A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  And while we have incorporated the low-level Stupid of the War on Terror into our daily lives—enduring the security theatre of the airport scan, assuming our governments are spying on us, tolerating the waste of billions of dollars on pointless conflicts—we’re oblivious to the greater absurdity: that the fixation with national security comes with a body count, not merely of foreign lives lost in distant wars, but in the consequences of infrastructure not built, health services not provided, prevention programs not funded, social services cut back, all in the name of strategies that in fact make us less safe. The desperate and draconian effort to make Westerners more secure is killing them too, not just the nameless victims of violence in places like Iraq. And this form of Stupid will continue as long as governments, intelligence and law enforcement agencies and large corporations benefit from it.

  BK

  * Speaking of The Onion, the West doesn’t have a monopoly on absurdity: in 2011, al-Qaeda criticised Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for peddling 9/11 conspiracy theories. ‘Why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?’ al-Qaeda lamented, in a complaint that echoed an Onion parody video in which an al-Qaeda representative argues with a 9/11 truther.

  * One researcher estimates nearly 1600 more Americans died on US roads after 9/11 than would have otherwise been the case, because they opted not to fly.

  * Mass shootings are, strangely, not considered terrorism events despite usually being carried out by, for example, Neo-Nazi white males.

  * But see, for example, Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977) for how the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army did many of the allegedly unprecedented terrorist acts of Islamic extremists.

  * In fact it doesn’t, that’s a Western myth, but whatever.

  * An elegant example of Stupid in which a strain of flu not demonstrably worse than normal seasonal strains, and possibly less dangerous, sparked billions of dollars in spending by worried politicians to erect ‘protective’ measures like thermal scanners and rush into production vaccines that were never needed. The UK alone wasted £150 million on unnecessary swine flu vaccine.

  * The whistleblower who revealed the bugging was then raided by Australia’s domestic intelligence agency and had his passport revoked to prevent him leaving the country to give evidence about the bugging to an international tribunal.

  * A particularly unsubtle example of military-industrial-complex lobbying is former Republican State Department official and Iran-Contra survivor Richard Armitage, who has attacked Australia’s allegedly low level of defence spending without divulging that his firm, Armitage International, is a Washington lobbyist for US defence contractors.

  * The drone strike that incinerated the sixteen-year-old Denver-born Abdulrahman, who was eating at a cafe with friends while looking for his (by then dead) father in Yemen, killed no militants. The man who ordered the strike, Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan, was rewarded by Barack Obama with promotion to head of the CIA. The killing of this boy has never been investigated by any authorities, and was dismissed by one source close to the Obama Administration as a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’.

  Entr’acte—From Dallas with Love to Moonfaker: the lost films of Stanley Kubrick

  JFK was paralyzed by poison contained in the flechette in less than two seconds—so paralyzed that the first rifle bullet that hit him did not knock him down, but left him in a nearly upright position. A second volley of shots fired at JFK a few seconds later struck a stationary, visible target. The paralyzing flechette shot was fired by a man holding the umbrella launcher.

  —Richard E. Sprague and Robert Cutler, The Umbrella System: Prelude to an assassination (1978)

  As it turns out, we know the identity of one of the (many) alleged participants in the plot to murder President John F. Kennedy. He outed himself in 1978: his name was (so he said) Louie Witt, and he was the Umbrella Man. There he is in that original found-footage horror movie, the Zapruder film, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him bystander holding an umbrella as Kennedy drove past on That Fateful—and sunny—Day. His umbrella, Witt said, was a Neville Chamberlain-based reference to the support for appeasement of the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, when Ambassador to London in the 1930s. But while you might have missed him, he didn’t miss the president—he launched a CIA-developed poisoned dart at Kennedy for the purposes of paralysing him so he could more easily be shot. Or, at least, that’s what some JFK conspiracy theorists believe.

  Oliver Stone, in his exhausting tribute to stunt casting, JFK, more soberly suggested Witt in fact was signalling the assassins on that most sinister piece of topography, the Grassy Knoll, rather than firing flechettes.

  Witt’s cover story isn’t as silly as it sounds, if you think about it. The whole concept of appeasement is a little hard to sum up visually, unless you could re-create Chamberlain’s hangdog features and what we’d now term his Walter White moustache. And that’s no good if the target of your protest is actually Joseph Kennedy, who was indeed, like many of his fellow Americans, a strong supporter of appeasement before the war. On the other hand, precisely what his son was supposed to do about that in 1963 isn’t clear, especially given his father had been disabled by a stroke two years before. Witt could have waved some shares, in reference to how Kennedy père made his fortune from insider trading; he could have waved some steroids, or women’s underwear, in reference to two of JFK’s many pathologies, but that would have looked less interesting and, in the case of the underwear, might even have been mistaken for cheering. A Chamberlain-style umbrella makes some sense.

  And the umbrella-launched paralysing flechette has its problems. Yes, umbrella weapons had a rich Cold War history—the Bulgarians once used a pneumatic umbrella to kill a dissident with ricin in London. But if you could fire a paralytic agent from long range into the presidential blood stream, why not fire something, well, a little more lethal? Why such an elaborate assassination? Was there a kind of demarcation dispute between the assassins? Did strict union rules, or a particularly zealous interpretation of the CIA’s offshore mandate, require that the CIA only be allowed to paralyse the Philanderer-in-Chief, while other conspirators from domestic agencies got to actually kill him?

  On reflection, there’s a certain comfort in this thought—that even assassins plotting one of the most infamous crimes in history had to follow strict bureaucratic rules about areas of operation. You could almost imagine a M*A*S*H-style comedy as the conspirators fight intelligence bureaucracy and bumbling paper-pushers insistent that all hell will break loose unless a presidential assassination is conducted strictly in accordance with the rules.

  And for that matter, what is it with the CIA and convoluted assassination methods? Some of an apparently endless stream of CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro involved exploding or poisoned cigars, poisoned wetsuits and—the one that makes you wonder if the CIA’s LSD experiments went all the way to the top—an exfoliant that would, Samson-like, destroy Castro’s political authority by removing his trademark beard. In that context, maybe an umbrella-launched paralytic flechette isn’t too much of a stretch.

  Welcome to the remarkable world of conspiracy theories.

  No one has died as a result of JFK conspiracy theories, unless you count Lee Harvey Oswald, slain before his guilt or innocence could be properly determined (conveniently!). But some other conspiracy theories come with a vast body count. The oldest recorded conspiracy theory—forget the Illuminati, they’re Johnny-come-latelies from the eighteenth century—is the ‘blood libel’ directed at Jews, who allegedly conspired to kidnap and murder Christian children for the purposes of ritual murder. This first emerged in the twelfth century, and for the following seven centuries it saw thousands of Jews murdered either by mobs or after ‘trials’ for killing Christian children or, more accurately, for being Jews. The blood libel was known at the time to be false—several pre-Reformation popes, starting in the thirteenth century, attacked it as merely an excuse t
o murder and steal property from Jews, but to no avail; indeed, the blood libel was only the beginning of a long list of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that continue today.

  Such theories, and others based on racial, religious or ethnic stereotyping, relate to an identifiable group, easily targeted for violence or theft and easily demonised as the Other by white, Western societies. But there are different types of conspiracy theories, so a system of classification is needed. For example, in addition to theories involving groups easily identifiable as separate from the rest of society, some theories postulate the work of fifth columnists or domestic cabals, people indistinguishable from Us, who could be our friends and neighbours, who can operate undetected in plain sight.* But since the Enlightenment, and especially in the industrial era, conspiracy theories have focused on small groups of powerful figures—anti-Semitism began focusing on a finance industry elite, for example, and in the twentieth century it centred on large corporations, secret powers within governments or even supra-governmental bodies, which either kill key figures that pose a threat, stage dramatic events to extend their power or use technology to control some or all of the populace.

  Such theories aren’t the preserve of any one ideology or side of politics. Left-wing conspiracy theories focus on wicked governments and evil corporations a little more than right-wing theories, in which the UN, atheists and internationalism are the villains, but libertarians are as eager to target overreaching governments as progressives are. Indeed, the revelations by Edward Snowden of the very real conspiracy of systematic intelligence agency surveillance of the internet and telecommunications have produced an unlikely and at times tense coalition of support between conservative libertarians and left-wing progressives, both opposed to governmental surveillance.

  Now, the internet seems to have been a great enabler for conspiracy theories, with its capacity to empower and connect communities of like-minded users and the dramatically expanded research capability that it offers, enabling anyone to access a trove of data from which to cherrypick whatever information affirms their beliefs. At least one popular conspiracy theory, about chemtrails, is a wholly internet-era creation, although it only barely qualifies as a fully fledged conspiracy theory since no one has ever clearly explained exactly what the chemicals dispersed at such high altitude are supposed to do and why such an expensive and elaborately inefficient method has been chosen to distribute them when, say, you could chuck some stuff in the local water plant.

  The internet is wonderful for conspiracy theories because back in the analogue era, theorists had to settle for amateur magazines or pseudopeer-reviewed journals devoted to their conjectures, or the Fortean Times, samizdat for the paranoid circulating on the fringes of publishing or sent like contraband through the mail system (for conspiracy theories about which, see Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49). They did, just before the early internet let a thousand alt.conspiracy newsgroups bloom, get their own TV show, The X Files, a drama based on the simple premise that not one or some but pretty much all conspiracy theories were right, thereby delivering a weekly stream of villains for the credulous detective duo to battle. ‘I want to believe’ was a key slogan of the show, encapsulating the basic problem of conspiracy theories in four words.

  On the other hand, if you look closely at conspiracy theories, other than chemtrails (which is akin to that staple of the Cold War, the fluoridation conspiracy theory), there are very few genuinely new plots: 9/11 truthers reprise the FDR-knew-about-Pearl-Harbor theory with a dumber but even richer president;* corporations are still either holding back utopian technology or trying to kill us, as always; Muslims are less likely to be murdered by their fellow citizens than Jews used to be, but the alleged plot to ‘impose sharia law’ (aka ‘creeping sharia’ aka ‘jihad-by-stealth’) is a less grisly version of the blood libel, with halal food taking the place of blood-soaked matzo bread.

  Indeed, there’s a case for the 1960s, not the internet era, being the heyday of conspiracy theories, not merely because of assassinations, social upheaval, the Cold War and Vietnam, but because of the feedback loop created by popular culture. Even before Kennedy’s death, The Manchurian Candidate (starring none other than Kennedy pal Frank Sinatra, the centre of many a Mob-based conspiracy theory himself) had played with the idea of patsies used for presidential assassination. Stanley Kubrick had made Dr Strangelove, a satire of nuclear war all the funnier and more discomfiting for being an entirely plausible characterisation of the military mindset (Kubrick had to change a Slim Pickens line to remove a mention of Dallas after the death of JFK). The hugely popular Bond films were ritualistically, even archetypally, conspiracy theories featuring a procession of well-resourced cabals and super-villains. In 1967, the spoof US government paper The Report from Iron Mountain argued that extended periods of peace were bad public policy and governments needed a variety of lurid social controls to cope; the satiric nature of the work wasn’t clear to the media at first, and later the text would, inevitably, be adopted by conspiracy theorists as actual evidence of a New World Order plot rather than a clever piss-take.

  Then there was the Apollo project conspiracy: it was only possible to maintain that the moon landing was faked after 2001 had made space travel look realistic; inevitably, it was Kubrick who was alleged to have filmed the fake moon footage. That wasn’t the only way the Apollo conspiracy oozed into Hollywood: in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, Connery-Bond (sadly sans umbrella weapon—that would get a mention in the Moore era), in the course of investigating an elaborate Howard Hughes-inspired conspiracy, actually interrupts what appears to be a restaging of the moon landing in the villain’s lair in the Arizona desert.* The whole of the sixties seemed to teeter on the brink not merely of social chaos, but of some bizarre admixture of farce, tragedy and conspiracy, all invariably played out on screen, from where it seeped into popular culture.

  The emergence of conspiracy theories at such times of social stress suggests they have a valuable psychological role. Indeed, conspiracy theories have multiple important uses. For starters, they’re a great mechanism for disposing of unwanted information. This is why denialism inevitably and logically ends up in conspiracy theory: while cherrypickers try hard to explain away the vast reams of data from the world’s climate scientists showing a warming planet, or how vaccination saves lives, ultimately the only satisfying explanation is that scientists or the medical profession or drug companies are colluding in secret to push an agenda.

  So, at its most benign, the warmist conspiracy theory is supposedly that scientists have faked global warming to maintain government funding for their research. Most versions are a little more melodramatic and tend to involve the United Nations’ plans for one world government (seventy years of trying and still nothing!), a left-wing plot to de-industrialise the world—there’s no soy latte on a dead planet, after all—or even, more rarely, a right-wing plot to promote nuclear power.

  But conspiracy theories are less about the epistemological challenge of inconvenient data and more about the human need to find meaning in randomness. The human brain reflexively finds patterns and structures in its environment, a skill immensely useful in the days of primitive humans competing with other predators (as portrayed by Kubrick in the early, funny scenes of 2001): try hunting and gathering without an ability to make sense out of the sights, sounds and smells around you, much less more complicated tasks like farming, building or, speaking of pattern recognition, writing scripts for Bond films. Better to be predisposed to make Type One errors—false positives—than Type Two errors—false negatives—since the latter will get you killed much more quickly out on the early Anthropocene savannah.

  The hypertrophying of this intellectual capacity to identify patterns—apophenia*—can lead to tendencies like thinking you’re hearing things when you play records backwards; satanic backmasking is a charge levelled at artists as varied as the Beatles, Britney Spears, Hall and Oates, Judas Priest and the Bee Gees, of whom it might be said that it’
s satanic enough to play them forwards, let alone backwards. But it also enables sufferers to skilfully fish out every piece of evidence that appears to confirm a conspiracy while failing to see, or explaining away, every piece of contrary evidence.

  This surely is one of the reasons why there’s a well-established correlation between belief in one conspiracy theory and belief in others. It may be that if you distrust governments enough to think they’re poisoning us with chemtrails, you’re likely to think they killed Princess Di (although for what reason has never quite been explained). That’s especially the case if you live in a culture that is predisposed to conspiracy theories—as Richard Hofstadter argued in the 1960s in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, even since colonial times Americans have seemed predisposed to seeing plots all around them. This reflects not just a tendency to mistrust government, but a mental predisposition to spot conspiracies, which means your brain will constantly spot evidence that some nebulous They is engaged in perpetrating a collective crime.

  But conspiracy theories are more than group inkblot tests: they fulfil the need of many people to wish away the unpleasantly messy nature of life and the essential purposelessness of the universe. Believing that some cabal somewhere—Jews, climate scientists, the CIA, Big Pharma, the Illuminati, the Bee Gees, whoever—is in control and doing things for their own motives, however sinister, is a more comforting thought for many people than that bad things merely happen, often for no larger purpose, that the universe is a cold, indifferent place in which chance plays a far greater role than human design.