A friend saw a late-night TV program (or was it an infomercial?), which she swears was on PBS affiliate KCTS. It offered tickets to a free seminar at the Sheraton, which would be all about helping individuals get government loans and grants (for home buying/improvement, business, education, etc.). She couldn’t make it that day, so invited me to attend in her stead. Turned out advance tickets weren’t necessary. Anyone who wanted to could enter the ballroom; about 200 did.

What we all got: Not an info-backed lesson in the grant process but a 2.5-hour sales pitch for a $799 weekend seminar which, according to the salesman, would provide the information we’d been promised to get this day.

It was easy to spot the glib hypemaster’s real agenda from the start. He didn’t matter-of-factly list categories and sources of grants, application tips, etc. Instead, he gave a highly emotionally manipulative marathon spiel. It was a sort of cross between a revival sermon and a medicine-show pitch, illustrated with PowerPoint animated images on a big-screen monitor.

The spiel was heavily seasoned with neuro-linguistic-programming shticks. He frequently asked us all to think about our current lives, then to imagine how much better our lives would be with lots of money, a secure retirement, a new home, a new car, and a business of our own where we’re in control of our own agenda.

Then he proclaimed all this was possible with government money–but that the money is hard to find, hidden among hundreds of agencies (federal, state, local) with thousands of programs, all with different eligibility requirements and application processes. If you try to play the grants game yourself, he insisted, you were doomed from the get-go.

Then he said you could successfully navigate the bureaucratic sea with the help of a profressional grant writer or a specialist attorney on your side–except that anybody who’s any good at the job would charge far more money than most newcomers to the game can afford.

The solution? None other than the company he works for, the Boca Raton, FL-based National Grants Conferences Inc.

With the localized, freshly-updated info you’d get at the conference (and in its documentation and on its members-only website), you could start applying right away for just the right program for you. He even claimed you could grab enough public-trough cash to pay for the conference before its price shows up on your credit-card bill.

At one time, I almost thought his pitch to be semi-plausible; particularly when he warned us that the majority of our grant applications would be turned down, and that we’d have to be persistent and professional about the quest.

But that kind of caveat (as I’d once learned from Jim Rose, when he talked about his days as a pest-control salesman) can really be just part of the carefully crafted pitch. That’s how it turned out, when he revved up his fast-‘n’-loud act for the big finish.

This phase began when he told us how he didn’t used to be the dynamic, charismatic, confident man he told us we were seeing now. He’d been just another schmoe in Rochester, NY, loaded with debts and lacking in self-esteem. Then he went to a seminar about getting rich in real estate with no money down. (You remember, that earlier infomercial fad that collapsed when one of its leading promoters went bankrupt, after too many course-takers demanded refunds.)

That course, he forthrightly pronounced, had changed his life; just as this new course, more detailed and more attuned to present-day opportunities, would assuredly change ours. (But we’d have to Act Now, because space was limited and the best time of the year for submitting applications was drawing nigh.)

But the real clincher, the part where I knew I’d never take the course, came when he switched the big-screen monitor’s image to that now-ubiquitous photo of firefighters raising a U.S. flag at the NYC disaster site. He told the crowd an ever-so-slightly distorted version of one of the post-attack news items–that men allegedly connected to the terrorist network had received a grant to run a crop-dusting operation. The pitchman, in full-aggression mode, challenged us to imagine: If such purely evil people could attain government cash, how much easier could it be for good-hearted, all-American do-gooders such as ourselves? He came just this short of demanding we buy the course as our patriotic duty. The moment was even more tacky and obscene than I relate here.

He closed by exhorting us to rush with all deliberate speed to the front of the room, checkbooks and/or credit cards in hand. Instead, a healthy majority took the opportunity to get the heck outta there.

(This article’s permanent link.)