Deconstructing the Conspiracy Theory

William S. Burroughs once wrote that language is a virus and we use it to infect others. I have said that paranoia is the only known communicable mental illness. These two things are closely related.

One of my earliest memories was wanting to watch a program on TV, which may well have been the Mickey Mouse Club. It was not on that day, but instead, all stations had the exact same program. An ominous drumbeat was the soundtrack, and a slow, steady parade passed by the cameras. In the front was a man leading a horse in sidestep, and in one stirrup was a boot, placed backwards, so the the heel faced the front of the horse and the toe faced the rear. This was the funeral march of John F. Kennedy, our murdered president.

My mother purchased every copy of Look and Life magazine that came out, focusing on the now-infamous Zapruder film. I remember distinctly looking at the images, frame by frame, laid out in 3x5 images. They chose not to publish the final head shot, showing the President's head exploding. Mom also purchased, and read cover to cover, the paperback release of The Warren Commission Report, and later, Mark Lane's book Rush To Judgement.

I was born in 1959. JFK was murdered in 1963. Do the math: I was about 4 years of age.

The Conspiracy Theory was thus introduced to me at an early age. As I grew older if not wiser, the notion that there is a Secret Plan in place was part of the background. When I began to read the countless volumes of books, stacks of magazines and articles, then web sites, dedicated to that one crime, I began to gather a rather jaundiced eye: people, it seemed, would believe anything. Fools, all.

I widened my search and examined all other forms of Conspiracy Theory. All manner of madness came across my view: FDR stood by and allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor; International Bankers financed Hitler; behind every curtain was a man we were supposed to ignore, we were all blind and ignorant.

For me, though, everything was turned on its head by my finding the MKULTRA plot. In a nutshell, it reads as follows: the CIA was attempting to manufacture a Manchurian Candidate, a means of deep hypnosis that would allow an agent to be programmed to commit murder, but to never be aware of doing so. Further, the CIA had purchased the entire supply of the then-legal drug LSD in an attempt to further this attempt, then used questionable means to have the drug declared illegal first in the United States and then the world. Pursuing it further, the CIA then went on to purchase the then existing world supply of LSD, and began using it in in-house testing, often without the subject's knowledge, to see if it could also be used as a truth serum. Once that was in place, it was a short step to begin "dosing" unsuspecting US citizens, most if not all males, who were in the process of procuring a prostitute, the citizen being dosed in hotel rooms where behind a two way mirror, their behaviors would be studied.

The level of raucous laughter that I emitted bordered on hysteria: as my friend Scot says, "you just can't write that shit."

My pattern at the time was to read as much as I could find about such matters, then spend most of my entertainment time of examining the source material. For many, it boiled down to "researchers," individuals with a questionable amount of time on their hands, who had always managed somehow to dredge up the most peculiar of sources. He said, she said, they said: actual evidence, any trail that would lead to a smoking gun, never in sight.

The shock came when I found the source of the MKULTRA conspiracy: a US Senate sub-committee... public acknowledgement from the CIA itself. They admitted it openly, publicly and as a matter of public record. The reason: one of their own agents was dosed and he committed suicide, and his wife filed a lawsuit... one thing lead to another.

That which most resembled a fool's parade suddenly came into sharp focus... and if this one is true... then what of the others?

The point here is not to inflict this mental "instability" onto you, dear reader, but instead to go deeper, into, as the subject lines states, deconstruction.

You see, the point is simple. Anyone who professes to believe in a conspiracy theory is often derided and mocked, a simpleton that has allowed themselves to be deceived.

Ayn Rand, the objectivist, said that mythology was the first attempt at philosophy. It was an attempt to make sense of the world as perceived.

The Conspiracy Theory, then, regardless of its content, is in my less than humble opinion, an attempt to grasp events that are seemingly random and place them into a comprehensible package... like religion.

And science...

When I began writing my novel The Third Event, I was in the mindset that suggested, as Bruce Springsteen said about his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, that I may never do it again, so throw everything into the pot and see what happens. On the back of my novel, instead of a simple blurb, I put in three separate sentences in Latin.

Peto primoris verum.
Panton alius mos insistuo.
Fabula est in nomen.

Seek first the truth.
Everything else must follow.
The story is in the names.

Truth, it would seem, is a rather interesting concept. As written in the Bible, and Jesus Christ, Superstar, Pontius Pilate asks our Lord and Savior: What is truth? Are mine the same as yours?

There are two main characters in my novel, the first has the surname De La Tour, and the other Towers. The first is French: of the tower. Thus, the novel, at its heart and core, are The Two Towers.

I recall distinctly where I was and what I was doing on 9/11/2001. I had traveled to Las Vegas to take a weeks vacation visiting a brother by another mother (a friend so close as to be as near blood bond as possible). My flight came in at about 1 AM, and he was on a night shift schedule. For a day, we both attempted to mold our times into one another, and early on that day, we were both all but unconscious. The phone rang, and a friend in Mishawaka, IN had called, telling us to turn on the news because a plane had struck one of the Two Towers.

So, there we were, for all the world looking like two boys, in our tighty-whiteys, blearily watching the video of the burning building. While we watched, the second plane came in. We both snapped fully awake.

"One," said my brother by another mother, "is an accident."
"Two," said I, "is a conspiracy."

While the world kept turning on its axis, day into night and night into day, the reality of that day stood stark and clear. We were under attack. Then came the Pentagon, and the fate of United 93.

As I write these words, it is 9:11 AM. Jung called it Synchronicity. Indeed.

Everyone saw it. We all saw the same thing, and for the most part, in unison. All over the world: a communal experience.

Sort of...

See, this is where everything starts to turn sideways.

After the collapse of the Two Towers, there was the collapse of Building 7.

Here, then, is the interesting part: after the fact, there are those who have come forward to define, using their collective specialties, what actually happened, the physics involved, the chemistry, etc.

Some said: you saw what happened, and here is the hard science from professionals, that state unequivocally that what you saw is exactly what happened.


Some said: you saw what happened, and here is the hard science from professionals, that state unequivocally that what you saw is NOT exactly what happened.

There was evidence provided by both groups, the chemistry of the fuel, the architecture involved in the building of superstructures like the Two Towers, testimony by demolition experts, etc.

Yet, somehow, there were two differing viewpoints on the reality of what happened. How can that be?

Those who accepted what is the majority opinion scoffed at those who believed otherwise, because the Truth Movement, as they called themselves, were nothing more and sometimes less than mere (drum roll, please): Conspiracy Theorists.

In my novel, I then was writing about the two Towers (De La Tour and Towers) in conflicting realities. I also mentioned the notion of the Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger's Cat or the idea involving multiple realities... and the 2 Towers in my novel were separate sides of one coin.

I also quoted, at length, from the film The Happening, often disregarded as a commercial and artistic failure. To condense: Science will look at an event and develop the best possible theory to explain it, but at the core, it is always going to be a mystery.

Think otherwise? Then ask someone that is fully into the materialistic, non-spiritual belief system to explain, in as precise a means as possible, how gravity functions... and how it fits into the notion of Physics...

It just does...

I do not mock those of that mindset. Not now, not ever: rather, as Robert Anton Wilson wrote in The New Inquisition, I mock the closed mind. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, there are more things under Heaven and Earth than fit into philosophy.

The Conspiracy Theory, then, not to mock but to clarify, is an attempt to comprehend the world, history and events as they unfold... much in the way mythology does in the mind of Rand.

The Conspiracy Theory attempts to eliminate the very concept behind the phrase: Things Just Happened...

Was JFK murdered? Yes. By whom? Someone with a gun... do you really need anything else? What about Bobby Kennedy? El-Malik El-Shabazz (formerly Malcolm X, Detroit Red, Malcolm Little)? Watergate?

To openly deride all conspiracy theory as mere bunkum is to suggest that Things Just Happened Like That, that No Man Is Responsible... other than The Enemy.

Who is the real enemy of rational thought? The conspiracy theorist or the one that mocks them? The one that accepts the Official Version or those that mock them?