New Orphic Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall, 2004

Editorial

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The New Orphic Review

New Orphic Publishers

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 The Power of a Good Hoax

 Ernest Hekkanen

 

 

 IT IS PROBABLY unwise of me to admit this in print, but one of my favorite literary subgenres is the hoax. The hoax has a well-regarded and indeed honorable (perhaps, I should say dishonorable) history in American literature and one of its best practitioners was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). On April 13, 1844, his story “The Balloon-Hoax” was published in the New York Sun, a newspaper which specialized in running real news stories alongside false ones, and it took full advantage of the public’s gullibility.

     Initially, “The Balloon-Hoax” wasn’t published under the title it now bears. It appeared as a broadside or ‘Extra page’ in the newspaper and the headline declared: “Astounding News! By Express Via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days!” The story was so successful, that day’s edition of the New York Sun sold out in a matter of hours, much to Poe’s annoyance, as he was unable to secure a copy. The story caused such a sensation, it was reprinted the next day in the Sunday Times and, according to Harold Beaver, the editor of The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976), the author “single-handed[ly] managed to divert his contemporaries from the raging controversy over the admission of Texas into the Union.”

     The editor who approved publication of Poe’s story was none other than Richard Adams Locke who, “nine years earlier in the same newspaper, had perpetrated a similar editorial hoax, about a telescope that revealed life on the Moon,” Harold Beaver reports in his commentary. Locke’s story was entitled “Discoveries in the Moon” (1835) and it appeared three weeks after the publication of Poe’s “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” much to Poe’s chagrin, by the way, because Locke’s hoax surpassed Poe’s in its ability to stir the public’s imagination.

     Nowadays, if the hoaxes of Poe or Locke were presented to us as true stories, they would soon be outed for what they in fact are and the editors of such newspapers would be summarily fired. However, today, such stories don’t stand a chance of being mistaken for fact. Times have changed. Scientific knowledge is now so all-pervasive, we are no longer duped by such hoaxes.

     Well, very rarely, anyway.

     Not long ago, a religious cult that believes we are descended from aliens claimed that it had cloned a human being and news agencies rushed to cover that ruse. Oftentimes, in order to get grants, scientists will stretch ‘facts’ having to do with their research, only to be outed weeks, months or even years later. And, of course, there is the famous example of Piltdown man, presented in 1912 as a genuine fossil linking us to the great apes, but which, in 1953, was discovered to be a hoax.

     Unlike a lot of people who express outrage whenever they are taken in by such hoaxes (outrage which is usually directed at the perpetrators), I am inclined to fault the public for being so gullible. Were people better trained in the techniques employed by fiction writers, they wouldn’t be fooled quite so easily or quite so often.

     Early last fall, I was sitting on a bench at Lakeside Park in Nelson, British Columbia, enjoying one of the last really pleasant days before winter closed in here in the Kootenays. The ochre sunshine created a sweet, melancholic ambience that justly deserved my admiration, when along came two fellows dressed in dark suits, one of whom had a leather briefcase clutched in his right hand. The moment I saw the two fellows, I suspected them of being Mormons and, indeed, my intuition proved to be correct.

     The two Mormons asked my permission to present me with some ‘facts,’ and soon we became embroiled in a rather lengthy discussion. Sometimes I relish such encounters and sometimes I don’t; it depends on how playful I am feeling, and that day I was feeling playful.

     “Excuse me,” I said, “before you go any further, I’d like you to clarify a few things for me. First of all, who founded your religion?”

     In truth, I was already fairly familiar with the so-called facts surrounding the Prophet Joseph Smith’s life. At age eighteen, after a bout of fervent prayer and supplication to the Almighty, the rarified personage of Moroni appeared to him at his bedside, surrounded by bright light. Moroni disclosed the whereabouts of some gold plates inscribed with the account of the former inhabitants of the North-American continent, “and the source from whence they sprang.”

     Moroni told Smith that when he got his hands on the gold plates he shouldn’t show them to anyone. Moroni, son of Mormon, appeared to Smith three times that night, and again the next day. According to the well-known tale, young Mr. Smith was laboring in a field with his father; however, he felt weak from all of the ecstatic revelations of the night before and so he decided to go home. While crossing a fence to leave the field he fell helplessly to the ground and at that point the whereabouts of the gold plates were revealed to him by Moroni. Upon regaining consciousness, Smith reported the episode to his father who, in turn, told him “to go and do as commanded by the messenger.”

     Young Mr. Smith hiked up a hill near Manchester, New York, and there he discovered the gold plates hidden in a chamber under a large stone. Four years later, he proceeded to translate the gold plates while under the ecstatic thrall of the divine. Here, we have to cut Mr. Smith some slack, because his storytelling becomes a bit transparent. The gold plates that he found under the rock weren’t, in fact, real gold plates; rather they were metaphorical gold plates. That is, the gold plates didn’t actually exist and so there was no need for Smith to hike up the hill known as Cumorah in order to discover them. This becomes abundantly clear upon reading the Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992). Because Smith was in bad need of some witnesses who could verify the veracity of his claims, “the angel Moroni appeared to Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer and showed them the gold plates while a voice from heaven declared that the translation was done by the Power of God and was true.”

     Obviously, Mr. Joseph Smith’s accomplices knew it would benefit them to get involved in the scam. Smith’s translation of the fictitious gold plates was published as The Book of Mormon in 1830 and then the angel Moroni conveniently absconded with the gold plates, which so often happens in such tales.

     Joseph Smith’s tall tale obeys a short story form typical of revelatory fiction. “If I’m not mistaken,” I told the two immaculately dressed Mormons at Lakeside Park, “Mr. Smith walked the face of the earth from 1805 to 1844 and one of his contemporaries was Edgar Allan Poe.”

     “Is that so?” said the taller Mormon.

     “Yes, that’s so,” I told him. “Now, do either of you have any idea what the favorite literary form was, back then?”

     They looked at each other and then shook their heads.

     “The favorite literary form was the hoax. Back when Smith was alive, hoaxes were widely circulated in newspapers as true stories and I suspect Smith was simply dabbling in that tradition. So, when you read a text like The Book of Mormon, you should take into account the social and literary context which gave rise to it, otherwise you’re going to end up believing in a lot of piffle, now, aren’t you?”

     Although scientific hoaxes are fair targets when it comes to being outed, religious hoaxes are treated a lot more reverently. In a free society, it seems, we are entitled to take the worst sort of nonsense for God-given truth. However, when utter nonsense motivates an entire nation, it has the potential for creating a considerable amount of harm.

     The hoax that Joseph Smith and his eleven accomplices perpetrated isn’t the only religious hoax. Even earlier, around the 3rd century A.D., some Christian zealots decided to create a historical Jesus Christ, and the latest book to deal with that hoax is Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ. And, of course, there are the Ten Commandants reputed to have been passed by Yahveh down to the fictitious Moses, as well as the equally fictitious parting of the Red Sea. In addition to the above stories, there is the one about Muhammad having transcribed Allah’s message in the form of the Koran. Likewise, I could maintain that every story I have ever written was divinely inspired; nay, that I was simply transcribing what was presented to me by an angel or by God Himself. I could set myself up as a ‘channeler’ of prophetic insights and gather unto myself some disciples who would be all too willing to suspend their disbelief. No matter the era, a guru’s success depends upon having a vast supply of people who are prepared to take nonsense quite seriously, and right now we are living in an age full of gurus – be they political, financial or spiritual gurus.

     Over the span of my life, I have come to the conclusion that history is little more than a series of elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by the few and played on the many, for reasons that have to do with creating in-group/out-group behavior. Those who are chosen (as opposed to those who aren’t) end up with all the juicy booty, and history (perhaps that should read, holy) books declare that this is the correct course of events and, moreover, that it is God’s will. How do I know this to be true? Well, I guess I could claim, like so many prophets before me, that I received my insights by opening my ears and heart to the divine, but, sooner or later, I’m sure somebody would come along and claim that I’m a schizophrenic megalomaniac, which is probably the case with every prophet who has ever walked the earth.

     Not long ago, I went to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. In Moore’s documentary, there’s a woman by the name of Lila Lipscomb (an employment counselor with a strong Christian bent) who counseled not only her son but many other young people to go into the military. Later on in the documentary, Lila is portrayed in the bosom of her family, reading the last letter written by her son, who was killed in Iraq. By the end of his rather short life, her son had come to believe that George Bush Junior’s war in Iraq was a total fraud. He wrote that Bush “got us down here for nothing.”

     Lila, the dead soldier’s mother, is devastated. She goes to Washington, D.C. and there, outside the White House, she breaks down; at first, I thought she was going to vomit on the sidewalk. She has been utterly disillusioned, but now she has a focus for her rage and that focus is the nation’s capital. However, while watching the film, I got the impression that Lila was devastated a lot less by her son’s death and a lot more by having been duped by the Bush Administration’s hoax, which led her to counsel many young people to go into the military. The weight of her guilt must be enormous, indeed.

     For a hoax to work, it must be plausible and yet farfetched enough to titillate the imagination. Every good scam artist knows that this is true, and George Bush Jr. and his cronies (the elite whom he refers to as his ‘base’) are excellent scam artists. Although the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was a hoax (a very transparent one to those of us living outside the U.S. of A.), it was plausible enough for fearful Americans to be taken in by it. Americans, who have been trained to buy everything from blue toilet-flush to the outrageous claims of the Christian right, bought President Bush’s hoax – hook, line and sinker, as it were.

     The reason why the Americans (I’m an expatriate American, by the way) were so powerless to understand the nature of George Bush Junior’s hoax has to do with their pitiful ignorance and their willingness to believe every farfetched notion that comes down the pike. They were powerless to perceive that they were about to become the victims of a hoax and, in turn, would victimize other people in its name. Had they been well-schooled in the techniques employed by fiction writers, politicians, prophets and salesmen of every stripe, they might have seen through Junior’s ruse.

     People who are powerless to perceive that a hoax is being played on them end up empowering the hoax; however, when they finally discover they have been duped, and duped rather royally, too, they have no one to blame but themselves, in my opinion. It is their willingness to suspend their disbelief which is at fault. That’s why fiction should be studied and studied very thoroughly. It can teach us a lot about human gullibility.