Presidents and Patterns

I know Big Cosmo better than you do. Yeah, people are always bitchin' about him rolling too many sevens. Usually after he cleans their clock. Ha, ha, ha. But he's just lucky. Not that there is such a thing as luck, if you listen to them Vegas eggheads. It's all just dumb chance. Ha, ha, ha.-- overheard at the Domino Bar and Grille

When I was little my mother, who as a high school student had been traumatized by the murder of President Kennedy and as early as I can remember worked on transmitting the momentousness of that event to my tiny mind, opened my first window on the genuine weirdness of the world, by which I mean the weirdness that happens in real life rather than in books and movies (which even as a child I vaguely understood somehow not to be the real world, even though I thought the actors were tiny people inside the TV screen and was scared to death by the "money shots" in the old Hammer horror films that seemed so often to be showing at our house long before the creation of DVDs, Blockbuster, or even TV remote controls).

But I'd better find the thread again before I become mired in sorrowful contemplation of my age. Sometimes when weaving her recollections of that shattering day in Dallas my mother would mention a strange little quirk of American presidential history variously known as "The Presidents' (or The Presidential) Curse", "The Curse of the Zero Year", or (since in America nothing even remotely unusual can be permitted to occur without some country-fried raconteur dragging in dime-novel Native American hoodoo), "Tecumseh's Curse": the fact that U.S. presidents elected in years ending in zero (like 1840) do not finish their terms but die in office.

This "curse" hasn't afflicted every eligible president since the founding of the Republic in 1788, but it has hit more often than it's missed. As of this writing (2008) it will take another 52 years for the number of survivors to balance out the victims -- assuming, of course, that everyone from George W. Bush onward makes it out alive (and assuming that 52 years from now U.S. presidents are still being elected). I'd put the roster here for your convenience but I can't get the table to format right, so here's a nice concise summary from Wikipedia.

Of 11 eligible presidents, 7 have been stricken, all during the 120 year period from 1840 to 1960. Some people try to milk the phenomenon for maximum effect by including Reagan as number 8 on the grounds that he was nearly killed and if he'd been shot before contemporary medical advances he would have died, or that the wound accelerated his Alzheimer's disease and left him effectively brain dead before the expiration of his term. I suppose you could (very tenuously) shoehorn John Quincy Adams in as well, since after leaving the presidency he pulled the unique stunt among presidents of going back into the minor league of the House of Representatives and did die in that office, died in the Capitol Building in fact. If Bush II finishes out his term, as I suspect he will, one could point out that he was not technically elected in 2000. So by Enronning the numbers in this way you could say that the curse has stricken 9 out of 10 eligible presidents, with the tarnished sage of Monticello being the only one to escape; but given the circumstances of Jefferson's death when it finally did come, perhaps in him the mystical workings of the universe had other fish to fry.

Personally I think the curse, if there is one, has run its course, but that's for another post.

When I was younger and had not yet started busting holes in the wallboard of my brain I used to believe very strongly in this baleful spell on the presidents, because it is so obvious! Not even the most jihadist skeptic can deny that all seven of the stricken presidents were elected in zero years and that every one of them died in office, one after the other, like a row of dominoes. On that bet even the Amazing Randi would lose his million dollar shirt. Proof positive, Punkin!!!

But of course no one questions the fact that it happened, but only whether there's any mystical import in it happening. A number of smart people who don't believe in mystical import, but who haven't had the opportunity to prove it by popping the back off the cosmos and examining the clockwork, use probabilities or the law of averages or whatever you call it to support their belief that there is nothing to see in the string of White House fatalities. Naturally the arguments vary in skill, cogency, and thoroughness depending on the author, but they all boil down, if I understand them correctly, to this idea: statistically it isn't very remarkable for presidents to die in office, particularly in the medically unsophisticated past, and so there is no curse, pattern, or any other organized process at work. The facts that all of the deaths but one affected zero-year presidents, and that 31 of the 32 non-zero year presidents did not die in office, are an interesting curiosity but a meaningless coincidence.

I can't effectively argue against this because I have no skill in math and no training in statistics. I'm not even sure I want to argue against it because I'm not sure it's wrong. I used to believe very strongly in the curse, but I don't so much any more; at least I don't feel so passionate that it proves anything. But it has always seemed to me -- and I admit quite openly that I have a damaged brain which is configured to think magically and struggles against any other mode of thought -- that the authors of the mathematical analyses devised to explain these things away, however exhaustive they may be, in the end always fail to pierce to the heart of the matter: their entire solution lies in calculating the odds; that done, they see no significance when the outcome keeps skewing one way. Gamblers may find it meaningful when the same numbers come up over and over again, but statistical analysis doesn't.

But what if the universe is playing with loaded dice? Of course rational people discard that idea at once, but to my goblin-infested mind it's as likely as the alternative, and so I can't help feeling that maybe the skewing is the most important part of all because it might hint at a concealed truth or underlying mechanism that casual observation does not perceive: a wax-filled hole, shaved edges, an ace up the sleeve. The preliminary number-crunching of the statisticians is trivia, or perhaps a smokescreen.

So the smokescreen whispers that no meaning lies in the fact that between 1840 and 1960 every one of the seven presidents elected in a zero year died in office, while of the twenty other presidents serving during that same period only one died. It's just the luck of the draw, and if somehow the clock were turned back and the period were run through again maybe McKinley and Garfield would live and Buchanan, Cleveland, and Coolidge would die. I understand the reasoning in this (at least I think I do), but I can't accept it. I literally experience (or at least used to experience, when I was younger and took these things more seriously) a physical aversion to the idea that this is random chance. I suppose it's the God Gene at work, warning my inner cavewoman to flee to the safety of Woowooland.

My big stumbling block, the obstacle I cannot get over, is the fact that, however else the history of the presidents might conceivably have played out, it didn't play out in any of those other ways but in this way. Maybe Harrison could have lived, but he didn't. Maybe Lincoln could have lived, but he didn't. Any of the other zero year presidents could have lived, but none of them did, and given these mortality rates the survival of the other twenty (minus poor Rough 'n Ready) stands out even more sharply. To me the statistics demonstrably have it wrong: it is not particularly common for presidents to die in office; obviously most of them don't do it! unless they are elected in a zero year.

Of course my brain resembles a sodden swiss cheese, and even simple thoughts are sometimes a struggle for me, but it genuinely appears to me that the 'reality-based' argument is fantastic, in the old sense of being an imaginative flight of fancy unconstrained by reality. To my mind my view is the stronger because it is based on the evidence, on reality, on what actually happened. When the rationalist argument speaks I hear it telling me to pay no attention to the elephant in the middle of the room; I hear it telling me that woulda-coulda-shoulda is more substantial than reality; I hear it telling me to forget what actually happened because what really matters is what theoretically might have happened! The rationalist argument, however perfect it may objectively be, seems to me to be counterintuitive, topsy turvy, and just plain wrong.

The rational argument would, if I understand it right, counter with the assertion that my view is wrong because the reality I think I see isn't really there. The human mind is designed by nature to impose order on chaos, to see patterns where they don't exist. The fact that all of the presidents who have died have been elected in zero years is just a fluke.

But what is order? What is chaos? What constitutes a pattern? Nature is full of order and patterns and symmetries imposed by some primordial mechanism, from the formation of ice crystals or the number of seeds in a sunflower to the periods of the tides and the movement of the heavens. No one questions this so long as it merely affects atoms, rocks, plants, waves, galaxies and things like that. But when it becomes a question of human history arranging itself in patterns, or of some cosmic clockwork ordering the movement of individual free will, the orderly, patterned universe suddenly gets hit on the head and becomes random and chaotic.

I have to concede the possibility that my mind is imposing a pattern on something that has no pattern, but it seems to me that the converse has an equal chance of being true: that it is possible for one to deny the existence of a pattern that is actually there, either because one wishes not to see it, or, more likely -- are there evolutionary misfits with a Spock Gene? -- because one's brain simply is not configured to see it, just as a colorblind eye stares at the green petri dish on the test card and cannot see the little pink squiggles in it. You can scream at me all you want that you and your buddies aren't really colorblind and that I'm stupid, simplistic, and crazy, but it's not going to convince me. I'm not convinced that I'm right either. I used to feel certain, but now I just feel confused.

How do you find the tiger in the forest when half of your hunters are hallucinating and the other half are colorblind?