Welcome to the Magic Show!

Welcome to my blog on lying, cheating, and stealing, some of the most popular activities in the world today!


My intention with this blog is not to teach anyone how to lie, cheat, or steal. We learned enough about how to do that in elementary school.  The idea here is to explore the many ways that other people (especially political figures and business leaders) are lying to us, cheating us, and stealing everything they can from us.


Don't get the idea that this is some kind of namby-pamby moral screed about the importance of being earnest and truthful. Far from it. A world without lies would be a bleak and boring monochrome place. No fairy tales, no novels, no films, no stories of any kind. Nothing to spice up the tasteless facts. It would be worse than Orwell's worst nightmare! Lies color our lives. Fortunately, a world without lies is unimaginable.


Obviously this is a HUGE topic. There is a book on white-collar crime entitled "Lying, cheating, and stealing..." by Stuart Green. Other books on different aspects of this phenomenon are clogging the bookshelves. I have my own favorites. [i]  Bill Moyers also has a good list on his website. Send me your list! I am a sponge for this stuff.


I spent a 40-year career in the halls of Congress observing experts in the world of political lying, cheating, and stealing.  Since that time, still fascinated by it, I have been doing additional research on the subject, which I will share with you here on this blog. And you can share your views here as well. Please do!


Lying, cheating, and stealing are not confined to politics, of course. We are all like fish swimming in a big ocean of lies, frauds, and thievery. Deception is the name of the game.


Recently I went to see a performance at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. called the "Elephant room".  There, among a plethora of other tricks and jokes, three comedic magicians performers sawed my partner, Amber Jones, in half. Amazingly, she lived!


Magicians can teach us a lot about lying, cheating, and stealing.  To pull off their stunts, they use a technique called "misdirection" to distract your attention while they steal your watch and wallet. They are exploiting a feature of human cognition that involves gaps in our perception.


Politicians do something similar.  A good magician can make an elephant disappear right in front of our eyes.  A skilled political performer can make an uncomfortable observation instantly evaporate into thin air. Politicians embrace a type of misdirection called "rhetoric" to distract people from unpleasant aspects of their character or political history.


Take Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, for example. Gingrich is a consummate performer who has mastered the trickster's art of political misdirection. In the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary debates, he was asked by the moderator about his ex-wife’s embarrassing revelation concerning his desire for an open marriage. Gingrich instantly launched an emotional and vitriolic attack on the despicable news media. His adjectives were purple. (He favors "destructive, odious, vicious, despicable, audacious, inexcusable, dishonest, laughable, disgusting, and incompetent.")  The open-marriage elephant disappeared while the audience cheered loudly for the red meat Gingrich was feeding them, completely forgetting the question at hand. Gingrich triumphed in the primary, of course, largely based on this single skillful misdirection.

Just as politicians emulate magicians, magicians admire the kind of stagecraft that politicians use.  One of the magicians at the Arena Stage performance  of “Elephant Room,” Louie Magic, said “D.C.'s got more tricks that we’ve got. It’s full of deception. That’s why people appreciate it here…People come to our show looking for tips—politicians looking for tricks.”[ii] 

We all enjoy being fooled by magicians, politicians, and other performers.  With a little misdirection here and there, it is easy for them to get our buy-in. As magicians know, people loved being fooled by a really good trickster.  Paradoxically, we enjoy being lied to!

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[i] On my short list are books by Matt Taibbi, Spanking the Donkey: On the Campaign Trail with the Democrats, (ISBN 1-56584-891-8), New Press, 2005; Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, (ISBN 0-8021-7041-2),Grove Press, Black Cat, 2007; The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, (ISBN 0-385-52034-4), Spiegel & Grau, 2008 and Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, (2010).

Michael Lewis has also written extensively on the subject:  The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, W.W. Norton & Co.. ISBN 0-393-07223-1 (2010);   Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, W.W. Norton & Co.. ISBN 0-393-06514-6. (2008); The Money Culture. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03037-7.  (1991);  and Liar's Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-02750-3. (1989).

There are many other writers and scholars working onthis subject, such as Gretchen Morgenson, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, 2011; Ellen Schultz,  Retirement Heist, How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers (2011); and Lawrence Lessig, Republic Lost, 2011.

[ii] Louie Magic, as quoted by Maura Judkis in “'Elephant Room’: Do You Believe in Magic?”, Washington Post, January 22, 2012, p. E3.