The nineteenth century offered a fertile field for the traveling salesman. As Americans spread across the continent, retailers stretched to keep up with them, and in many cases that was most efficiently done by peddling. Services and goods of all kinds were offered on the streets and in town squares by men just off the last train.
Most notorious of all of these salesmen was the one peddling the miracle cures, the snake oil salesman, the man with the medicine show. While for the most part the traveling salesman actually had a product with genuine utility (whether it was brushes, tools, or buttons), the wares of the medicine merchant rarely worked as advertised and often harmed the very people conned into buying. Frequently, the miracle potion was laced with opium, cocaine, or some other drug that gave a temporary euphoria while providing no cure. Dangerously, the magic elixir could lead to addiction.
Since these medicine showmen were unknown to their customers they had the tough task of gaining the interest and trust of their audience. They did their best to look good and sound good and entertain the crowd. Most of all, they needed to convince people that they had a problem, a big problem, a problem for which, luckily for the people of the town, the salesmen just happened to have the solution. The facts did not matter; assertions and promises were taken for facts. The trick was to get people worked up and then clinch the sale before the customers had time to give a second thought to what they were doing or a chance to look into the details. Bring phony testimonials onto the stage, but do not let potential customers talk with real people who had been “helped” before in this or some other town.
The medicine show seems back in style today, employing all of the advances of modern communications technology to play to an entire nation. Barack Obama, sounding good and looking good and giving a good performance, remains surprisingly unknown beyond his shallow stardom. With the help of a legion of shills, he is trying to overcome the thin trust he has with Americans and convince them that they are sick and getting much sicker. He tells the people that their healthcare system is broken, and his shills repeat the line in the media. He promises that the government—which has notoriously abused patients trapped in existing government-run healthcare programs like Medicare, military healthcare, and veterans health programs—can do better than the private system that most people choose and like. And he claims that the price is right, that this government healthcare will be better for less, that the new nationwide government programs will save money even by spending more.
In the crowd of every medicine show there is bound to be someone with the nerve to holler, “Quack!” The salesman will desperately try to divert the audience, urging listeners to pay no attention to the nay-sayers. If that does not work, then the salesman will try to get the crowd to drown out the contrary voices and start the medicine bottles moving. Congress has been incessantly urged by the White House to pass the new government program right away, first by August, and at least before the end of the year, because, well just because. The debate is over, we are told; it is now time to vote. The plan fans who do not want to debate anymore are eager to silence the critics who point to the obvious flaws, who ask how government’s failures with current healthcare programs qualify it to take on more, how spending trillions of dollars extra will reduce costs, how cutting half a trillion dollars from Medicare will not harm services. Do not slow down and think about what we are doing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, the great and powerful Oz has spoken.
In the 1800s, the medicine shows did their harm, but most people were not deceived. When the quacks were not chased out of town, their audiences at last just turned away.
