Luke Ford

From Vanity Fair:

When Stephanie Tisone met Anthony William, a cult-famous, self-billed clairvoyant, she felt an instant connection. Her belief in his abilities was unwavering. Her life would never be the same.

…William has said that negative energy can be a source of disease and that he can teach you to clear it; that he can give followers emotional support to rewire their brains and souls after post-traumatic stress disorder from long-term illness; that he can speak to the entity he calls the “Spirit of Compassion” on their behalf. He has said that his information is decades ahead of science, that he knows if objects are hidden in the walls of old homes, and that he fell into a long coma after running past a chemical spill from an overturned truck. His former associates say that much of his follower base is made up of women dealing with chronic illness and pain.

From the LROB:

* Things were different only a couple of generations ago, when the cult of the founders underpinned consensus. In the 1960s sociologists discussed the role of a non-denominational ‘civil religion’ centred on the founders’ secular scriptures – the Declaration of Independence, the constitution and the Bill of Rights – and a calendar of public observance. Was America’s civil religion a substitute for Christianity, or merely a supplement to it? In the easy-going days before the rise of the evangelical right, it didn’t seem to matter, and the cult of the founders had no ulterior partisan or ideological significance. Indeed, liberals were just as committed to it as conservatives, happily hymning the Jeffersonian separation of Church and state.

* Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is an unobtrusively subversive contribution to the genre. Schiff’s Adams is, if not quite a purveyor of fake news, a master craftsman in the arts of distortion and exaggeration, whose spin and sensation-mongering transformed loyal colonial Britons into revolutionary Americans over the course of little more than a decade.

* The most persuasive explanation, advanced by Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), is that the reading habits of the 18th-century colonists tilted heavily towards the fretful opposition Whiggery of the mother country. By contrast with mainstream Whiggish celebration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, opposition Whigs – indebted to mid-17th-century commonwealth ideals, suspicious of government power in general, and nervous of conspiracies against liberty – stressed the frailty of English freedoms, not least from the poisons they identified in the body politic. Transatlantic distance aggravated such concerns. Eventually, colonials came to fear that England’s liberties were on the point of expiry, and British America’s might be next.

Schiff adds a twist to this story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of Boston, and Boston’s exaggerated misreadings of London’s intent, Adams’s persistent scheming, Schiff suggests, contrived America into existence.

* Her Adams and the mid-18th-century Boston crowd supply disturbing precedents for rabble-rousing populism, truth-bending demagoguery, intimidation, violence, vandalism and the destruction of property; the hanged effigies of Oliver and Grenville foreshadow the gallows the Capitol mob built for Vice-President Pence. Founding-era exemplars of this sort still matter. Most obviously, the Tea Party movement, which has now been absorbed by the Republican Party, klaxoned its debt to the American Revolution, and its anarchic, ultra-libertarian obstructiveness crudely echoed the chariness of government so characteristic of 18th-century Whig patriots.

Megan Garber writes:

One of Springer’s legacies will be his realization that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Another will be his recognition that even shock can grow stale. Springer had to keep finding new ways to outdo the drama on his show. In the 2000s, he began arriving onstage by sliding down a stripper pole. When real people’s stories seemed insufficiently titillating, he brought on a character—the drunken “Reverend Shnorr”—to punch things up. Springer masterminded the havoc, but on-screen, he presided over it for the most part like a mild-mannered father amused by his unruly children. And then, for the final twist, he tried to graft meaning onto the chaos he’d just presented to his viewers. Springer ended each episode with his “Final Thought,” the wan sermon he delivered as a response to the stories just aired. The address, a holdover from a similar one he’d delivered during his days as a news anchor, tried to find a moral in the madness. It concluded, always, with the same line: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

The hypocrisy of the Final Thought—its episode-by-episode effort to cleanse all the scandal with sanctimony—will be Springer’s most lasting legacy. The Jerry Springer Show exploited people fervently and ruthlessly and lucratively. It treated real tragedies as diversions. And it did all of that as it pretended to be more profound than it was. Springer tried to frame the show’s exploitation as anthropology, as something revealing and instructive. But it was Springer’s own arc that would prove most culturally revelatory: His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.