Geoffrey Chaucer

Catch Me If You Can is a 2002 American crime film based on the life of Frank Abagnale Jr., who, before his 19th birthday, successfully conned millions of dollars by posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor and Louisiana attorney and parish prosecutor. His primary crime was cheque forgery, becoming so skillful that the FBI eventually turned to him for help in catching other cheque forgers. (Wiki)

This is one of those flicks they play constantly on basic cable. Instead of once a week it is down to once a month showing now. I finally watched it all the way through. It is a wonderful film.

DeCaprio plays a teen whose father is a loser. The elder Abagnale picks up this French lady during the war and brings her home as his bride. Walken plays daddy and is a Willy Loman kind of fellow with a strange view of the world and America and his lady quickly walks out of this strange dream as fortunes fade.

DeCaprio, who has purchased his father's strange visions concerning how the world works , runs away by kiting some forged checks and finds his calling.  It was a lot easier in 1959 to forge and kite checks and as Frank, we quickly see that he is a genius.

Like the character of Chaucer in the fictional film A Knight's Tale, Frank Abagnale forges documents as he traverses the world in a various number of guises. Frank pretends to be a pilot but never actually flies a plane. He feigns to be a doctor but never really practices medicine. He becomes an attorney by passing the Louisiana Bar Exam after studying an entire two weeks and watching Perry Mason on the tellie.

Frank is best as an attorney since anyone can pretend to be an attorney. I mean beckerhead and rush and hannity and all of the right wing nuts pretend to know something about the law.

And real lawyers like Bybee and Yoo just make the law up as they go along anyway.

I recall when they first advertised this movie and I thought it was a remake of a film made 4 decades earlier starring Tony Curtis.

 Tony Curtis played Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. (December 21, 1921[1][2] - June 7, 1982), known as "the Great Impostor", masqueraded as many people from monks to surgeons to prison wardens. (WIKI)

Like Frank Abagnale, Ferdinand Demara was a real person; a genuine imposter.

Demara is born twenty years earlier than Frank and starts his strange adventures at about the same age. He becomes a monk and then jumps into WWII as an enlistee.

But like his stints at the monasteries, Demara goes AWOL as an enlistee a couple times from different services. Hahahaha! They catch him eventually and he ends up in the slammer for 18 months.

Ferdinand then begins to borrow other people's names and becomes a psychologist, a surgeon,  a religious counselor and he even tried his hand at a little acting.

The irony of all this, which is why Crichton wrote The Great Imposter, in the first place, was that unlike Abagnale, Demara was a great surgeon. Hahaha

Anyhow both bios are interesting reads and I like both films.

We are all in love with imposters. I mean so many books and films and TV dramas highlight imposters with plots encompassing their chicanery.

My first thoughts concerning these imposters are epistemological in nature.

How do we know what we know?

Most of us just walk into a medical clinic and assume the fellow with the thingy around her neck is a doctor.

Most of us walk into a lawyer's office and assume the silly certificates on the wall demonstrate much learning and besides your buddy Stinkey told you this guy was really, really good defending grass busts.

Most of us walk into 7-11's and assume the clerk knows how to properly print out a purchase money order for thirty bucks and you never carry your glasses with you and so you sign it naming the internet company as the payee and discover later that the purchase money order was made out for forty dollars and you do not have ten bucks left to go back and do the right thing so you stay away from that 7-11 for awhile.  But I digress.

Back to epistemology.

The best we could ever really do in the old days, anyway, was to find a professional by way of a referral from a friend. Most of us just feel too damn clever and worldly to rely on an advertisement.

Now of course we could just do a little research on the internet.

We as a society have always been leery of professionals so societies invented certifications.

The state certifies doctors and lawyers and accountants to be sure. But that is not good enough.

I recall the hubbub involved with that repub plant known as Joe the Plumber a couple years ago. Joe steps out of the crowd in an attempt to humiliate the Democratic Nominee like the first lead character stepped out of the Chorus in the play by Aeschylus.  

You want to raise taxes on people who make over $250,000.00 a year, someone like me who is just getting ready to set up his own plumbing business and why do that if you are just going to raise my taxes, says the actor.

And MSM as usual makes an ass out itself and an ass out of America. Instead of simply telling us through normal journalistic means that the guy never made over thirty grand in any year since he answered orders for burgers and fries, we are told that Joe (Who wasn't even Joe) does not even have a license to plumb.

 What the hell did that fact have to do with anything? I am supposed to be aghast that Joe does not have a degree from Yale in Plumbing when the lying son of a bitch was merely a plant in the first place?

Then I get into this lottery dream of America that is given to us by the corporate pigs who run the media. The message that only in America can you work hard and earn a million bucks as long as you never have an abortion or use drugs.

We have this need to certify our plumbers and license those who mow our lawns. We need to be certain that our universe is well ordered and safe.

So we certify corporate accountants who end up helping the corporations cheat on their books and cheat on their taxes.

We certify oil companies to drill our wells so that they can make billions when things pan out and negotiate so that they can escape responsibility for the lies they wrote when they procured those certificates.

We certify attorneys so that they can sit in the White House and make up arguments for torture and unlawful wiretaps.

We certify doctors so that they can bear false witness against their neighbors by testifying in civil suits on behalf of companies who pollute our ground waters and marshes, or on behalf of prescription companies who poison our children.

We certify meteorologists so that they can provide fronts for international corporations who could give one goddamn about our environment.

We certify Wall Street traders so that they not only can win their billions on the basis of inside information as they have for the last two centuries but now can lie, cheat and steal openly using software dedicated to the proposition that the common investors are nothing but suckers.  And suckers never deserve an even break.

We even certify educators who would include myths in our science textbooks.

Certification.

How is that working out for you, exactly?