Crossing Over
I don't watch TV, generally, but my mom got me to watch Crossing Over with John Edward, which was impressive, but didn't really shake my impression that John Edward is a cold reader. Is there anyone today with the stature of Houdini who could go head-to-head with the television mediums by imitating their work?
One of the difficulties is that people who go to appear on John Edward's show are eager to be read by him and enthusiastic when he reads them -- and in general they believe or suspect that he has the ability to do that. So there's a difference between the reaction of a subject who takes the reader seriously as a psychic and the reaction of a subject who's just been told by the reader that the reader is a charlatan.
This alone could make this sort of competition impractical. Houdini could compete on spirit manifestations, because the spirit manifestations could be observed regardless of whether you believed in them, and they had no connection to the mental or emotional state of the participants in a seance. So one medium could produce a particular manifestation and Houdini could produce the same manifestation and then everyone except Arthur Conan Doyle would think that Houdini had debunked the medium. (Doyle, according to Gardner, would conclude instead that Houdini was a medium as well, despite Houdini's protestations to the contrary.)
This pattern doesn't cross over, so to speak, to Edward's style of mediumship. Here so much of the significance is in the subjects' reactions to the readings -- if they exclaim "Yes, my cousin Laura!" or "Oh, yes, that's my wife!" we think that Edward is doing a good job. If they care, we think so all the more. If a skeptical mentalist could do "the same reading", the subjects couldn't sustain the same sort of enthusiasm and interest. For all the power of the suspension of disbelief, we still perceive a difference between watching a play in which firefighters struggle to extinguish a blaze and observing that the theater we're in has just caught fire.
One of the most obvious manifestations of this difference is that almost all of Edward's subjects conceive of themselves as his allies: he's helping them get in touch with their lost loved ones. This is something for which they are profoundly grateful and something for which they may have waited for a long time. Everyone in the show I saw was certainly exhibiting this attitude. There were no challenges to the medium's authority or veracity, no criticism of him, no specific questions from the subjects to test him (Rosabelle, believe!).
I just can't imagine admittedly-fraudulent mediums' subjects showing that same sort of gratitude, co-operation, and encouragement!
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