Word: cons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...uses metaphysical doubletalk to "explain" philosophy. The patter creates credibility, leading Poe to conclude elsewhere that "pleased at comprehending, we often are so excited as to take it for granted that we assent." In "Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," he offers the ingredients of a good con: "Minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin...
Many a used car and intellectual lemon have been sold with his formula. Lindberg does not label Poe a confidence man but a "New World technician." Yet tech man and con man are related by method. Writes Lindberg: "When the New World technician reduces complex process to duplicable parts, he provides the model by which the con man reduces another's gestures to imitable steps and dissects habits of belief so as to manipulate them...
With the publication of P.T. Barnum's autobiography in 1855, says Lindberg, the con man in America went public. The rush to grab land, swindle immigrants and kite stock gathered momentum. As a great showman, Barnum hoodwinked the suckers and made them like it. Who could hate a man able to move crowds by changing the exit sign to one that read, "This way to the Grand Egress." His book ratified cynicism as entertainment, if not instruction...
Lindberg still detects the trend in society and fiction. Packaging is frequently given more attention than the product; politicians unashamedly talk about their image and how to sell it. In movies and books, notes the author, "con men now not only appear in a zany mix of styles, but they simultaneously carry on criminal activities and redemptive ones." In short, we no longer clearly distinguish between the good confidence...
Lindberg is a good con man. Contemporary literary critics can be lifeless and dutifully impenetrable. As Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher put it in Humboldt's Gift, "Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse." Lindberg takes care of more business than most readers may care to handle. But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg's felicitous and confident phrase, it takes "poise in ambivalence...