For about a decade, I was really into conspiracies.
There was Watergate, of course, the great documented conspiracy. I studied Nixon for years; hating him in detail was a great passion. Kennedy is the Big One, natch — I’ve read tons on that one. But this sort of thinking goes back hundreds of years — really thousands. I refer you to Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
It was probably when the Amok Dispatches came out in the late Eighties that I got sucked in. In the early Nineties, I read such zines as Flatland, Crash Collusion, Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader, and Steamshovel Press. There were books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen, The Books of Charles Fort, In God’s Name — Jim Keith’s classic whacked-out Secret and Suppressed.
For a while in the Eighties, I cleaned office buildings at night. I listened to Roy of Hollywood, the overnight show on KPFK, as he played programs with Mae Brussell, John Judge and Nip Tuck & Dave Emory.
At some point, I moved beyond the scene. I’m thinking about it today, because of this article in New York magazine about 9/11 conspiracy theorists. The whole mind-set is a tar pit. When you start questioning the Official Story on anything, you start questioning everything. Connections lie everywhere. Nothing can be trusted. Nothing is accidental, everything is calculated. There is no such thing as coincidence or incompetence, just evil and mystery.
I still find much of it interesting, in the abstract. For example, I loved the book Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles, which is about the scenes surrounding Roswell, New Mexico, and the place called “Area 51,” north of Las Vegas, focusing on the people who made a living off of the notion of conspiracy. Although I haven’t read it, I’m told Jonathan Vankin’s Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes similarly examines those who push the conspiracies.
Reading about conspiracies is one thing. Back in the Eighties, a lot of the stuff was about prior events. There was some attempt to tie it into the Iran-Contra Affair, but it was mostly historical in nature. When people start going on about the attacks of September 11, and how no one ever really saw that plane hit the Pentagon or how there’s no way those Twin Towers could have fallen naturally and how it was really the work of Mossad or Big Oil, I get a visceral reaction.
I get mad.
UPDATE: Okay, this is the kind of crap I’m talking about. Charlie Sheen opined on The Alex Jones Show:
“It seems to me like 19 amateurs with boxcutters taking over four commercial airliners and hitting 75 percent of their targets, that feels like a conspiracy theory. It raises a lot of questions,” Sheen said. “A couple of years ago, it was severely unpopular to talk about any of this. It feels like from the people I talk to, and the research I’ve done and around my circles, it feels like the worm is turning.” Sheen said the collapse of the Twin Towers looked like a “controlled demolition.” The out-there actor also expressed his disbelief over how one of the planes hit the Pentagon. “Just show us how this particular plane pulled off these maneuvers . . . It is up to us to reveal the truth. It is up to us because we owe it to the families, we owe it to the victims, we owe it to everyone’s life who was drastically altered, horrifically, that day and forever. We owe it to them to uncover what happened.”
Dude. The substance of history is often referred to as facts. They are not really subject to how you feel about them. This is often the meat of conspiracies: It doesn’t make sense to me; that’s not how it looked to me; there are unanswered questions.
Tags: conspiracies, Richard Hofstadter, Amok Dispatch, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Charles Fort, Jim Keith, David Darlington, Jonathan Vankin