I recently talked with a poor unfortunate who has been hacked and watched by the government for a number of years. The same old fears. Freedoms of the people trampled on by the Beast 666, Government cronies, and rabid watchdog intelligence agencies latching onto the grief of poverty in an abuse of power. The Kennedy assassination? Secret funding of terrorist Jihad? These things meant nothing to this man. They are as meaningless and terrifying as the Thelemic Pentagram ritual to an evangelical minister.
This man skulks around in a world overwrought with the Shiva eye of Hal that stares down and relays to the buggers of Big Brother his every move. For him, the sudden ‘flipping the bird’ of his prosthetic arm while driving is not only unsettling but profoundly creepy. Is there a reason that his prosthetic arm will shoot the middle finger at random moments and at random people? Did they deserve that affrontal assault? Had they wronged him in some subtle way that only his prosthetic appendage can discern? Sadly no. This poor soul somberly and with voice cracking, told me that his arm is “connected to his cable box, which in turn is monitored by the powers that be.” A weepy occasion. The same scourge of technological prowess that provided his prosthetic also serves as an electronic leash to be manipulated at a whim by anybody with a rotten sense of humor. When I asked what should happen to right these terrible injustices, he screamed in a tone of righteous craziness, “I’m waiting for the lord to clean up this mess!” And there you have it. Jesus vs. technology. The sandal-wearing leper curing heavyweight of the Christian religion is set to deliver such an ass-kicking on the scientific method that we should prepare to hunt and gather with dull spears and communicate in garbled grunts.
And isn’t that the argument of every conspiracy theorist that babbles insanely about the horrors of technology while on their laptop or talking on their phone? Fer Christsakes, Kaczynski is a blathering idiot. How could somebody who earned advanced degrees and taught at Berkeley suddenly wake up and find himself living like a wino and building bombs in a 5x5 shed in the Montana wilderness? Making wrong turns just doesn’t seem to cover it.
Yet that’s not to say that I don’t welcome conspiracy theory in all its various forms. There is something surprisingly lucid about discordant theories that address all walks of life. At the very least, conspiracy theory requires a prerequisite to ‘think’ and kicks the imagination out of the mundane. There is something to be said about theories that suggest German occultist Rudolph Hess sat across from an Allied working Aleister Crowley and was interrogated while being fed “Mexican brain poison” ie. Mescalin to keep him just enough crazy and terrified to give away the inner workings of the Nazi agenda. Or that revelatory gem that dropped just recently that involves Jackie Kennedy’s personal opinion that Lyndon B. Johnson had a hand in the assassination of JFK.
Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal. The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him. She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.
If that doesn’t make modern conspiracy theorists jump up, start rambling incoherently, and run about with arms flailing, it’s time to check them into the ‘I believe everything everybody tell me’ resort for the elderly and misshapen. There is certainly a place for the conspiracy in occult-lore but a proverbial line in the sand must be drawn. After all, only a degenerate would find conspiracy in absolutely everything. But who knows? Maybe they’re all out to get you. And maybe you’re just weird enough to deserve it. Whether we take conspiracy theory with a grain of salt or shrug it off as the ravings of the feeble, the fact remains that it deserves a place in folklore study.
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