None Dare Call It Conspiracy--the Walkthrough part I

Well, we will have to shorten that title to something because writing those titles is going to get stale. For those of you who have never read one of these, it’s pretty simple. I’ll read a section and then make commentaries. The posts are difficult to predict because I can’t foresee how long each section will last. I’ve done this a few times, and occasionally the section I read will be an entire chapter, but it can also be one paragraph. Whatever fills a thousand words is what I shoot for.

You may also notice that I’m starting on page 9 instead of page 1. This is because, unlike most books, the introduction started on page 1, and I’m skipping that. Now, this is already a bad sign. As a person who just finished writing his dissertation, there are rules to this. Page numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.; don’t start until the body of the work begins. Introductions, prefaces, etc., should have lower case Roman numerals; i, ii, iii,…this allows correct citation of the work when the author of the introduction is different from the book's author. In this case, the introduction was written by Wallis W. Wood.; an author of several books from the extreme right and, up until 2015, a writer for the New American magazine. I may revisit the introduction later but let’s get started on the book itself.

The book properly begins “Ch. 1 Don’t Confuse Me With Facts,” and before I’ve read a word of this work, I regret this decision. It already reminds me of the first time I taught my own college class, and I had a student who was a 9/11 truther. She would go on and on about building 7, how the towers fell at the wrong speed, that no Jews were…(I cut her off and told her to not finish that sentence if she wanted anyone to take her seriously), and the usual truther bullshit. One thing that she told me as I began to answer her questions, which weren’t really questions, was that I “couldn’t use that pancake theory to explain the buildings collapse; I have to say something else.”

What she wanted was for me to abandon the actual answer because the factual nature of it confused her conspiracy theory. Right off the bat, this book is telling me that facts aren’t going to work. In fact, it’s going to say that facts are the problem because they hide the feeling of the truth. Like Morpheus offering us the blue or red pill, the media offers us a bunch of facts to obscure the real story.

So this brings us to the idea that the press is the enemy. This book was published in 1976, and right-wing extremists haven’t gotten a new idea since then. The idea that the press isn’t reporting the real story isn’t confusing, but the metaphor used in this book is absurd. They liken the search for the truth to one of those hidden picture puzzles in a child’s magazine like “Highlight for Children,” where we look for a boy pulling a donkey cart. Then the authors admit that they are usually unable to solve these puzzles. It bears repeating, they can’t solve the puzzle in a child’s book, and they’re going to show us the way to the truth.

Then on the same page, they literally startled me with something. A thing that I’ve never read/heard in Jones or Icke: a coherent thesis statement beyond “everything is a conspiracy.” Here it is in full, “We believe the picture painters of the mass media are artfully creating landscapes for us to which deliberately hide the real picture. In this book, we will show you how to discover the hidden picture in the landscapes presented to us daily through newspapers, radio, and television.” (Page 9)

Remember, this will be shown to us by two authors who admitted to cheating in a child’s magazine to find the hidden picture. I’m going to hammer on that for the entire book.

“No one in this modern-day and age really believes in the conspiracy theory of history–except those who have taken the time to study the subject.“–pg. 10

Later in the same paragraph, “those unhallowed halls of ivory.”

So instead of an ivory tower, it’s an ivory hall. I wonder when that changed, or if it did at all because on the first page of chapter (9), the authors said something stood out like the “proverbial painful digit.” You know, instead of “sore thumb,” which is both more succinct and not stupid.

I grouped those quotes together for two reasons. The first is that railing against intelligence is probably one of the most uniquely American things you can do. It’s also one of the most hypocritical. The first quote from page 10 is the 70s version of the mantra espoused by 9/11 truthers and Flat Earthers, “Do your own research.” They aren’t going to explain the conspiracy theory of history to you, and no one else will because only the chosen few who have sat down and researched it believe it. It’s indicative of the sunken cost fallacy, conspiracy theories used to be more than memes. A person had to go to the library to figure this stuff out. After all that research and travel, they aren’t going to abandon their thesis. They will start twisting facts to fit their theory, like Freud, after discovering Shakespeare wrote Hamlet before his father died.

The second is that this shows the enviousness of these authors. Conspiracy theorists tend to liken themselves to academics with the devastating difference that the conspiracists will not accept peer review or criticism. Yet, they want the same accolades that academics get. When mainstream academics reject them: they go on the attack. Look at Eric von Daniken’s original Chariot of the Gods, where he attacks the disciplines of history, sociology, and archaeology as being so dogmatic that they reject his belief that aliens built the Pyramids and all of the other non-European monoliths (seriously the only European structure that gets mentioned is Stonehenge but nothing else). They want to be in but are shut out; therefore, everyone else is wrong. Those halls are unhallowed because this book isn’t allowed in, but the moment the book gets an invite, the halls will be sanctified again.

One of my pet peeves for conspiracy works like this is the number of rhetorical questions they ask to prove their point. So I’m going to keep track. The number should be 0; any question that gets asked should be answered. As the series progresses, I’ll keep a running tally at the end.

Rhetorical Questions: 4