"Oh, you've gotta be kidding..."

From Slate today:

"Like all good stories, this one begins with a bull humping a cow in the middle of the road. In 1957, Alan Abel, a lecturer and jazz drummer was on his way to a performance in Denton, Texas, when he found himself caught in a traffic jam caused by the aforementioned beasts… [He had an idea] to write a satire about a group called The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA, which would call for animals to be clothed for the sake of decency. Abel submitted his story to the Saturday Evening Post, but when the editors missed the joke and angrily rejected it, he got an even better idea and founded SINA for real in 1959. The agenda: to get Bermuda shorts on horses, dogs, and any animal taller than 4 inches or longer than 6. The battle cry: A nude horse is a rude horse! Thus was launched the career of America's greatest living hoaxer."

The article is about Abel Raises Cain, a documentary now out on DVD. Alan Abel’s hoaxes were all exaggerations of things he saw happening, designed to point out the absurdities. Just looking around today, is the outrage over mothers daring to breastfeed in public that far from wanting to hide animal genitalia? Not really. It makes us wish that some frustrating aspects of our real world would someday be revealed as practical jokes. The article continues...

"When a broke and crime-ridden New York City teetered on the verge of collapse in the 1970s, Abel launched Omar's School for Beggars, which supposedly taught unemployed professionals tactics for successful panhandling. When the uproar surrounding Dr. Kevorkian was reaching fever pitch in the '90s, Abel created a fake company that specialized in "euthanasia cruises." A ship with a greased deck would venture a few hundred miles offshore and then tip slightly, dumping its disconsolate human cargo into the ocean."

The hoaxes are funny, but as the piece points out, the very fact that they were believed (and, at times, fully embraced) is a little depressing.

"We can laugh at the suckers who thought dogs needed pants back in the '50s, but is 2008 really any less fertile ground for hoaxers, benign or otherwise? A squirrel-cooking creationist made a nearly credible bid for the White House. CNN employs an anchor who told viewers that illegal immigrants have caused a leprosy epidemic in the United States. And a couple of weeks ago, the Mississippi state legislators proposed a bill barring restaurants from serving meals to fat people—a push more than a little reminiscent of Abel's 2006 fat tax hoax, which he perpetrated with the help of Esquire."

Buy the movie here.