5 Examples of Americans Thinking Foreign People Are Magic

There's a great article on Cracked.com from October called 5 Examples of Americans Thinking Foreign People Are Magic. Got the link from the depressing hanzi smatter blog (which I got to from a slashdot comment. It tells people what their stupid Chinese tattoo really means).

This is a pretty solid article, and it's only long from the snarkily-captioned images.

But bring the superstition from a foreign culture, and suddenly you are in business. You can apparently still convince a shockingly large portion of the population that you can see the future if you're doing it with Tarot cards. They come from the gypsies after all. Of course, these same people would slap you if you offered to tell their fortune from a standard card deck.

Despite being pretty stupid, feng shui got particularly hot in the 90's, with Donald Trump, Oprah, and firms like Salomon Smith Barney hiring feng shui consultants to maximize their chi. Of course, this is the equivalent of a Chinese Executive pinning 4-leaf clovers all over his office.

Unfortunately, our homegrown homeopathy (not mentioned in the article) breaks the trend: it was invented in a different culture--in time, not in geography--and people still flock to it.

Pity, that.

- RG>