660: Hoaxing Yourself
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Parents, here is all the evidence you need. The TV is bad for kids, especially public TV. When Sean was 14, he loved watching those British TV shows. They're always running on PBS, Masterpiece Theater, Doctor Who. And then there was this show that I would stay up really late and watch and tape and watch over and over again the tapes called Dempsey and Make Peace, which was about an American detective who went to London because he had been set up at home. And he was teamed up with a woman who was this aristocrat named Lady Harriet Make Peace. And I was really on her side, you know, she's got it going on. You looked down on the American. Oh yeah. What Sean liked about Lady Harriet Make Peace and all the other Brits on TV was their aloofness, how they seemed above it all, how they looked down on Americans. But Sean did also convince there must be something wrong with the nation that produced jocks and bullies who were asked him in school. And sometimes, joking around with his friends, he would talk with the British accent. And then it was just something that spiraled out of control. I know that eventually I was just using an English accent literally from waking to sleeping, morning, noon and night. Sean spoke with the British accent from the time he was 14 until he was 16. And at some point his mom thought, you know, maybe I need to do something about this and took him to see a psychiatrist. He was just really, he must, I don't know, you know, the different schools of psychology, but he was really very confrontive. And he was like, well, you know, you've got to stop doing this, he said, because you're not British, you know. And my mom, my mom just sort of sat over next to me and she sort of went, yeah, to agree with him and, you know, sort of help him in showing me this. Sean was furious. He had an emotional lecture with the guy on how, in fact, he was British. And the only problem with that was that, A, he knew very well that he was not, and B, his mom was sitting right there. She was sure to contradict him. He didn't know what to do, his situation seemed impossible, because that's what I was thinking, like, there has to be a way that I can be British still. There must be a way that this is true somehow. Yeah, exactly. But in the inner radio program, stories of people who tell a lie, and they get to the point where they believe the lie more than anybody else does, it feels like it must be true. It happens all the time, and, kind of, say we are not even going to get into what happens with political figures in this show, kidding themselves about the facts of things. Today, we have stories of civilians, people like you and me, basically pulling hoaxes on ourselves. From WBC Chicago to this American life, I'm Ira Glass. Like one of our programs today, the sun never sets on the Moosewood restaurant, in which two young men, both from small towns, try on new identities, false identities, and what they have to do to keep the lies going. Act two, conning the con men, Nancy Updike reports on a federal sting operation and how it caught con men by setting up a con of its own.
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