Deceived

Went to a free magic show on campus last night. It turned out to be a Christian thing (no mention of this was made in the publicity), where two young-ish guys alternated magic tricks with really crass sermonizing. The theme was that if you could be deceived by magic tricks, maybe you should consider that you’re also being deceived by your secular, materialistic culture. Or something like that. Actually, they didn’t need to do any magic tricks — the fact that I could come for a magic show and end up being prosleytized was all the evidence I needed that I could be deceived. They even took shots at other religions, and at the whole concept of religious tolerance. I thought the whole thing was incredibly tacky, and in incredibly poor taste.

Halfway through, they offered the audience the chance to leave, if we wanted. About a quarter of the audience took them up on it. I stayed, as I’m sure a lot of people did, just out of inertia and morbid curiosity. In for a penny, and all that. Then one of the guys opened a strongbox and pulled out a .357 Magnum (though he referred it as a “Colt .45”). At any normal show, I’d be confident that this was all part of the act, but with these guys I wasn’t sure, and tensed to hit the deck. When some dude’s spent the last ten minutes waxing eloquent about the afterlife and then pulls out a gun, you have a small but significant fear that, at best, he’s going to off himself on stage, and, at worse, going to start going all Dick Cheney on the audience. Fortunately, he merely proceed to do the magic bullet trick. (Apparently these guys did this same trick here three years ago and pretended that one of them had actually been shot, and had the guy carted off in an ambulance, or something. I got the feeling that after that they were asked not to come back, and were only allowed back this year on the condition that they behaved themselves.) What dumbasses.

I really hate this sort of purposely misleading publicity. Back when I was an undergrad, the programming board was so desperate to get students to come to events that they created grossly misleading posters to make events look more interesting than they actually were. The one I remember best had three pictures of Hitler and said: “CLONING: HUMANITY’S WORST NIGHTMARE?” A packed house came to see a scientist talk about some of dangers he saw to cloning in his line of work, e.g. the chance of inadvertently introducing toxins when cloning soy beans. After an hour of really boring discussion of genotypes and phenotypes, someone finally asked, “What do you think about cloning Hitler?” The scientist, caught totally off guard, responded like, “Um … I guess that would be bad?”