Conspiracies

I’ve wracked and racked my brain to try to assemble one coherent line of thought that is comparable to these deranged tales of a New American Century/BushCo conspiracy that knocked down the Twin Towers, shot down an airliner over Pennsylvania, and fired a missile—followed by de-winged airplane-looking thing—into the Pentagon, all while performing mass-hypnotism so enthralling that it convinced not only hundreds of people but cameras too, that they saw what they didn’t see. I can’t. It can’t be done. This “theory” cannot be compared, analogized, mocked or parodied. There is simply nothing else as ridiculously, pathetically, and irredeemably ludicrous as this notion. Nothing. Not the re-dating of the Crucifixion to 1056, Niburuans genetically splicing Neandertals to make great- grandpa, the Earth riding the back of a turtle, or the world power-elite being secret reptiles (though that one comes close).

But lots of people believe it. Lots of people who can dress themselves, drive cars, make money, raise children, …and (I choked a second there) vote, believe this nonsense. The question is Why? The only thing that pops to mind as approaching comparable territory are the concurrently wide-spread beliefs in ghosts, alien abduction, and Democrats’ being responsible adults sometimes fit for political offices. The difference though, at least with the first two, is that they are credible in some sense. That is to say it is not unabashedly irrational, though it is fairly non-rational, to believe them.

Many people, after all, have claimed direct experience with spirit entities of some sort, and surprisingly many have claimed to have been spirited away by creatures from other worlds. So, to those who have not experienced any such things there is at least the weight of a lot of personal anecdotal evidence to consider in their favor. More importantly, there is nothing that definitively argues against these things. Ghosts are not impossibilities, so far as we know, they just don’t fit anywhere in the standard-issue official reality. Aliens might abduct folks. Such would require, first, that there be said aliens. That, in itself is not a stretch even by scientific rules. Second, they must be kidnappers and piddlers of an odd sort. Why they would do these things is really beyond the realm of reasoning by us non-aliens.

But the Bush Did It conspiracy has none of these advantages. It is simply not possible. Put the really important question of what in God’s name would be the purpose of such a project aside. It isn’t even necessary to consider given the empirical evidence. That is the very high tonnage of evidence against any such thing as US official involvement in the disaster. Direct evidence, as with those who actually saw what did happen and the various expert investigations of how it happened, and indirect evidence— the easily demonstrable necessity of the vastness and perfection of the conspiratorial assemblage and the impossibility of the existence of any such thing. Unlike ghosts and aliens, belief in this doesn’t even pass the most kind gullibility test. So why do so many people….etc. etc.? Because they are sick. Not like Jeffrey Dahmer-sick, but more like Al Gore-sick. Disconnected from reality. The reverse of the interesting and entertaining scifi set-up. Convinced that they are in The Matrix when actually, they are on plain old Earth where lots of things are just what they would look like if you were not wearing bizarre glasses. Not so much dangerous as sad, unless, of course, they start to influence public policy. Then there is a real problem. A REAL problem. Not one made up in the fevered brains of the victims of this psychosocial or sociopsychological plague that is running rampant up and down the coasts and at selected points in between.