drop tank. "I'd never heard of a drop tank," she said. "I didn't know what a drop tank was."
Five. Minutes. History Channel. We're talking about what--three facts here? In the video they say he knew he was shot down by "the Japanese." He knew his plane was a Corsair. And he mentions a drop tank. This is a little kid who's obsessed with World War 2 model planes, and he's somehow spookily acquired facts about WW2 planes. Kids pick up a word every ten minutes during language development. Top Story.
Then James' violent nightmares got worse, occurring three and four times a week. Andrea's mother suggested she look into the work of counselor and therapist Carol Bowman, who believes that the dead sometimes can be reborn.
With guidance from Bowman, they began to encourage James to share his memories ? and immediately, Andrea says, the nightmares started become less frequent. James was also becoming more articulate about his apparent past, she said.
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Carol Bowman: why "meaning well" means dick. |
Bowman said James was at the age when former lives are most easily recalled. "They haven't had the cultural conditioning, the layering over the experience in this life so the memories can percolate up more easily," she said.
There you go--bring in one of these new age psychology fucks with PhD's, a feeble connection to reality and no subscriptions to any major APA peer-reviewed journals, and the past life details start dropping faster than dresses on prom night. Carol Bowman's the author of several books on the not-so-complicated process of leading your child into saying things that confirm what you want to believe. Little Binky or sweet-cheeked Suzy may well have been sipping tea with the King of England, or overseeing slaves build them a pyramid! Wherever your sick mind would like to historically place them, Dr. Bowman can help. The same leading technique can be used to extract molestation allegations--which is why, much as I hate priests and Michael Jackson, I'm reluctant to buy into every allegation made.
Stick them in a room, ask them if they ever feel like they're "someone else" or if anyone ever "touches them." Keep asking. Don't stop. Keep the questions coming. "You like airplanes? Do you know about the war? What about flying airplanes over the ocean?" "Did he touch you there? How about there? Are you sure?" You'd be surprised how pliable a 6-year old is. In the 80s prosecuters like Janet Reno conducted merciless, transparently delusional witchhunts, prosecuting women and men for molestaion in cases that were exceedingly dubious, performing numerous interviews to crack kids into complying with their ceaseless questioning. Many innocent people--some couples--are still in jail. Thankfully these reincarnationists are mostly harmless, outside of maiming cultural sensibilities. But as Dr. Bowman, PhD, implies, this angelic notion of the blank slated child, uncorrupted by the layers of social conditioning, underlies both the child-reincarnationists and the bastards who pressured sometimes dozens of children into absurd sexual or "Satanic Cult" accusations. As one gets older and infected by social conditioning, memories fade or are "repressed".
I'm calling Shenanigans
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Reincarnation of the other baby who died in infancy because it had a tail and other serious genetic defects. |
Not surprisingly, people fishing for "past lives" in children, themselves or anyone else frequently retrieve the kind of vague "historical" image-soup that passes for most people's conception of history. For instance, you get white European solider memories often since so many popular historical accounts and films focus on war, despite the statistical improbability thereof. In Indian "reincarnations", they've got their own cultural patterns informing the divine manifestation. Much as Indian "accounts" frequently involve gods within human bodies, little James was a "fighter pilot," fuck all that there were only a few thousand of these guys. He might as well say he was a cowboy or Wookiee.
Supposedly this kid also came up with a name of the ship he was on and a friend from WW2 who's still alive. Here's the Sightings-worthy empirical evidence. But would you believe--Primetime Thursday, a program on a major network that aspires to the highest journalistic standards--seems to not care whether it's true or not? At one point in the video the father says he was "flipping through a WW2 book with his son" (gee, I wonder how he's getting all that crazy information). There's no effort made to create a timeline--for instance, a hard-hitting question might be, "when did you start looking through books on WW2 with your son? How does that compare with the information he was spontaneously providing?" Not mentioned. "How often were you seeing Dr. Bowman? Were you present during these interrogations? What might she have been telling him?" Not mentioned. There is, as always, the obligatory skeptic's 20 seconds of doubt, which is promptly denigrated.
Denigrated, essentially, by the parents' power of belief. "Is there any doubt in your mind?" We know to trust James' parents implicitly because they are a "modern," "well-educated" couple, unlike that horde of cow-worshipping savages. They're "our" people--Primtime Thursday people. We're treated to images of Dad in his study, deeply immersed in WW2 documentation, because at first, he was "deeply skeptical." You see, audience, being good Westerners, the awesome legacy of the enlightenment is residing in your mind! You have the power. Mr. Smithy's 10th grade Physics class saw to that. No need to cultivate any truly skeptical or reasoned sensibility. In this way they play into the intellectual degeneracy of their viewers. "I only read books by people with 'PhD' after their name, 'cause I respect the, like, long tradition of smartness we have!" And the parents' vaguely narcissistic enthusiasm in believing their plane-obsessed son was a rootin', tootin' air force pilot shootin' down Nips like the monkeys they are is never presented as anything but disinterested, when the whole Dr. Bowman, ABC TV camera excitement is obviously enough to hypnotize any idiot into belief. It seems as exciting a boost to marriage morale as any I can imagine. But any further criticism is like picking continuity holes in Star Trek episodes--fruitless.
The April 15 Primetime Thursday, the same episode our reincarnation story aired, also featured a groundbreaking story on Psychic investigators contracted by dim-witted local police forces. "I'm getting a red feeling--I feel water?" I'm getting a strong low-SAT score sensation. Every hick sheriff across the American heartland is running for their phone--"where cin I find me a psychic to fuck up and distort my own investigation?"
Unfuckingbelievble how shameless these producers are.
It's unclear whether they're stupid or just pandering--but
either way, putting these people in control of major media outlets is unconscionable.
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