Conspiracy Theories
The first thing that popped into my head when I read the headline about the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords: "Go up and look your legislator in the face, because someday you may have to blow it off."
That's what a militia leader told his followers in Idaho back when I was freelancing for Boise Weekly. The paper's intern, a friend and former classmate of mine named Michael Carroll, had been sent to a militia meeting. They were a growing force in Idaho politics at the time, and both Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth and Superintendent of Public Instruction Anne Fox had their active and vocal support in the elections.
Mike came back with that quote. The paper ran it, and he was immediately the center of threats and accusations. The militia leader claimed he was misquoted. But there were plenty of people in the militia movement who agreed with the sentiment.
Less than a year later, Timothy McVeigh parked a bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City and murdered 168 people, including 19 children.
The militia movement didn't force McVeigh to do what he did. Nor was Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree caused by anything he read on the Internet or saw on TV. There are plenty of people capable of holding violent ideas without resorting to violent action. Most of those militia members back in Idaho, as angry as they were, never did more than talk a lot of shit.
And unlike McVeigh, Loughner hasn't yet proudly claimed credit for the horror he committed. Although I imagine that's not far off.
Still, Loughner's attack echoes of 1995 to me, and sure enough, there have been people denying his tactics, but not the sentiment. One asshat who runs a comic-book retailer was dumb enough to say it explicitly. Other people have been more careful in their language. And some have just been batshit crazy, like the folks who believe it was all part of some Satanic Illuminati ritual.
The novelist Walter Kirn said it best, just a few hours after Loughner's identity was revealed to the public:
All these assassins are self-anointed knights templar of the collective shadow realm, not secular political actors in extremis.
Over the past year, I've done some deep reading into conspiracy theories as part of the research for The President's Vampire. I've been fascinated by them since I was 12 years old, when I began to notice the intersection between the conspiracy theorist's shadowy realm and the all-bets-are-off universe of the paranormal.
Spoiler alert for anyone who thinks they're going to find out the real killer of JFK in this blog post: I don't buy a single one of them.
But all of the feverish speculation and bad logic inside those pages has come spilling out again in the past week.
Some of the people I know who believe in a New World Order, 9/11 as an inside job, or the Illuminati say this makes me naive; that I don't know just how far the government will go to carry out its vicious agenda.
Actually, I know exactly how far it will go. There's ample evidence that U.S. agencies helped deal drugs, funded terrorism, supplied arms to dictators, toppled democratically elected foreign leaders, spied on U.S. citizens, and even helped Nazis escape justice after World War II.
But I also know how government actually works. I've clocked far too many hours in government meetings and plowed through metric tons of government documents. Most conspiracy theorists talk like they've never sat through a county commission hearing. I have. When I worked in Boise, there were only three men on the county commission. That meant two of them talking in the hallway about county business was technically a violation of the open meetings law. All three were Republicans. You'd think they would have been able to do everything in secret, without a single leak.
Not so much. One of them hated the guts of the other two, and there wasn't a decision made — no matter how trivial — that didn't get a full and tedious debate.
If three people cannot get a decent cover-up together at the local level, where nobody cares, how likely is it that a group of a few thousand elites would be able to hide the secret history of the world?
It's also useful to consider Robert Anton Wilson's Strange Loop theory: any conspiracy powerful enough to commit global crimes and cover up all evidence is also powerful enough to have manufactured the evidence that led you to believe in it in the first place. In other words, if you know about the Illuminati, it's only because they want you to know about the Illuminati.
Loughner, by all available evidence, is one of those disturbed individuals like McVeigh who mistakes the structures on paper and in e-mails for reality. It's not as uncommon as you'd think. His online rants about grammar and the gold standard have a long history in American politics, stretching back almost to July 4, 1776. Conspiracy theory seems to be a part of our national DNA. People are always willing to accept the easy solution, to find the boogeyman under the bed.
Take a look at the anti-vaccine movement. For the most part, these are people dealing with a heartbreaking illness in the best way they know how, despite all the evidence that says they're wrong. But they say the evidence is manufactured by a worldwide conspiracy out to suppress the truth.
Is that likely? No. But it gives us someone to blame. And for some reason, in our politics and our lives, we need that. I am consistently amazed by the people who will not believe a word they read in the New York Times, but take an anonymous chain e-mail as gospel.
In my books, I chalk every bad thing in the world to an occult force called The Other Side, the ultimate, anti-human enemy with limitless hatred for us all. Unlike the conspiracists, I don't believe that's real. I don't believe I have all the answers. I don't know what causes autism. I don't know what made Loughner decide the world would be a better place if he killed a bunch of people.
But I wish I did. It would be comforting to know where the source of all evil was, so we could at least put a name and a face to it.
