A Sucker is Born

A famous saying, rightly or wrongly attributed to master 19th century showman P.T. Barnum is of course "There's a sucker born every minute". Extrapolating that to today's population would more accurately state "There's a sucker born every few seconds" or whatever. But the pithy observation is probably even more valid 100+ years later. Consider the following recent high profile examples.

The debacle at Sunday's Dallas Super Bowl, whereby at least 400 patrons whose temporary seating (planned so that the total attendance might set an alltime record--it didn't) wasn't ready and who had to watch on television from an inside club room, resulted in these individuals being promised by the NFL a refund of triple their ticket's face value plus a free ticket to next year's Super Bowl. Nothing so unremarkable until you consider that such face value was $800 or $900 [some paid a lot more to legitimate ticket scalpers, or"brokers"] and counting the cost of travel, etc. many of these people might still not come out even. But the "sucker" element is in the face value itself. For marginal seating and views in a 100,000 seat stadium, people (i.e. suckers) were willing to shell out such sums! We're really in a recession? Maybe for the unlucky bottom 10-20% but apparently there are myriad thousands who whether they can really afford to or not, are caught up in the Super Bowl hype. Suckers indeed.

BTW, wasn't the perfect epitome of Texas size braggadocio gone amok with all the problems Dallas had in putting on the event, seeing George W. ("Mission Accomplished") Bush smugly sitting in a VIP seat?

Anyway, another sucker magnet has been the troubled $65 million Broadway extravaganza Spider- Man Turn Off the Dark. After months beset with mechanical issues, injuries to actors during performances and innumerable delays, the nation's theatre critics finally decided to review the show, although its official opening has been postponed yet again to March 15. The reviews ranged from "incoherent" to "a mess" to "a candidate for the worst musical in history" and you get the picture. But will this sink the show? Probably not--despite generally poor word of mouth to date and extremely high ticket prices up to $270, the show has been selling out and TNB wouldn't bet that this won't continue. One could argue that's it's the intellectually snotty critics vs. the comic strip loving "real Americans" such as TNB's "hero" Glenn Beck who has allegedly seen and loved the show 4 times [maybe he's an investor]. However, isn't this just a perfect instance of another several hundred thousand suckers being ripped off?

Make that a sucker born every millisecond.