“Words of wisdom about words used by scammers” is the headline over Elliot Greenblott’s Fraud Watch column today in the Berkshire Eagle. The caption under an accompanying photo reads as follows.

”The author says that the reality is that there are two kinds of people: those who have been scammed and those who will be. Educated people are scammed every day. Scams have no relationship to education or the lack thereof. Scams use emotional ploys to build anxiety, and remove the logic and reason developed through education.”

How about this. There are at least three kinds of people: those who have been scammed, those who will be, and those who will be again and again and again. In this last category are most of the exquisitely propagandized American public, especially the more highly educated members of polite society well attuned to the opinion makers in government and (I know this is redundant) the news media. The O.M.A.—opinion makers of America—can make vast majorities of Americans believe just about everything for as long as it takes, including official accounts of important assassinations,* the “War on Drugs,” and the 9/11 attacks of September 2001. In the latter case the official accounts were so farcical that it took a dollop of anthrax scare (generated from the bowels of a government lab) beginning later that month to distract everyone from the ridiculousness of the Arabs-with-box cutters story.

Often it’s the less educated people who are less prone to swallow what’s handed down by O.M.A. operatives.

Two-thirds of the way through our walk across Massachusetts, Bruce and I had coffee with a fellow who had worked as an investigator in a couple of capacities including in jobs that had something to do with how buildings are made and not made. This retiree, I’ll call him Joe, insisted his favorite Herman Melville novel was The Confidence Man, which takes place mostly on Mississippi River steamboats. Joe said he’d love to teach a course based on it because of how much is revealed about the fraud that has gone on since before Greenblott’s grandfather was born. Including the fraud that led to our 9/11 truth walk and that conversation. He’d have his students start halfway through, read to the end, and then read from the beginning to the middle.

We come across attempted scams every day and usually recognize them. “A primal urge,” Greenblott notes, is often greed. Sometimes it’s fear, as in “emotional ploys to build anxiety.”

— Mark Channing Miller

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* The less important ones we don’t hear about.