Ok I have just about had it with those dumbassed Tarot Card ads. I have tried changing channels but they are everywhere! Has anyone else seen these?? A couple of white women are setting around predicting people’s future using the cards and the camera keeps panning back to that fat black woman with the moonpie face, who is grinning like a shit-eating dog and nodding at each prediction with an I-told-you-so look. I can predict her future easily… she will be at a dinner table somewhere choffin on a rib bone.
Of course that will be after a hard days work of fleecing the gullible and superstitous out of their hard earned money.
“I think it speaks to the duality of man sir.”
(private Joker in Full Metal Jacket)
My first job when I moved to Vegas was as a “live psychic”. I basically did Tarot card readings on a 900 line. I really, truly believed in what I was doing at the time…
Then God whacked me upside the head with a two-by-four and let me know in no uncertain terms that he wanted me to be Catholic, so the live psychc gig sort of went out the window…
I was basically a cut-rate psychologist. The cards spell things out in general terms that could be applied to any number of people. What you could call universal problems. I do think I gave people good advice, but the “information” I got from the cards could have been gotten by asking pertintent questions… but I wouldn’t have had the ego stroke of thinking I had a special ability because I knew how to “read the cards”…
Most of the people I got online basically just needed someone to talk to, but didn’t have the traditonal support systems of family, friends, church, etc.
So, for $3.99 a minute, I looked at some pictures on a deck of cards, got a vague general sense of what their problem was, but mostly, I just listened to their problems and gave them general advice based on life experience.
The trouble with Sir Launcelot is by the time he comes riding up, you’ve already married King Arthur.
My problem with psychics is that it isn’t all just harmless listening and advice giving. One of the commercials shows a psychic telling her caller that yes, his wife is fooling around.
One woman I worked with had a aunt that was married to a man who had a history of suicide attempts. This was his second marriage and his family didn’t really like his new wife. One day he took a walk out the window. The cops realized it was suicide from his history. His sister apparently couldn’t accept this and went to a psychic who told her it was’t suicide. So what? His wife killed him? These people can be dangerous and can screw up innocent people’s lives if they’re not careful. Do they care? This one didn’t.
I’ve got the same Tarot deck they use in the ads and what really galls me is the way the “psychics” don’t even try. I mean, you’re supposed to lay the cards out in a very specific pattern, with each position reflecting different aspects of the person’s life, personality, and future. But here they just plunk down 4 cards and say, “Oh the lovers card means you’ve been unfaithful and the page of swords means someone’s mad at you and blah blah blah blah.” They can’t even put on a good show for the camera. I’m not going to pay $3.99 a minute when I can give myself a better reading for free.
“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy
KROQ occasionally has a psychic in-studio (they also bring in hypnotist The Amazing Tom Silver, which is always fun). A few years ago I decided to try a little experiment. I called the psychic at the number they gave on the air to set an appointment. When I had the “reading” I recorded it and wrote down all of the predictions later. After two years (the max length of time for the predictions to happen) I checked the notes.
The results: 100% wrong! You’d think that the law of averages would account for at least a small percentage of “hits”! Conclusion: Psychic predictions are fake.
I saw a show on A&E/TDC/TLC/PBS about “psychics”. A debunker made printed horoscopes for everyone in a class. The class was asked to rate the accuracy of the horoscopes. Every one of the students claimed they were “amazingly accurate” and were in awe that this man could have such insight. Then the man asked the students to pass their horoscopes to the person nest to them. All of the horoscopes were identical!
I don’t think most “psychics” are scamming people. I just think they don’t realize they can’t “see the future”. I think agisofia is correct that people who go to psychics just need someone to talk to. And I guess it’s cheaper than a psychologist.
Hmm… but if the law of averages dictated that the psychic would get some right, but your psychic didn’t get any right, that’s got a statistical significance in and of itself.
What you got there is what we call a “bizarro psychic.” They have an uncanny ability to predict, with amazing precision, events that absolutely will not occur.
It’s less useful than traditional clarivoyance, but we take what we can get.
The funniest tarot card reader I’ve seen was at a half-assed office party last summer–I have no clue as to why she was hired. Anyway, she’d have the person lay out some cards and tell her their birthday and all this other numerology crap until she had a single digit. Then she read the person’s “fortune” off a card she had in her lap, based on the number but supposedly based on the cards. She hadn’t even memorized the fortunes! It was priceless.
Since this sems to be primarily a thread devoted to mocking teevee psychics (and more power to you), I’m at a loss as to why the Tarot is getting dragged into it.
Let’s look at its practical side, if we’re pooh-poohing mysticism…allow me to quote the brilliant Mr. Justin Green, underground cartoonist and author of BINKY BROWN MEETS THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY:
"…but these mental exercises are just child’s play compared to the fantastic mental gymnastics revealed by the Tarot.
"Disguised as a deck of cards, the Tarot is really a multi-dimensional textbook of the Occult Sciences, written in universal picture-symbols.
[illustration of the four modern card suits, the four Tarot suits, the four Elements, and the four letters in the name of God]
"Even non-believers can put it to good use as a method of improving the memory.
[illustration of the Major Arcana card called The Chariot, with one of the harnessed Sphinxes saying “Return monkey wrench to Manny.”]
“However, to those with fractured attention spans the Tarot (like everything else in life) will just be a series of dull pasteboard pictures devoid of any meaning.”
– from the story “Visualization and Concentration” (c. 1974)
Well, Ike, if you have a quick enough mind and a good imagination, you can discern something interesting and even helpful to your memory from anything—the back of a cereal box, street signs, the cover quotes on Cosmo.
But Tarot cards are—in and of themselves—“a series of dull pasteboard pictures devoid of
any meaning.” Or, in my own lexicon, “ba-nanner oil.”
