Soften the Target
While I was in high school, I became fascinated with the assassination of President Kennedy. I found books about the “grassy knoll”, the difficulty of firing Oswald’s bolt-action rifle quickly and accurately, and all of the failures of the Secret Service leading up to the shootings. I read parts of the Warren Commission report, itself controversial. And I marveled at the “magic bullet”, found whole and pristine on the stretcher beside the President’s body. And ultimately I saw the Zapruder film, with the motions of the tragically targeted President so discordant with the described attack.
How could one crazed man change the world? How could Lee Harvey Oswald so dramatically divert our history? And later, in 1968, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan would each do the same, pushing our nation away from “good” and into disorder. Shouldn’t it take more than just one man to deflect the world? There must be some conspiracy, some greater force behind these crimes, isn’t there?
Plausible “Facts”
I became a conspiracy theorist. I looked for phantoms behind the grassy knoll. It didn’t help that a couple of years after I graduated, the US House of Representatives established a committee to re-investigate the shooting. They heard a fourth shot on an open police radio mike, “proving” that Oswald couldn’t have been a lone gunman. I went down the rabbit hole: was it the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson himself, the FBI, the CIA, the Defense industry, the Cubans? I looked forward to 2014 when “all” the information would be released – and then we would finally know.
Well “all” the information wasn’t released a few years ago, and we still don’t know. But I’ve found that once you enter the contorted world of conspiracies it’s easy to slip farther into the trap. “Facts” become fiction, theories evolve into “facts”. But, in the end, all of great “construct” of explanations are based in sand. A single wave, and it’s all washed away.
There are other great historic conspiracies. Did Franklin Roosevelt “allow” Pearl Harbor to be attacked? What about Unidentified Flying Objects? They all sound compelling, with just enough circumstantial evidence to make them seem real.
September 11
But after 9-11, a more insidious conspiracy theory crept into American life. I think we were shocked that our nation was so vulnerable to terrorists with box cutters willing to die. So we searched from some other alternative. How could such great buildings, the twin towers, fall so quickly? How could a single plane do such damage to the Pentagon? Why didn’t our air defenses protect us from our own passenger airliners?
The answers were in the clear. The buildings fell, because their design did not include a fully fueled plane striking them in the middle. The nation’s air defense did not include a passenger airliner scenario, in spite of the Tom Clancy novel outlining that exact attack strategy on the Capitol Building. We got caught, wide open and vulnerable.
After 9-11, there was a growing list of conspiracy theorists, all claiming some darker insidious force behind the attacks beyond Bin Laden. And unlike my Kennedy obsession, you didn’t have to go to the library to find alternative explanations. There was a new force, the Internet. It brought compelling theories into your home. Grainy video was enlarged, slowed, and perhaps altered, to demonstrate why “the theory” was really fact. And you could watch them at your leisure, over and over again.
The 9-11 conspiracies became a business. Advertising was linked to the presentations, and even more elaborate constructs were available by “just one more click”. While most Americans continue to believe that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us, a growing segment grew to doubt what they saw with their own eyes on that sunny morning in September. They believed that their government was lying to them, was corrupted by the “unseen” forces for financial gain.
In Your Pocket
“Information” is now omnipresent. We can access it at any given moment. We stand in line and view it on our phones, see it on Netflix, hear it on podcasts. Our main method of learning about the world has unlimited bandwidth, and is filled with what Kelly Ann Conway would call “alternative facts”. It’s fed to us twenty-four seven. And all of those “sources” are so sure, so “factual”, that it’s difficult to find the “real truth”.
There is a natural desire to find an overarching “theory of everything” to describe the disparate things that happen in the world. Conspiracies “answer them all”, and simplify the complex nature of current events. The Q-anon Conspiracy Theory has all of those answers, knitting child molestation with money and political power. How convenient that Jeffrey Epstein “plugs right in”, and managed to die before his actions could be investigated.
Coincidence
We don’t like coincidences (Gibbs’ rule 39: there is no such thing as a coincidence). We want clear and clean answers, from the Creation Story to 9-11. But with the omnipresence of Internet information, and the growing skepticism about “accepted fact”; minds have been “softened”. They have been prepared to accept all sorts of fundamentally unfounded ideas that fit a “theory of everything”. Our minds have become fertile fields for the growth of those ideas.
That growth creates a cynicism in many. If there are dark unseen forces controlling events, then a single vote cannot matter. If Donald Trump is leading a crusade against wealthy child molesters, whatever actions he takes must be justified. After all, he’s protecting children.
Perhaps there’s an even greater conspiracy here. Maybe Q-anon is a product of Russian intelligence, or the Trump campaign? Perhaps Les Wexner created it with Epstein. Maybe there’s another island.
I’ll create a new website, or maybe even a Joe Rogan podcast, for that one.
