There were two stories before Christmas that pointed to the possibility that we are now living in an alternate universe, or have diverged onto a new timeline, or pick your Fringe metaphor.
The first was this piece in the New Statesman by Amelia Tate. It’s about a movie from the 1990s called Shazaam that starred the comedian Sinbad as a genie. Remember it?
You don’t, actually. Because the movie doesn’t exist.
Yet for some strange reason, lots and lots of people do remember that movie. They remember it very specifically. They remember individual scenes and bits of dialogue. They remember rewinding the VHS tapes of it. None of these people know one another. The Sinbad-genie movie is a collective false memory—one of the most interesting and detailed collective false memories in modern times. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the Mandela Effect.
Now, you can choose to believe that the Mandela Effect is born from some witch’s brew of cognitive failures and social psychology. Or you could accept the possibility that at some point shortly after the release of Shazaam, our world jumped timelines into an alternate universe where Shazaam was never made. National Review’s Daniel Foster tweeted, “Have now asked multiple people who haven’t read the Statesman article about Shazaam. I am terrified. Shut down the large hadron collider.”
The second story came courtesy of Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. Bunch was writing in defense of University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler who has, as Bunch delicately puts it, “a fiery liberal persona on social media.” (For samples of what Bunch’s euphemism really means, see here and here and here and here.)
Anyway, Bunch is worried about Butler being persecuted on campus by … wait for it …conservatives. “[W]hen a fellow professor contacted her a few weeks ago and told her she’d been placed on a brand new nationwide ‘professor watch list’ intended to help conservatives identify faculty liberals, Butler felt like rising McCarthyism on America’s campuses just surged to a new high water mark.”
Go read that again: Will Bunch thinks there’s a “rising McCarthyism on America’s campuses” that’s surging “to a new high water mark.” And that it’s the fault of conservatives.
When it comes to alternate realities, I’m not sure which is more far-fetched: Sinbad’s Shazaam or Bunch’s conservative campus bogey-men.
