It wasn’t always like this, y’know. Shysters trying to sell you horse-dewormer for a respiratory infection or procedurally-generated pictures of Christ with sixteen fingers and four elbows and two Omaha Beach soldiers on his shoulders for your weirdo aunt’s Facebook feed. Not always.
Certainly, America is a land built on a bedrock of scams and frauds and hoaxes and confidence games, no doubt there. Trades exploiting how ridiculously impossible the locals found the very idea of private property. Ship-masters soaking religious extremists looking for somewhere they could be free to bind everyone to their sacred hateful repressions, only to dump them on fallow rocks they had to name ‘New England’, just to pretend they had not been royally conned. Their spoiled descendants dressed up like the Native Peoples they wiped out with germs and guns, so they could protest tea-taxes that were lower than in their homelands. Our true National Pastime.
But the rip-off artists and swindlers used to have at least a little creativity and style involved in the schemes with which they kept the gears of capitalism turning. They did not just run for The Presidency under promise of jailing every person with pigmentations darker than Garth Brooks. The money-printing mendacities at least had a bit whimsy to them, once. A touch of shady fun!
The king of kinder-gentler American capricious fraudulences, however, was The Cardiff Giant.
Times were ripe for a hoax during The Second Great Awakening, an epoch of intense religious gullibility where hopes were so desperate that you could make a living telling people that God gave you a magic rock or how the cracking of your toe knuckle was the voice of the Deceased.
One man got so sick of it, he had some artists carve a ten-foot ton-and-a-half man out of stone, just to mess with a preacher obsessed with Biblical giants. Being America, however, too many refused to believe the truth, it became a huge gate-draw and so he sold it for show in Syracuse.
P.T. Barnum, of “A sucker is born every minute” fame, the phrase that should really be on our money instead of anything to do with God, tried to buy it off the Syracuse men. Unable to get traction on a sale and knowing it fraudulent, P.T. had a copy made for him to tour with, while claiming the original-fake a hoax and his giant genuine. A fake-fake! In-God-we-trust indeed.
It wasn’t always like this, y’know. Those frauds were far less harmful and a helluva lot more inventive than red caps with failed ‘30s fascist slogans on them. The real-fake now lives in a Cooperstown farming museum, a town itself built on the lie that baseball was invented there.
As for the fake-fake, it lives in an arcade museum in a suburb of Detroit. A hoax upon a hoax, long-past significance, lingering around only to make its owner a few more dollars. And what could possibly be more in-God-we-trust American than that? A stone giant born every minute.
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