My youngest grandson had some exploding underpants last year in pre-school, but luckily there were some clean ones nearby and an alert teacher. One of the funniest lines of a most humorous look at growing up in the 50, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, concerned one of the neighborhood boys who was appropriately named, Lumpy, because his pants always had a soggy lump of poop in them.
“Never trust a fart,” was the sage advice of the aging Jack Nicholson from the movie, The Bucket List. Then there are the telltale ‘skidmarks’ in the briefs of kids whose personal hygiene skills need remediation.
‘Exploding underwear’ has these dark days of winter come to define airplane terrorism. Not too humorous at all, although when compared to burning shoes as a weapon, elicits a slight grin. Of course, to those who live in that perpetually dark place, the right-wing of the political spectrum, our entire national security was compromised during that underwear event. The sky is falling!
Oh, yes, the sky is falling and the world is coming to an end and woe is me and you and stuff like that. Good grief! Get a grip, get a life, for crying out loud. Our ‘national security’ was not breached by some dumb-ass radical fundamentalist who burned his pubic hair off while trying to incinerate a plane. This lone wolf does not threaten me. Nor do those other fundamentalist zealots in Afghanistan who wish to live in the Middle Ages.
What really ‘threatens’ American citizens on a serious and pervasive basis is economic instability. Even though far-right reactionaries led by Dick ‘Dick’ Cheney would have us look outward, over the ocean, for terrorists who are planning to ‘destroy our way of life,’ we need look only to our eastern shore, the waters lapping Manhattan Island, Wall Street to be perfectly accurate. The right-wing fear mongers do not want us to ‘look at the man behind the curtain,’ but rather to concentrate on the lightening and thunder in the skies, the exploding underwear. No, not the men behind the curtain, the shysters of Wall Street.
Sadly, Cheney is today’s Lumpy. He’s the guy full of shit. He and all of his right-wing cronies want us to take our eyes off of the crooks, liars and cheats who work Wall Street , the knot of incompetent and dangerous thugs who nearly brought the entire nation to its knees in late 2008. Rather, they want us to look over the Atlantic, to the perceived enemies of our nation, the zealous religious fanatics who populate the caves and the deserts of Asia.
Never trust a fart. Never trust Dick Cheney. Or, do I repeat myself?
Lumpy
Man With the Muckrake 
Any magician knows that what you want to do is distract someone or control their perception so that they see what you want them to see. Look elsewhere rather than at my hands.
The study of close-up magic is a good introduction to misdirection. Misdirection takes advantage of the limits of the human mind in order to give the wrong picture and memory. The mind can concentrate on only one thing at a time. The magician uses this to manipulate the “victim’s” idea of how the world is supposed to be.
Misdirection in magic may be as simple as a magician rolling up his sleeves and saying “nothing up my sleeve” and then producing an object that could never have been “up his sleeve”. The audience instinctively scrutinizes the magician’s arms, but ignores the actual location where the object-to-be-magically-produced is hidden.
Attention can be controlled in various ways. A magician will first grab attention with a coin, or another small and shiny object A shiny object captures more attention and seems less likely to disappear or to be manipulated. Then attention is directed away from the object (hence, “misdirection”) through a combination of comedy, sleight of hand or an unimportant object of focus, thus providing just enough time for the magician to do whatever he or she wishes to do with the original object.
One of the most important things to remember when thinking about misdirection and magic is this: a larger movement conceals a smaller movement.
Likewise, one needs to beware of the terrorists outside of the US who are attacking it, rather than the people within who are working to destroy it.
That was grand. It’s absolutely accurate to depict Cheney as a stage magician distracting us from reality. Cheney, who has worked incessantly hand in hand with corporations that have relocated to Dubai to avoid complying with American tax laws and make it easier to evade jurisdiction.
Cheney, manipulating the intelligence agencies to construct a environment more economically friendly for his corporate profits….
Funny, I have been writing a series of fictional “history of magic” humorous pieces…I just finished one called “The Great Nudini” but perhaps I’ll spare you that.
No, don’t spare us. But I’ll read it at your blog rather than the comments here.