First They Came For Miss Cleo
And I Said Nothing
As America's Best Christian, it concerns me greatly
that the FCC is cracking down on people who charge a great deal of
money for what they can't deliver. No, I'm not referring to Arnold
Schwarzenegger, John Travolta or Sylvester Stallone, but that would-be
Caribbean sorceress, Miss Cleo. According to the secular news, the
federal government has joined with state attorney generals in trying
to shut down a woman who inveigles the public by purporting to know
their future. After one charming glass of wine with her unsaved
accountant, however, it became clear to me that Miss Cleo should be
more renowned for making fortunes rather than telling them.
As a True Christian(TM), I've never had cause to use any supposed
clairvoyant's services. I don't speak to the dead. They are naively
unaware of this rather specific slight, as I don't tend to speak to
most of the living either. Nevertheless, are these harmless
tête-à-têtes so terrible? To be honest, I find the fact that people
credulous enough to spend $5-a-minute to hear vague prognostications
from a phone-bank of women one paycheck away from making cold-calls
for telemarketers somewhat comforting. If they weren't tied up on the
telephone ignoring common sense by making small-talk with someone
imbued with less supernatural powers than Darrin Stevens on Bewitched,
they might be in the car behind mine ignoring the red light dangling
before us.
Once Miss Cleo is sent back to behind the counter at Taco
Bell, will the FCC, in its stated desire to protect the American
public from chicanery, turn its attention to other people on TV who
hawk the future like it was theirs to sell for an exorbitant fee? I
am, of course, talking about Pat Robertson. What of the televangelists
who promise to cure everything from cantankerousness to cancer in
exchange for a generous "love offering"?
Will the Attorney General of New York swoop down and padlock all the
Catholic confessionals? After all, Miss Cleo is only promising the
hair color of next Thursday's fling, not a rendezvous with God,
eternal life and a charmingly appointed mansion of gold overlooking
the Milky Way. Indeed, when it comes to having the ingenuity to
package the future and market it to the public for a retail price,
Christianity makes Miss Cleo look like quite the hapless amateur. Once
tithes and other contributions to our rather prosperous enterprise are
spread out over the course of a light afternoon of confessions or
faith-healings, Christianity's minute-by-minute fees renders Miss Cleo
a below-market bargain.
As the CEO of a Fortune 500 Christian ministry, I admit to harboring
disdain for any woman who indulges the amusingly gullible public's
quaint hankering to know the unknowable -- and parlays it into cash or
real estate. That is, after all, my demographic. Nevertheless, while I
have always considered Miss Cleo's syntax and mode of dress criminal,
it worries me that she may be criminally liable for duping an audience
verily begging to be deceived and fleeced. To blame Miss Cleo for
someone else's desperation is tantamount to jailing the man driving
the train that Anna Karenina found herself under.
© Mrs. Betty Bowers 2000-2002 All Rights Reserved