Monday, February 2, 2009

Conspiracy Theory

Once again proving that I'm in some sort of 'sphere zeitgeist, Victoria blogged about trutherism showing up on TV as I was mulling over a post on conspiracy theories.

I love a good conspiracy theory. But the quality of conspiracy theories of late has dropped tremendously. A conspiracy theory has to be either plausible or entertaining. Paddy Chayefsky's Network for example, features a marvelously entertaining conspiracy.

My favorite conspiracy theory ever is probably that the NFL framed OJ for the murders in order to preempt the first televised in America World Cup. Now, that's the fever dream of an above average madman. When you hear that, you wanna say, "Wow! Wait, what?"

Let's examine the ne plus ultra of conspiracy theories: the JFK assassination. Why does this work so well? Well, for one thing, there's no way to ever completely disprove it. Even if you pin down every fact to the official story, there's no way to prove that the mafia, CIA, the KGB or whatever didn't hire Oswald to do the job.

It makes JFK a heroic figure, too. In The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Bill Curtis ties in Kennedy's assassination with the withdrawal of troops in Vietnam who, according to the show, were sent right back the first week LBJ was in power. The whole thing ties in nicely with the Vietnam conspiracy.

Other things that make the assassination good fodder:
  • There was lots of conflicting data on the ground. This is great because people who are not conspiracy theorists will be reinforcing your theories with utter conviction.
  • There was a lot of incompetence from official sources and incompetence can always be interpreted as "showing the strings".
  • It was easy to marshal facts that sound impressive, even though they're not true, because they involve things (like shooting a bolt action rifle, the reaction of a body when impacted by a bullet, etc.) people don't have experience with.
  • There was a clear motive. There were many clear motives, in fact. The President always has an abundance of people who want him dead.
  • The conspiracy can be adjusted for size: You can shrink it down to Lee Harvey Oswald and one other person, or you can make it huge, as needed.
  • Bullets are essentially invisible when fired from a gun.
Let me emphasize that last point: The generally agreed upon fact about JFK is that he was killed, presumably by bullets but perhaps by alien death beams. You can't see the bullet. Therefore, arguments about where any bullet comes from and whether or not it was, in fact, a bullet, may be entertained.

This is the main problem with 9/11 Truthers: Everyone saw the planes crash into the buildings. Eyewitnesses number in the thousands. The second plane was filmed crashing by maybe hundreds of people. So, most of these guys have to approach this from an angle of, "Oh, no, planes didn't actually crash!" which is quite literally insane or that the planes did crash but weren't responsible for the buildings falling.

Now, I confess here, I was pretty sure at one point that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance. It was disabused of that notion when I realized I couldn't think of a motive for him to hide his knowledge. The standard conspiracy theory has it that FDR wanted us in the war, on the right side. (It's actually a significant point in the Frank Miller Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns: That even if FDR did know, was it still wrong?) But in 1941, a deflected Japanese attack would have been sufficient. There would have been no need for him to sacrifice the bulk of the Navy. (Note the government incompetence angle, too: Those ships should've been at sea.)

While it's true that the Clinton years saw us ignoring a whole bunch of attacks, I think it's safe to say that a single airplane crashing into a single WTC tower would have been sufficient to get us pissed off. In other words, we have no motive to explain the additional complexity required to justify a second plane or a bunch of explosives. Even if you take it from the angle of, say, the WTC owner just wanting insurance money, one plane would be enough.

9/11 conspiracy theories are worse than the bogus moon landing conspiracies. They both involve a huge amount of expense and complexity and simply massive numbers of people, but at least the moon landing/space program theories have all this anomalous space phenomena that (most of us not having been to space) do seem puzzling.

The 9/11 Truthers have instead constructed an elaborate explanation for the towers' collapse which insults everyone who saw the planes hit.

Worse, they do so in the face of an actual conspiracy: Of anti-American hard-line Muslim terrorists who left massive paper trails, who had ties all over the world, who had many co-conspirators, and who had a boss willing to take credit for it.

On a lighter note, another dumb conspiracy making the rounds is the "Obama wasn't born in America" theory. This requires us to believe that the State of Hawaii is hiding something (apparently in a many-decade anticipation of Obama's eventual Presidential bid) and that there's not a single Republican or Hillary supporter able to sneak that evidence out.

Really, it's just not up to snuff.

I hope to see better in the future from everyone.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the comments for the lamest conspiracy theory of all: Trig Trutherism.

7 comments:

  1. On a lighter note, another dumb conspiracy making the rounds is the "Obama wasn't born in America" theory. This requires us to believe that the State of Hawaii is hiding something (apparently in a many-decade anticipation of Obama's eventual Presidential bid) and that there's not a single Republican or Hillary supporter able to sneak that evidence out.

    Blake, I love your post here, because like mine it begins to touch upon some of the themes about the genre I find absorbing (in my case, in a negative way).

    I think if you and I put our heads together, we could research the topic in such a way as to possibly create a book out of it.

    (The topic certainly needs an update from the very good, but basic, book by the estimable Daniel Pipes)

    I like that you ended with the latest conspiracy theory making the American rounds, albeit seconded by the equally moronic Palin-Not-Trig's-Mother one:

    That Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii.

    What is fascinating in an expected way is that the people who are pushing is meme are not just right-wingers (though sadly, there are plenty of those doing so). The two main champions of this theory are two Truthers, Andy Martin and Philip J. Berg.

    As I mentioned in my blogpost, just the mere association with Trutherism discounts whatever else the person has to say for me.

    So even if I were inclined to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Obama had somehow retroactively thought that their son would be President of the United States one day, and tried to cover up the fact that he wasn't born on US soil, I would dismiss it for that reason alone.

    Likewise, if Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy and wasn't even in the Depository Bldg, why did he bring "curtain rods" on the day of the assassination, then kill Officer Tippett in cold blood after a routine stop, not to mention mysteriously turning up at the cinema during work hours?

    Ack. The mind reels, then flips then caterwauls in agony.

    Cheers,
    Victoria

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  2. I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT TRIG TRUTHERISM!

    That was one of the really and truly lame inspirations for this post.

    I mean, we have to believe that Palin faked a pregnancy to protect her daughter who immediately got pregnant again and delivered because... Why, exactly?

    I think you're on to something as far as the angle to these new theories: It's tied in heavily to political partisanship, which isn't something I heard about Apollo, nor even about JFK. (It probably was alleged that the Reps killed him, but that's never come up in my reading.)

    It's also enough, apparently, to simply argue that the official explanation is inadequate--though that was true of JFK as well.

    It's the combination of superpowers and incompetence that I find most fascinating of partisanship.

    Do people still write books? I've been out of print for ten years now! :-)

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  3. I mean, we have to believe that Palin faked a pregnancy to protect her daughter who immediately got pregnant again and delivered because... Why, exactly?

    The only thing I have been able to come up with, is this, Blake.

    Palin represents the conservative paradigm in absolute terms. The perfect storm of religiosity, conservative politics, and heroic personal life story.

    Instead of being someone worthy of praise (even if you disagree with her politics), she represents a kind of woman that they secretly suspects still exists, one completely untouched by modern feminism in its victimhood sense, and that cannot be allowed to stand. It would upset too many apple-carts, including their own parallel choices.

    So in this counter-narrative of theirs, instead of a selfless mother who abided by her religious scruples to give birth to a "flawed" child, she must be turned into a conniving, heartless religious fiend who finds her daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy so insulting, that she takes it on herself to deceive people about her "grandchild"'s parentage.

    (Of course, one of the twists about this narrative is that Todd is the father of this baby, born of an incestuous liaison)

    In essence, what the anti-Trig conspiracists are saying is that Palin would do ANYTHING to hide the fact that she is a great big hypocrite.

    I don't know if you recall me saying this, but actually, despite being rather jaded about conspiracies, when I heard this Daily Kos-rumour happen in real time that day on Althouse, I cried.

    I mean, I couldn't believe they would use a helpless Down Syndrome baby to attempt to bring down a politician they feared.

    They're sick.

    Cheers,
    Victoria

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  4. I hope to see better in the future from everyone.

    Don't forget all the theories about the true identities of all those commenters on Althouse. Like the mysterious and hostile dowtownlad. Some people think he's Sully, and at times hasn't he been Glenn Greenwald? And didn't someone postulate long ago that Cyrus Pinkerton (I think) was Amanda Marcotte? It goes on and on.

    How about this one: titus = Anderson Cooper?

    Far-fetched? Maybe. But just imagine AC writing that stuff. It's good for some laughs at least.

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  5. I don't know if you recall me saying this, but actually, despite being rather jaded about conspiracies, when I heard this Daily Kos-rumour happen in real time that day on Althouse, I cried.

    Victoria, that whole period of time was the lowest in politics that I can think of. The whole Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was a big deal to me. It was an unpleasant dose of reality at the time, that my liberal friends weren't bothered by it, even the ones that claimed to be big feminists. Seeing the hypocrisy of the Left eally got the whole process started, ultimately changing me from a democrat to a right-leaning libertarian.

    But with all that said, emotionally, that didn't compare to what happened to Palin. I still can't believe the lengths they went to in order to destroy her. Just to make way for mediocre Barack Obama.

    Anyway, as I said, that was a really low point for me. Reading your website helped tremendously at the time.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wonderful post blake. What can one say?

    when I heard this Daily Kos-rumour happen in real time that day on Althouse, I cried.

    @Victoria,

    Your website during that time was a tremendous inspiration--please never give in to those evil forces--we need you.

    How about this Althouse conspiracy:
    blake = victoria = ron.

    I know that a lot of facts get in the way, but how come you all know so much about the same movies? :)

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  7. I'm not one to use the word "wicked" normally but that's what the whole "attack Palin" thing was.

    I agree she's a threat. It's ironic that she's a threat because she is the epitome of the '70s feminist ideal: She has a career--what a career!--she runs with the boys, she plays hardball, but then she's with the kids and loves the husband, who supports her and accommodates her.

    Yeah, it's like the Lewinsky thing: The only thing that matters is party. There are no standards.

    Unlike Monica, though, the infosphere was completely flooded with anti-Palin crap. I knew women who should've related to her deciding she was a phony.

    Yeah, their treatment of Trig--these people who had been howling over Chelsea's mistreatment--again, it just shows, it's all about party identification.

    Knox--I will now forever think of Titus as Anderson Cooper. Heh.

    ReplyDelete

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