As you know, in recent days I have been skirmishing with several of the Merry Krewe of the Austin Ghetto Line over the events surrounding 9-11. Most of them, otherwise intelligent and fairly rational people, have a predilection for government conspiracies. If someone shows them a video alleging a new federal outrage, they are well disposed to believe it. No amount of arguing from the other side will sway them from their appointed rounds. Any ideas opposed are condemned as “taking the government position.” It’s remindful of the days of the old L.A. Free Press when the editors there concocted preposterous complex plots the government was pursuing to scorch the earth with incessant wars and cast all the protestors irretrievably into dank dungeons. Even the least significant resistor “had an FBI file” and paranoia reined supreme. Hell, the truth was bad enough. A stumbling, bumbling federal government, deranged at the possibilities of Communist expansionism, took misstep after misstep in a failed attempt to rectify a situation which eventually rectified itself. The leaders of the protest groups were absolutely spied upon and often arrested by various federal factions. “Law enforcement” overkill ran rampant and those of us who engaged in protest demonstrations without being arrested were probably just lucky. That said, the underground newspapers, of which there were many, did nobody any favors by inventing spectacular conspiracies which never existed and juicing up an audience eagerly prepared to swallow every indictment of the government which was served up. Show Them A Light And They’ll Follow It Anywhere.
All of this is strangely remindful of those on the other side of the political spectrum, the fanatics of the Tea Party and their ilk, who truly believe Barack Obama is Darth Vader, a foreign-born infidel come to steal away their precious liberties and turn them over to the spooky “New World Order.” Many of these people are incapable of an original thought—and why expend the effort when you have career-expanding clowns like Rush Limbaugh to make all your decisions for you?
Anyway, I guess we’re fated to contend with The Age Of Conspiracies. Like Chickenman, they’re everywhere. Truth be told, even Bill was once a Conspiracy Theorist.
War Of The Worlds
Although the first UFO sighting in America took place way back in 1639 at Muddy River in Boston, nobody paid much attention to this sort of business until 1957, when a batch of the critters were spotted over Washington state. The hits just kept on coming, with rafts of subsequent sightings reported all over the world. Jets were even scrambled to chase the varmints from the skies over the Capitol. Then, the inevitable: people began to claim they had been abducted by aliens, which came in all sizes and colors. Betty and Barney Hill, a nice, quiet mixed-race couple (NAACP members, even—certainly THEY wouldn’t be looking for undue attention), reported being captured by aliens on a dark road in New Hampshire and subjected to all manner and make of scrutiny by ETs in the popular book Incident At Exeter, a tale related by an author who had discovered all this when he placed the Hills under hypnosis several years later.
I was 17 years old in 1957, God bless the days, and I was fascinated by all this. I probably read 100 books on the subject. I even drove up to Exeter, N.H., which wasn’t very far away from my home town in Massachusetts, to survey the area. The only odd thing I noticed was that it was almost impossible to get a signal on my car radio—it was all static. At the time, of course, there were allegations of UFOs tapping our electrical wires for some unknown purpose so the plot thickened. UFO stuff was published in droves. Eventually, there were the scary and menacing “Men In Black,” nowhere near those jolly affable fellows you see in the movies. The UFO extravaganza reached impossibly unbelievable levels but I, a sane and responsible observer, cast my lot with the more subdued and respectable National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, which gave me the straight poop on the U.S. Air Force’s evil Project Blue Book, a dastardly scheme devised to pull the wool over the eyes of the general public.
To me, there was no doubt the aliens were circling, but to what purpose? Were they here to deliver us from ourselves or to put the human race in chains? I would brook no arguments about these matters—how could anybody be so blind as to ignore all the evidence? What about Socorro? What about Area 51? What about poor old Betty and Barney Hill?
As time passed, of course, and the mania lessened, a gradual reassessment was in order. Many of the witnesses who “had nothing to gain by being perceived as crazy people” turned out to have something to gain after all, as they sold their stories to one fruitcake tabloid after another. Even the Hills and their hypnotist author were eventually discovered to have gaping holes in their stories. Geez, I thought, is nothing sacred? These revelations didn’t mean, of course, that the Air Force, confused and rendered powerless by whatever was up there, didn’t lie about alleged “weather balloons” and that other government mouthpieces didn’t follow suit. Basically, they didn’t know what the hell was happening and didn’t want to admit it, a typical characteristic of governments everywhere. But the more expansive accusations of government shenanigans were overblown and unlikely. And, since not much has really happened for the last 50 years, probably irrelevant. At least we got a few good movies out of the deal.
Lyndon Did It!
In 1963, Jack Kennedy was assassinated. Lee Harvey Oswald, the purported assassin, was then gunned down by the unlikely strip-club proprietor, Jack Ruby, in the bowels of a Dallas courthouse. ALL my friends in Austin, without exception, were positive that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice-President, was involved. After all, Lyndon was well-known for his devious political shenanigans and who knew him better than his Texas constituents?
I was living in Tallahassee at the time, not a year removed from my Austin stint and thus not as engulfed in the tide of accusatory certainty as the Texans. I loved JFK and was as depressed and disenchanted as the next person but Johnson’s demeanor, post-assassination, did not ring of an accomplice to me. But I did read all of the “grassy knoll” suppositions and I did watch all the reenactments of the multiple shots fired from the Texas Schoolbook Depository Building and I was as certain as most that the truth of the disaster had not yet emerged. It seemed inevitable that it would, but as years passed, committees investigated and more authors reached further into the stratosphere for answers, it gradually became apparent the truth would never be known. It seemed that Joe Kennedy’s cultivation of underworld financial help in the election and Robert Kennedy’s later vigorous assault on many of these same people was as likely an answer as anything, but who knew? We were all hoping that Louisiana District Attorney Jim Garrison would shed some light on the subject with the arrest and trial of Clay Shaw in 1969 but Garrison fell flat on his face and Shaw was acquitted one hour after the trial went to the jury. We’ll likely never know what happened, but Lyndon Johnson? No, I don’t think so.
Ten Characteristics Of Conspiracy Theorists (From Urban75.org)
1. Arrogance. They are always fact-seekers, questioners, people who are trying to discover the truth: skeptics are always “sheep”.
2. Relentlessness. They will always go on and on about a conspiracy no matter how little evidence they have to go on or how much of what they say is discredited. They have no capacity for precis whatsoever. They go on and on at enormous length.
3. Inability To Answer Questions. For people who loudly advertise their determination to the principle of questioning everything, they are poor at answering direct questions from skeptics about the claims they make.
4. Fondness For Certain Stock Phrases. These include Cicero’s “cui bono” (of which it can be said that Cicero understood the importance of having evidence to back up allegations). And Conan Doyle’s “Once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—however unlikely—must be the truth.” What these phrases have in common is that they are attempts to absolve their adherents from any responsibility to produce positive, hard evidence themselves.
5. Inability To Employ Or Understand Occam’s Razor. Aided by the principle in #4 (above), conspiracy theorists never notice that the small inconsistencies in the accounts which they reject are dwarfed by the enormous, gaping holes in logic, likelihood and evidence in any alternative account.
6. Inability To Tell Good Evidence From Bad. Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources. The fact that a claim has been made by anybody, anywhere, is enough for them to reproduce it and demand that the questions it raises be answered, as if intellectual enquiry were a matter of responding to every rumor. While they do this, of course, they will claim to have open minds and accuse the skeptics for apparently lacking same.
7. Inability To Withdraw. It’s a rare day when a conspiracy theorist admits that a claim he/she has made has turned out to be without foundation, whether it be the overall claim itself or any of the evidence produced to report it. Moreover, they have a liking for the technique of avoiding discussion of their claims by “swamping”—piling on a whole lot more material rather than responding to the objections skeptics make to the previous lot.
8. Leaping To Conclusions. Conspiracy theorists are very keen to declare the “official” account totally discredited without having remotely enough cause to do so. Of course, this enables them to wheel on the Conan Doyle quote, as in #4 above. Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the “official” account clearly and definitively discredited. It goes without saying that it is not necessary to prove that these inconsistencies are either relevant or that they even definitely exist.
9. Using Previous Conspiracies As Evidence To Support Their Claims. This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna Station Bombings, the Zinoviev Letter and so on in order to try to demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it has “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely.
10. It’s ALWAYS A Conspiracy. And it is, isn’t it? No sooner has the body been discovered, the bomb gone off, than the same people are producing the same old stuff, demanding that there are questions which need to be answered, at the same unbearable length. Because the most important thing about these people is that they are people entirely lacking in discrimination. They cannot tell a good theory from a bad one, they cannot tell good evidence from bad evidence and they cannot tell a good source from a bad one. And for that reason, they always come up with the same answer when they ask the same question. A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at the very least, a bore. (End of list)
Well, pardners—see anybody up there YOU know?
That’s all, folks….
