Authority

I have a problem with authority. It goes back to when I was young, and while I’ve moderated it a bit, I’ll always be the guy who is skeptical of a gold-plated authority spouting the Creed on a stool.

Some of this derives from my days on the road as a Folkie, folksinger, and Pius Itinerant moving about. I met all sorts of people who claimed their authority came from a deity, superior intellectual capacity, art, craft, or inspiration from nature.

Don’t buy the BS that today is the age of grifters. It’s always been that way. It’s just that these days, they have better technology to spread their idiocy.

I’ve been on the fringes of cults, taken in by manic friends, and barely escaped the grips of genuine nutcases. I learned valuable lessons in grifting from someone interested in teaching them. While in Boston, my buddies and I had an “almost friend” named John. John was a proud grifter. Insurance schemes, bunkos, and cons were his game. I sat opposite him at the Harvard Gardens, drinking while he went into great detail about the variations that can develop in the Pigeon Drop con.

Some seasons were better for spirit readings than others. With a friend, he developed an entire system of foretelling the future—corticeomancy. Birch bark was burned ritually, and the patterns exposed in the burning bark revealed the fortune. He was careful to keep his clientele happy, always insisting that they got enough “bang for the buck.” You wanted to keep them coming back for more.

Through experiences like this, I developed the essential skills to filter real knowledge from bunko. Can I be fooled?

As John said, anyone can and will be taken. It’s just a matter of how good the con is. He maintained that “enrolling the mark in the con ” was the surest path to success. Get them invested, and they’ll stay invested.”

No wonder that John eventually went into politics.