Gems of idiocy from 1992 radio interview with AWU's Asher.

I have bought a cassette of Maxine Asher's 1992 appearance on the excruciatingly bad Seattle radio program the Laura Lee Show, which is devoted to the flakiest realms of the paranormal, new-age thinking, etc. The cassette arrived today, and I tortured myself this afternoon listening to it, which was rather like listening to fingernails scratching a chalkboard for four hours.

Early in the interview, Asher announces, "Okay, first of all, I need to tell your audience, and of course you know this, that I am from the academic community. I am president of a university, and I have many degrees and credentials, so when I speak about Atlantis, I do not speak about it in any mystical way." (Her new-found position as a "university president" was of course self-appointed, following decades teaching grade-school students and middle-school social studies students. Those poor tykes!)

The following was I thought the best part of the show:

"LAURA: Are you saying that there is certain suppression of certain evidence to support....

"MAXINE: (Interrrupting, which she does constantly.) There are thousands of people in this country, and certainly my own daughter, Susan, who lives in Seattle and is listening tonight, who realize what happened to me during the time that I was actively searching for Atlantis, although I still am, in 1973, I was kidnapped, there were murder attempts on my life, I was bankrupted, I was smeared in the press everywhere. Lest you think that, you know, paranoid, it has happened to other people, Dr. J. Manson Valentine who discovered the Bimini blocks and who is still alive in Florida had the same sort of thing happen to him. Anyone who is scientifically, not psychically, but scientifically searching for Atlantis usually doesn't make it. They're either killed, discredited, bankrupted.... I'm a survivor, Laura.

"LAURA: I guess."

Lest we fear that this truth-teller's life was one of unrelenting woe, at the time of this radio show she was looking forward to an appearance on "Unsolved Mysteries" (who would look forward to that?). I don't know if that appearance ever happened, but she said, "I hope after 'Unsolved Mysteries' makes their show that we can make a movie of the week because NOBODY has EVER been through anything like what I've survived. (....) We had telephone taps...my mail was aborted. I mean it just, and not just in one year, but it's gone on for some time."

With all the resultant worldwide excitement about Atlantis that would result from Asher's appearances, she hoped that they might get a computer and crunch together the "tens of thousands" of pieces of evidence about Atlantis: "all this data, psychic and scientific."

The program dealt with every sort of quackery you can imagine, and Asher posed as an expert on all sorts of scientific and scholarly disciplines--geology, oceanography, etc. Since she had dealings with the son of the soothsayer Edgar Cayce, she couldn't resist telling the listeners, "I've been so close to the Cayces, I even slept in Edgar Cayce's bed, would you believe. I mean, he was dead."

Just listening to her go on and on and on for hours, with the host barely able to get a word in edgewise, is enough to make you scream. If y'all have ever heard of the famous monologuist Ruth Draper, Asher sounds and talks just like Draper's character in the piece "Doctors and Diets" droning on and on about crazy fad diets and quack medical treatments--like doctors prescribing the color purple to a patient who is just "starved" for purple. Really, the similarity is just amazing.

 

I certainly appreciate the effort it took to write that review, but why on earth would you spend money to listen to.....that?

Bruce

 

Perhaps to confirm one's opinion of the supposed credibility/legitimacy of the World Association of Universities and Colleges.

Russell

 

Ed Wood, Jr. comes to mind, for some reason.