Chapter 15. Conspiracies

Making it up

People like to make up shit, and this is more believable, and more self-validating than the shit that they have to deal with. The unified theory of what goes down is better than chaos and misery, better than senseless nonsense, even if it has to stretch the truth. The basic fact is other people lie; therefore, they can’t be trusted. Teachers can’t be trusted. Politicians can’t be trusted. The scary thing is when people believe their own fictions or cannot distinguish them from history or science.

Religion teaches us

Miracles happen; we merely have to accept them. Faith can move mountains; we shouldn’t have to use machines. Great Truths come to humble souls; we too can be vessels of Sanity. Inner understanding comes from letting divinity flow through us.

Shakespeare

We find a Shakespeare who lived at Statford-upon-Avon but no evidence he wrote a word. Shakespeare couldn’t have written the plays since he was never schooled at Oxford. A better candidate is Sir Francis Bacon since he invented his famous cipher. Then there’s Queen Elizabeth since she couldn’t, as a woman, be publicly acknowledged as the author. The Earl of Oxford was probably the one since he wrote plays but never under his own name.

Assassination of JFK

If only Ruby hadn’t killed Oswald, if only Oswald had missed, if only the Warren Commission had reported the truth, if only Kennedy had lived, if only the mob, the mafia, and Mossad had no reason to kill him, if only the KGB, Castro, anti-Castro groups, KKK, LBJ, rouge agents in the CIA, neo-Nazis, the Freemasons, and the Vatican had no reason, then Sirhan wouldn’t have killed RFK, Ray wouldn’t have killed MLK, Jr., Jackie wouldn’t have married Ari, and some of the crazy conspiracy nuts would have spent their time working on something else.

Moon landing

Faking the moon landing would make a good movie plot because it’s so crazy. Whoever wasn’t hoodwinked would think it outrageously funny. Wait. They did that, kind of, and O. J. Simpson played an astronaut. Reminds me of the adage that if you can’t make it, fake it. Nope. I’m thinking of the idiom Fake it till you make it. Which could apply more to the conspiracy theorists.

Elvis

They say he died at the age of 42 from a cocktail of various drugs. Others say the guy who died was an Elvis impersonator, and Elvis lives as “John Burrows” at the same retirement home as JFK.

Denials: an incomplete list of daft, wacky, ridiculous, insane, pathetic, demented, deranged, harebrained, lunatic, cockeyed, crackpot, conspiracy theories

The FBI killed John Dillinger in Chicago on 22 July 1934, not a body double. Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis murdered six million women, men, and children. The Holocaust happened. On 20 July 1969, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on the moon. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 were not inside jobs. Lyme disease was not an accidental release of a bioweapon from the facility on Plum Island.