Harry Truman & Jack Benny
Update: I guess not.
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One of my nightly rituals is to pour a cold brew and fire up the iPod dock as I do the dishes. Sometimes I will listen to an audio book, or a podcast, some tunes or some old time radio.
Tonight I picked out a random episode of the Jack Benny Program — I have over a 850 Benny episodes on my iPod, so it is a really random selection. The episode that I happened to pick tonight was originally broadcast on November 6, 1948 — just 4 days after Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey in the greatest upset in American political history.
Benny’s writers put in a couple of gags about the surprising election results. Jack was visiting a psychiatrist (played by Frank Nelson — “Yeeeeeeeeessssss?”). There were two other patients in the office. One fellow thought that he was a rabbit (played by Benny regular Mel Blanc — “What’s up, Doc?”) Another patient was Mr. Gallup, the famous pollster, who was obsessively practicing his arithmetic (“1 plus 1 is 2. 2 plus 2 is 4 . . .”) Gallup, like all the other pollsters got the 1948 election dead wrong.
Is Jack channeling a hint about he 2008 race through my iPod? What are the odds that I would pull up this episode at random? Maybe I subconsciously picked it (the episodes are titled by date), since I’m wild about Harry Truman (David McCullough’s Truman biography inspired me to change my major to History).
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