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Sisyphus Press -- P.O. Box 10495 State College, Pa. 16805-0495 Conspiranoia: The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories by Devon Jackson For Orders in U.S. only $10.99 plus $12.99 for S&H. AIR MAIL: For Canadian + International Orders (U.S. checks, money orders, or currency only - no Canadian checks, money orders, or currency) |
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The Truth Is In Here: a dense handbook of contemporary conspiracy theory, obsessively cross-referenced, the ideal millennial index to all the terrors of the fin de sicle. Former Details editor Jackson has an impressively multidimensional understanding of the oft-obscured relationship between archaic, ancient underground bodies like Freemasonry, Cabalists, Illuminati, and the Knights of Malta and such disturbing modern phenomena as the military-industrial complex, Scientology, the Klan, J. Edgar Hoover, neo-Nazis, the Trilateral Commission, and George Bush. He extends this grid along cultural and political vectors, and in the process constructs a Pynchonesque web of conspiracies both familiar (the Kennedy and King assassinations) and obscure (secretive New World Order collectives like the Bohemian Club and Bilderbergers). His choice of a guidebook format (each chapter proposing an evanescent overall conspiracy, in which all relevant paragraphs are cross-referenced by pictogram to the other conspiracy chapters) makes the material easier to grasp than a narrative like Gravitys Rainbow, but strangely numbs the unease that much of it provokes. Jacksons buzz-friendly nature demonstrates how such conspiracy cultureonce personal, therefore unsettlinghas been vitiated by the public mode of entertainment, in which myth becomes inseparable from malfeasance, the vital nature of malign conspiracy arguably reduced to simulacra. Whats missing is any effort to perform a larger, graver task: to figure out which of these malicious netherworlds of corruption might still be brought to account by an increasingly fractious, distracted citizenry. All that said, Jacksons debut remains a page-turner. His entries are concise, detailed, and occasionally hilarious, and they shed necessary light on many shameful episodes of our recent history (such as the CIAs Operation Paperclip, in which top Nazis were smuggled out of Europe to aid in the Cold War). Even readers skeptical of these looming conspiratorial structures may find such material too compelling for comfort. A thoughtful gift for anybody you suspect is considering relocation to rural Montana, or a bomb shelter. (75 photos and line drawings, 21 maps) ------------ The tendency on the part of an individual or group toward rational or irrational, justifiable or excessive suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others based on the belief that others have joined in a secret agreement to commit an unlawful or wrongful act, or to keep the truth, as the believer sees it, secret. (from the Introduction to Conspiranoia!) What do Pan Am flight 103, JFK, mercury fillings, the Mars Pathfinder, Henry Luce, The Grateful Dead, Teletubbies, and mad cow disease all have in common? The answer to this question is clearly that they are all, in some highly explosive, ultraconfidential fashion, related. Conspiranoia! does what no other conspiracy book has done before: it connects all the dots. Arranged by subject matter, it opens with "The Master Plan" and then branches off into twenty of the world's most famous conspiracy theories, showing through the use of intricate maps how everything and everyone is connected. Conspiranoia! is the perfect mixture of family tree, road map, encyclopedia, and guidebook to delight conspiracy fans and skeptics alike. It happily follows along on any and all of the paper trails, and cheekily grants license to myth as well as fact. ------------ The cover of "Conspiranoia!" features four black-and-white photographs, laid out dossier-style against a Manila folder background: snapshots of The Teletubbies, a flying saucer, a cow and a mischievous Bill Gates. Already we have a book that is winking at us, jangling the skeleton key that will unlock nefarious secrets connecting it all. A more illuminating peek under the bed of civilization can be found on the "X-Files" episode with the killer bees. "Conspiranoia!"—though it purports to reveal the inter-connectedness of everything from The Illuminati to Louis Farrakhan to Chairman Mao—is more an encyclopedia than an exposé, not a grand narrative at all but a simple glossary of fringe thought. Ironically, this would-be mother of conspiracy books takes what is often a fascinating topic and reduces it to a mere list: Lavender Mafia, League of Nations, Vladimir Lenin, Lincoln Assassination, each theory reduced from its individual wacked-out glory to a mere paragraph or two of generally uninspired prose, running down the barest of "facts." And the facts of these theories must reside in quotation marks, no less so now than before the publication of "Conspiranoia!," which doesn't prove or disprove anything so much as itemize. This lack of judgment makes the book both dull and mildly troubling. For example, it would be reassuring if the entry for Jewish Media Conspiracy, which "posits that Jews control most, if not all, of the major media," concluded with a rebuttal to that claim, rather than with a list of Jew fat-cats followed by "and on and on." The problem isn't one of anti-Semitism (Jackson gives the same evenhanded treatment to anti-Islamic theories, not to mention those connecting Anarchism and the Freemasons), it's of discernment. Jackson has either no gauge of what might be of genuine importance, or a foolhardy commitment to giving the same amount of space to all of history's paranoid delusions. Is it truly worth giving equal time to all the puzzling similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy and the Trilateral Commission—an actual organization whose members are actual heads of state and titans of commerce who make actual decisions that shape our actual lives? It's just completely unclear what the point is. More interesting and in-depth studies are available of alien theory, cult theory and so on. Far more useful would be a book that attempts to untangle some of these webs rather than trying, with a remarkable lack of either success or good humor, to tie them all into one. |
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