You Can’t Miss What You Never Had
Everyone in America was apparently glued to the television last Thursday, when it appeared that a young boy had been carried aloft by a weather balloon that proceeded to float across eastern Colorado and land in the middle of a farm. Admittedly, it makes for a dramatic story, particularly when it was accompanied by live video. As the balloon drifted toward high-voltage power lines, I can understand how so many would feel so much anxiety for the safety of that boy.
We know now, however, that it was a hoax perpetrated by the child’s whore parents, in a shameful effort to attract attention they could parlay into a “reality” television deal.
Hearing about this fraud instantly brought a host of questions to mind. Did these people think they were going to get away with it? Do they have any concept of morality? Does it bother them that, across the country last week, millions of genuinely anxious people wasted millions of honest prayers? Is this how far our society has degenerated?
The answers to the first three questions are: apparently; apparently not; and I don’t know. I was tempted to believe that the answer to the last question was a resounding yes – that our society has, in fact, been driven to the point of moral bankruptcy in the short span of our living memory.
Then yesterday Wikipedia stepped forward unexpectedly to challenge my perceptions. It reaffirmed that we are indeed living in an age of depravity, but it moved the date of our moral degradation back nearly three hundred years, to 1726, to be precise. In that year, a woman from Surry named Mary Toft perpetrated a hoax that seems so obviously unbelievable, so completely ridiculous, that it is hard to believe anyone could have fallen for it. And yet people did, and some paid dearly for it.
Mary Toft suffered a miscarriage. That much is true, and that much is surely worthy of pity. But Mary Toft took things to another level. A totally crazy level. There’s no polite way to tell what she did, but, put simply, she cut up some rabbits and stuck them in her hoo-hoo, and then claimed to give birth to rabbits. Some doctors heard of this and went to see her, and when they pulled more parts of rabbits from her hoo-hoo, they thought, “hey, this lady’s full of bunny babies!” Now, you and I would immediately suspect something was amiss, because we know that there just wasn’t enough time since her miscarriage to carry rabbits to full term. Also, people cannot give birth to rabbits. But some people believed her. In fact, some people had the hilariously ignorant idea that a woman could give birth to whatever she had been around. So, let a cat sleep on your bed, and you’re going to deliver a kitten baby. When the hoax was discovered (and I can’t believe it took as long as it did), the reputation of a prominent doctor was ruined, and the medical profession in general suffered.
So, let us not grieve for our lately-departed sense of decency; it has been dead for a long time.
UPDATE – 23 December 2009: The parents of “Balloon Boy” (a sort-of inaccurate name) were sentenced to time in jail today, and prohibited from profiting from their story for four years.
Filed under: Current Events, History, Musings on October 21st, 2009 | No Comments »