Shrugging off the Mandela Effect
Recently, the astounding shift in reality, known as the Mandela Effect, has been brought to my attention. This is apparently the merging of parallel universes. Somebody, somewhere, has built an engine that has altered our reality—or so the premise goes. Or perhaps there are time travelers involved who have gone back and remade c
ertain aspects of our culture—this, of course, could be some kind of Butterfly Effect. How do we know? By searching our memories for things that aren’t what they used to be. How cool is that?
The prime examples are a quote from Forrest Gump, which we all remember as “Life is like a box of chocolates.” With the shift in reality, the quote has now become, “Life was like a box of chocolates.” Astounding! What? Except when you actually hear the full quote, “Mama always said ‘life was like a box of chocolates,’” it kinda falls into place, with the verb agreement and all.
Another example is Anne Rice’s breakout book, “Interview with the Vampire.” On the Interwebs, you can hear everyone from David Letterman to the author herself call the book and film, “Interview with a Vampire.” This one is a little weak, as the th’s in with and the tend to run together, and I guess at that point, the listener can hear what he or she wants.
Need more convincing? What’s the last name of My Baloney? It’s not M-E-Y-E-R, but M-A-Y-E-R. The books about the bear family were not written by Stan and Jan Berenstein, but Berenstain. Bears in the Night from 1971 remains one of my favorites. What would you expect from a horror-thriller writer?
Of course the most telling example, and where the conspiracy theory gets its name, is the fact that many, many people recall Nelson Mandela dying in prison sometime in the 1980s. For me, this is where the interesting shift to a parallel reality fell apart.
How the part about the triumphant rise of a political prisoner to president of his country gets shorn from the memory is kind of strange. At least to me. How can that kind of irony slip the mind?
What I recall is a great deal of resentment and anger about Apartheid, especially here in the Bay Area. The state of California divested itself of all South African investments, Bank of America, B of A, was referred to as the Blood of Africa. I remember people singing protest songs like “(Free) Nelson Mandela,” and “(I Ain’t Gonna Play) Sun City.” The man himself filled the Oakland Coliseum in a 1990 visit. He was kind of a big deal—so big that this memory lapse is beyond me.
And thus the obvious answer—Mandela died in a timeline other than the one we occupy. Well, maybe the one you occupy.
There is, of course, a reasonable explanation for this, with a psychological name that I don’t know, regarding the instability of memory and collective misremembering. Bottom line—memory is not a concrete thing, and so the facts that you remember haven’t changed. Your memory has changed. This is why you hear about eye witness testimony being of little use to police, instances of “repressed memory” and so on.
For me, the shielding of my brain from this phenomenon (beyond remembering Mandela being in town following his supposed death some years previous) is pretty mundane. While I am often accused of being a die-hard skeptic, that’s not the thing. It’s because I am terrible at spelling, and over the years, I’ve become a careful editor. For instance, I always have to look up whether the fast food joint is spelled McDonald’s or MacDonald’s. In fact, to be sure, I’d have to look it up now.
Many of the examples of the Mandela Effect are this kind of thing—differing appearances of company logos, spellings of product names and re-wording of well-known titles and quotes.
Years spent looking up the actual spellings of words, names and so on for the purpose of accurate publication has made look at words somewhat mindfully. Some anal-retentive switch kicks on when I see things like Froot Loops (nope, they’re not Fruit Loops), Jonny Quest (nope, he wasn’t Johnny) and Reddi Wip (which is neither Ready nor Whip). People recall the Chick-Fil-A restaurant actually being spelled Chic-Fil-A, though at some point I can’t imagine not joking about either the chicness of the restaurant or doing Le Freak in the parking lot (ahhhhhh—freak out!).
So in this interesting new conspiracy theory, I’m left without even the momentary suspension of belief. Perhaps your world is currently being rocked, as, apparently, words in the Bible have been changed due to this interdimensional merge. Are there demons at play at the nexus of multiple dimensions?
But I’m still standing on solid ground. I can fully recall in my youth watching Jonny Quest and Looney Tunes (not Toons), purchasing Interview with the Vampire (soon after, leaving it in someone’s car, and purchasing a replacement used copy at Moe’s Books in Berkeley with the article fully intact on each cover) and I remember the exchange between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back:
DV: Obi Wan never told you what happened to your father.
LS: He told me enough. He told me you killed him.
DV: No, I am your father.
(Cue Darth Vader theme)
On the off chance that I’m wrong about all this, I would like to take this opportunity to formally welcome all of you from that other dimension. Sorry, we don’t have your favorite Jiffy peanut butter or Captain Crunch here.
