A great book, and the chapter 'Operation Mindfuck' of particular interest to RAW fans and heads. Enjoy, steve fly.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/
Seth Blake on The United States of Paranoia : A Conspiracy Theory
Walker proceeds to lay out a general taxonomy of American conspiracy
theories, “five primal myths […] archetypes that can absorb all kinds
of allegations, true or not, and arrange them into a familiar form.”
These he distinguishes as “The Enemy Outside” (foreign actors who plot
society’s downfall from a distance); “The Enemy Within” (domestic
threats to the status quo); “The Enemy Above” (conspiracies of the
ruling classes); “The Enemy Below” (conspiracies of the lower classes
and social pariahs); and “The Benevolent Conspiracy” (a secret force
working behind the scenes to improve people’s lives).
Enumerating
examples of these five primal myths and how they have recurred and
recombined throughout American history, Walker is able to convincingly
illustrate how conspiracy narratives that may appear at first glance to
be isolated, episodic interludes specific to the idiosyncratic
circumstances of a particular era or social sphere, though distortions,
are also real manifestations of enduring facets of a national
consciousness. Conspiracy theories, according to Walker, and contra
Hofstadter, are endemic rather than aberrant phenomena, and manifest at
every level of American society.
In a particularly telling example, Walker traces the myth of The
Enemy Outside from the period between the Pequot and King Philip’s wars
(when English colonists’ fears of a “universall [
sic]
combination” of Indians lead them to form The New England Confederation)
to the contemporary misunderstandings by US policymakers concerning the
diffuse nature of al-Qaeda (Walker cites a
Washington Post from
2012 that referred to Bin Laden as a “terrorist CEO in an isolated
compound”). In both cases, an inaccurate but powerful metaphor — diverse
and diffuse Indian societies likened to the absolute monarchies of
Europe on the one hand, a diverse and diffuse terrorist network likened
to a private corporation on the other — opened up a space for
conspiratorial thinking and mythical misreadings that lead to
reaction-formations with devastating real-world consequences. For
infamous conspiracy theorist John Todd — who for nearly four decades
beginning in the late 1970s, wound a crooked path across the United
States, speaking at churches and community centers about the
intertwining plots of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, witches, Jesus
movements, and the music industry — the toll of belief came at a no less
devastating individual cost: estrangement from his friends and family,
frequent arrests, institutionalization, and an early death.
Walker’s chapter on conspiracy spoofs and spoofers is a more
lighthearted counterpoint to the personal and political tragedies
detailed in much of the book, and also may be his most effective. Here
he discusses the Church of the SubGenius (a wicked send-up of New Age
religions and self-help guides, ostensibly led by the beatific,
pipe-smoking übermensch “Bob Dobbs”) and
The Realist, a magazine that
often
printed
earnestly submitted conspiracy theories alongside deadpan satires of
the same. Just as science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson’s
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
came to serve as a sort of primary text for those who actually believe
that its eponymous secret society manipulates global events, the
communities fostered by these intended hoaxes were, in fact, very real.
For a short time in the early seventies, Paul Krassner, the editor of
The Realist,
even became convinced that people were following him: as Krassner’s
explains: “I thought that what I published was so important that I
wanted to be persecuted, in order to validate the work.”
If Walker has, as he claims, written a sort of contemporary American
demonology, it is populated by demons of the antique tradition: not
necessarily evil spirits, but ones capable, like the humans who invented
them, of a wide range of behavior. Perhaps a better term to describe
the form of
The United States of Paranoia is a bestiary. What
differentiates the bestiary as a form most from its more buttoned down
cousin, the encyclopedia, is the transparency of its animating ethos. In
contrast to the definitional, indexical project of the encyclopedia —
whose scriptural tone foregrounds its status as the official book of
record, as much as possible striving to erase the specter of human
authorship — the bestiary is essayistic, speculative, and most
importantly, allegorical. It is as much a work of moral instruction for
the beasts that read it as the beasts with which it is ostensibly
concerned.
Conspiracy theories, like religious beliefs, have the power to
transfigure the believer, and our hardwired apophenia — our tendency to
read meaning into random and meaningless data — may lead us to stretch
even the most homely and harmless of these theories far past the point
of credibility or charm. For all the scope of
The United States of Paranoia, Walker’s moral is ultimately a humble one: as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “we are what we pretend to be.”
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/in-praise-of-cranks-jesse-walkers-the-united-states-of-paranoia/
