An Army of One

“To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

Don DeLillo

from "The Names"

The Inside Game

"You are now breathing...virally mutated molds, nano-particulates of aluminum and Barium and cationic polymer fibers with unidentified bio-active material...Drs. Staninger and Karjoom and researcher Jan Smith have reported findings of self-replicating nano-machines and rivers of silicon running wild through the bodies...Welcome to the brave new world of toxic skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems as well as the emergence of a bizarre and frightening new plague...We must join together to stop this insane program of chemtrail spraying now."

-excerpt from a chemtrail conspiracy website

I'm a late comer to the chemtrail conspiracy. Don't ask me how, up until now, I've managed to miss it. It's exactly the sort of empty calorie, Krispie Kreme whackiness I usually can't get enough of. There are dozens upon dozens of websites devoted to the subject, most stocked to the rafters with elaborate, intricate narratives and New World Order paranoia futilely refuted by reputable experts.

All of this got me thinking about conspiracies and how drawn to them the intertwined popular and media cultures are. From Vince Foster-was-killed-by-the-Clintons, to Bush-blew-up-the-World-Trade-Center, to HIV-was-engineered-by-the-CIA, to the elaborate, shop-worn fictions of Roswell and the Kennedy assassination, and finally to the recent unhinged and deeply creepy Obama-isn't-an-American Birther movement, the coherent narrative offered by conspiracies, however dark, seem so much more attractive than the chaotic, random and incomplete realities they compete against.

Neuroscience has long described the human mind as a sophisticated pattern matching machine. While as a species we may be compelled from deep within the structure our brain stem to find comfort in organization, this hard-wired ability to tease out patterns from complex data may sometimes misfire and lead us to see connections where none exist --and at considerable cost and peril. Pattern matching it might indeed be. I'm not so certain about the sophisticated part.

"If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act." -Don DeLillo

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]