As a result, more Americans than ever would become reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and hashish, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award. In the early ’60s, Hollywood released the Washington conspiracy thrillers Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate, and by the 1970s conspiracy became the smart Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year
...more
