Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture

Conspiracy Theories This page intentionally left blank Conspiracy Theories Secrecy and Power in American Culture M...

Author: Mark Fenster

97 downloads 2595 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Conspiracy Theories

This page intentionally left blank

Conspiracy Theories Secrecy and Power in American Culture

Mark Fenster

Revised and Updated Edition

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London

Copyright 2008 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota First edition published in 1999 by the University of Minnesota Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy theories : Secrecy and power in American culture / Mark Fenster. — Rev. and updated ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-5494-9 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Conspiracies — United States. I. Title. HV6275.F45 2008 973 — dc22 2008009097 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I. Conspiracy as Politics 1. Theorizing Conspiracy Politics The Problem of the “Paranoid Style” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2. When the Senator Met the Commander From Pathology to Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

II. Conspiracy as Cultural Practice 3. Finding the Plot Conspiracy Theory as Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 4. Uncovering the Plot Conspiracy Theory as Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 5. Plotting the Rush Conspiracy, Community, and Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

III. Conspiracy Communities 6. The Prophetic Plot Millennialism and Christian Conspiracy Theory . . . . . . . . . . 197 7. A Failure of Imagination Competing Narratives of 9/11 Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Afterword Conspiracy Theory, Cultural Studies, and the Trouble with Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

M

y ﬁrst signiﬁcant political memory: Richard Nixon’s resignation when I was eleven years old. It was a family moment, the closest thing to a major public trauma that I had experienced during my conscious life (I was too young to be fully cognizant of or to remember the Kennedy and King assassinations), and my savvy older sister put her portable audiocassette recorder up to the television’s little speaker, preserving the event for posterity. By the time of his resignation, Nixon seemed like a bad man, although I had secretly rooted for him against McGovern just to be contrary to all of the older kids at my liberal Quaker school. Along with many others on the latter end of the baby boom who were too young to experience the political assassinations and Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, I had in me the peculiarly American antipathy to politics and politicians that was instilled by Nixon’s ultimate ignominy. Nixon led me to conclude that you can’t really trust powerful people, and he led me to suspect that events and machinations kept secret are probably more important than what is actually revealed. Perhaps that suspicion, like my tendency to contrarianism, was always meant to be. The ﬁrst book I remember reading and enjoying was a children’s picture book, The Secret Three.1 Ostensibly the story of Mark, Billy, and Tom, three boys who form a secret club, the book’s banal description of the boys’ adventures was (for me, anyway) vii

viii

|

P RE FA CE

overshadowed by the intriguing way the boys meet. Mark and Billy learn of Tom’s arrival on the island where they all live by ﬁnding an encrypted message that Tom had placed inside a bottle and tossed out to sea. Once they decode the message and meet Tom, they continue to develop new secrets and codes. Wherever you turn, the book implied, you might ﬁnd a possible sign of some secret, a decipherable existence that would potentially fulﬁll a deep, perhaps unrecognized desire. The book itself was advertised as part of publisher Harper & Row’s I Can Read series; while clearly an allusion to its simple language, large typeface, and vivid illustrations, the series name took on added meaning in a story about the proliferation of secret signs scattered throughout the world. The Secret Three taught me that learning to read was a process not only of understanding the plain meaning of writing but also of ﬁnding and correctly interpreting hidden codes and messages. The most important secret of Mark, Billy, and Tom’s club was not its mere existence. Rather, its true secret, its infantile but resonant source of power, its “position of exception” in Georg Simmel’s phrase,2 lay in the exclusivity of its membership and language. Thanks to the club, envy, concern, and longing haunted the otherwise banal boyhood utopia that the book offered me as a fantasy. I wanted at once to join the group, to replicate it in my own lonely childhood, and to expose and dismantle it. My contradictory response to The Secret Three, as well as Nixon and Watergate’s effect on me, is analogous to the conception of power present in a particular strain of contemporary American populist discourse: conspiracy theory. Imagine the experience of “ﬁnding” evidence of a “conspiracy”—not especially difﬁcult, given the circulation of novels, ﬁlms, and nonﬁction narratives that represent such an event. For those who look for such evidence or who experience this moment of discovery and the gravitational pull into a world of suspicion of doubt, it is a cathectic moment, an instant in which the spine tingles, the pulse quickens, the mind focuses. A secret group, wielding unknown but awesome power, exists. The evidence proving its existence and power becomes a source of endless further consideration, interpretation, and investigation, and a reason to ﬁnd and uncover the plot that both exempliﬁes and causes one’s own powerlessness. This book seeks to interrogate the social, cultural, and psychic relationship between conspiracy and theorist, between individual and group interpretation and narrative strategies, between populist notions of “the people” and “the

P R E FAC E

|

ix

powerful.” Ultimately, I propose that conspiracy theory operates broadly as a political and cultural practice that longs for a perfectly transparent, accessible democracy—an end that, even if it were possible, conspiracy theory can hardly imagine and cannot attain. Although it retains the basic argument and a signiﬁcant portion of the content from the original edition, this revised and updated edition of Conspiracy Theories tries to clarify the earlier book’s insights, make them more accessible to a wider readership, and update the research to include developments in the social and textual case studies of the ﬁrst edition and in the academic literature on conspiracy theory and populism. Most signiﬁcantly, I have included an entirely new chapter on the attacks of September 11, 2001. My interest in returning to this project is, admittedly, partly an effort to keep the book relevant, as it makes little sense to promote a book about conspiracy theory that fails to cover an event that has generated more conspiracy theories and theorists since the assassination era of the 1960s. But I also intend this republication to meet an important need: a broadly understandable, interdisciplinary account of a crucial and pervasive political and cultural phenomenon, as signiﬁcant today as ever before. Too frequently, commentators glibly dismiss conspiracy theory as marginal and pathological, a dismissal that ﬂattens its complexity and misunderstands its role in contemporary politics and culture. Also too frequently, academics either share this disregard or, if they attempt to depart from this approach, fail to address an audience outside of their (our) own small world. I regret that the original edition of Conspiracy Theories occasionally fell into the latter trap, either through leaden prose or jargon. I have tried to move the thickest and least necessary of that jargon into the notes, while retaining the insights provided by technical social theory and social science into the practices and signiﬁcance of conspiracy theory. As with the previous edition, I would like to acknowledge the enormous inﬂuence of a number of teachers, friends, and colleagues over the years, including Joli Jensen, Janet Staiger, Horace Newcomb, Tom Schatz, Larry Grossberg, Jim Carey, Chris Anderson, Jeff Sconce, Jim Wehmeyer, Charles Acland, Michael Curtin, Matt Wray, Eric Hayot, Ed White, Bill Page, and John Henry Schlegel. Thanks to Wesley Beal and Jennifer Kent for able research assistance on this updated edition. I thank the editors at the University of Minnesota Press with whom I worked, including, on the ﬁrst edition, Janaki Bakhle, Lisa Freeman, Micah Kleit, and Jennifer

x

|

P R EFA CE

Moore, and, on the present edition, Richard Morrison. Holly Kruse’s support and affection were enormously important to the ﬁrst edition, and therefore to this one as well. My work on this edition was also assisted by a summer research grant from the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida. This book could not have been completed without the help of those closest to me: my father, Marvin Fenster, whose unﬂagging support I likely did not deserve, and my mother, Louise Rapoport Fenster, whose passing during the writing of the original edition I am still learning to live with. The revised edition (and, more important, my life) has been much improved by the contributions of Trysh Travis, whose love, companionship, ideas, and editorial skills have made life very enjoyable and conspiratorial indeed.

Introduction We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now

T

wo propositions dominate discussions of conspiracy theory. The ﬁrst maintains that conspiracy theory, which I will deﬁne simply here as the conviction that a secret, omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the political and social order or some part thereof, circulates solely on the margins of society. Holding incredible, dangerous beliefs, conspiracy theorists are political extremists and unsavory characters—Oliver Stone, for instance, or members of the John Birch Society. They question whether the United States is a benign, pluralistic democracy, reject the notion that history moves through the triumph of progress and leadership and the vagaries of coincidence and mistake, and appear to disdain the established institutions and channels of democratic politics. The label “conspiracy theorist” insinuates that a person is extreme, threatening, nuts. The second proposition, equally prominent when concerned commentators discuss conspiracy theory, maintains that conspiracy theory has come to predominate American political culture.1 The specter of conspiracy circulates in the ﬁctional trappings of movies, television shows, popular novels, video games, comic books, and even in an increasingly gullible and market-driven news media.2 Most pernicious, of course, is the well-trodden but suspect realm of cyberspace, the Petri dish for paranoids.3 Conspiracy theory’s ubiquity, we are told, poisons 1

2

|

I N TRO D UCT I O N

our political system, culture, and public sphere to an unprecedented degree. They—or is it we?—are all conspiracy theorists now. Margins or ubiquity: in this political and cultural moment, it seems, we either face the threat that conspiracy theory will invade from the hinterlands or we must respond to the fact that it has captured popular consciousness. This book does not aim to resolve these competing descriptive claims—indeed, I think one can marshal evidence to claim that both are correct. A relatively small proportion of Americans seems to believe ﬁrmly that a grand conspiracy is the causal engine of politics and history, while a much larger proportion of the public engages in conspiracy theory at some level, whether for pleasure or as a potential explanation for events in their lives or in the country. Both claims, however, agree that conspiracy theory, in its dangerous conception of power, nationhood, and history, represents a dire threat. To illustrate, consider two recent examples, one from investigative journalism and the other from popular culture, in which assertions about conspiracy theory’s otherness and grave or potential danger drive how conspiracy theory is described and understood. Dark Alliance: The Journalist as Conspiracy Theorist

A series of stories written by investigative journalist Gary Webb and published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 reported that agents afﬁliated with the Contra rebels, revolutionaries in the Central American nation of Nicaragua with ties to the CIA, played a central role in the introduction of crack cocaine to American cities, and especially throughout African-American neighborhoods in Southern California.4 The stories, collectively titled “Dark Alliance,” circulated widely on the Mercury News’s relatively state-of-the-art Web site whose splash page featured a silhouette of a ﬁgure smoking a crack pipe superimposed on top of the CIA’s ofﬁcial seal. “Dark Alliance” extended longstanding rumors and news reports of CIA ties to Central and South American drug dealers by claiming that at least some of the Contra-distributed drugs were sold to American users. Published at a time when the World Wide Web had begun to reach critical mass, the stories received national coverage despite being published by a regional newspaper, causing uproar and political protest, especially among African Americans in Los Angeles.5 It is now ten years since “Dark Alliance” ﬁrst appeared, and the common view among journalists and researchers who have reviewed Webb’s

INTRODUCTION

|

3

stories and have expertise on the Contras and the CIA’s role in Nicaragua is that the stories somewhat overstate and overplay the largely testimonial evidence Webb had gathered but nevertheless were neither false nor fantastic. This is true whether the commentators are sympathetic to or critical of Webb.6 The historical consensus—to the extent such a thing is possible concerning controversial covert operations—indicates that the basic outlines of the Mercury News stories were largely correct: there is no question that the CIA was involved in covert counterrevolutionary action in Nicaragua, while some Contra agents or individuals with ties to the Contras ran drugs and used some of the proceeds to purchase equipment and fund the revolutionary efforts in Nicaragua. It would not be wrong to say that some CIA agents at some time knew of the Contras’ activities and, indeed, that some of those drugs may have been sold on the streets of South Central Los Angeles.7 The evidence supporting the connections between each of these propositions is not entirely irrefutable, but when stated carefully, the theses of Webb’s stories are supported in the public record. The stories had a life of their own, however. In suggesting that the Reagan Administration and the CIA assisted a revolutionary movement involved in drug trafﬁcking, Webb’s series led a segment of the American public (especially those most adversely affected by the ravages of crack cocaine) to infer that a government agency perpetrated an illegal, conspiratorial act that harmed Americans—not to mention Nicaraguans. Recall the broader historical context within which this inference was drawn. The precise nature of the relationships among the characters in this story—the CIA, the Contras, wholesale drug trafﬁckers, and retail drug dealers—was, and remains, unknown. The federal government and its intelligence community continue to hoard information about its Cold War–era engagement in proxy wars and counterrevolutionary campaigns, while their disclosures and pronouncements on the CIA’s role in Nicaragua appear sufﬁciently strategic to warrant suspicion—especially in light of the secret, illegal machinations revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal.8 A long history of allegations ties the CIA’s covert operations to malevolent political forces in Central and South America (as well as in southeast Asia and Africa) that engaged in illegal activities, including drug dealing. In short, although these conspiratorial inferences went beyond what the “Dark Alliance” series described and could prove, such speculative, unsubstantiated conclusions were not wholly irrational or unmoored from accepted fact.

4

|

I N TRO D UCT I O N

Soon after its publication, the nation’s most respected newspapers denounced “Dark Alliance” and condemned Webb’s work for engaging in groundless speculation about government conspiracies and thereby exceeding the boundaries of acceptable investigative journalism.9 Faced with damning criticism from its competitors, the Mercury News ultimately apologized for “Dark Alliance” and demoted Webb, irreparably damaging his career.10 Lowering journalistic standards was not the worst effect of the Mercury News’s transgressions, however, according to critics of the series. The story was so overstated and overwrought, they maintained, that “Dark Alliance” spread viciously through a black community that was susceptible to absurd speculation and paranoid fantasies. This latter, quasi-sociological claim about the state of black America sought to explain condescendingly how a population could fall prey to irresponsible reporting that alleged outrageous conspiracy. An article in Time, for example, noted a propensity in the African-American community to host a “Black Telegraph” of rumor-mongering that “has been a font of bizarre fantasies;” an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by historian Michael Kazin described belief in the CIA–Contra–cocaine conspiracy as “paranoid” and suggested it was based on “the ﬂimsiest of evidence;” while Timothy Golden, in an article accompanying his professional journalistic criticism of Webb’s reporting, offered telling examples of average African-Americans’ willingness to believe an investigative series whose “force . . . appears to have relatively little to do with the quality of the evidence that it marshals to its case.” Each writer also conceded that the black community might have good historical reasons to be paranoid, of course, but they all rejected the notion that this excused its inability to distinguish fact from conspiratorial ﬁction, and they suggested that conspiratorial fantasies pushed an already separate black community further to the margins.11 In his 1997 book, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From, Daniel Pipes saw no reason even to accept an excuse for blacks’ adoption of conspiracy theory, which, he argued, was fueled by black journalists and leaders who “dislike the existing order and offer radical ideas about changing it.” These spokesmen, in turn, have transformed the black community into an “organized group of malcontents” who prefer to lay the blame for their tragic circumstances on shadowy forces rather than assume it themselves.12 For Pipes, and for other mainstream critics to a lesser but still signiﬁcant degree, conspiracy theory’s desperate, tempting, and

INTRODUCTION

|

5

dangerous call to and from the margins neither accepts nor belongs in the responsible public discourse that characterizes democracy. The Da Vinci Code: The Novel and Conspiracy Theory

From the geopolitics of Central America and the tragedy of crack cocaine to the ﬁctional banal: consider the phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code (2003), the enormously successful novel that has sold tens of millions of copies internationally.13 It posits a world ﬁlled with secret societies desperately ﬁghting over suppressed knowledge, their existence exposed by characters who solve hidden clues embedded in famous works of Renaissance art and in word puzzles placed by a recent murder victim. At stake in this struggle are some of the basic tenets of Christian faith, including most prominently Jesus’s status as divine Son of God, as well as the supposed truth of the Holy Grail—which is merely a symbol for the womb of Mary Magdalene, who carried and then gave birth to Jesus’s child and established a “royal bloodline” that secretly survives to the present. The struggle to control this information pits the Roman Catholic Church and the fundamentalist Catholic organization Opus Dei against the Priory of Sion, a secret society that attempts to protect the relics and writings that document the truth about Jesus and his descendents. Two characters serve as the novel’s protagonists: Robert Langdon, professor of “Symbology” at Harvard, and Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist with the French National Police and granddaughter of the clue-leaving murder victim Jacques Saunière, who had been a curator at the Louvre and, it turns out, Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. (Sophie, we learn at novel’s end, is one of the last remaining descendents in the “royal bloodline.”) A complicated conspiracy lurks beneath the alternative religious and world history the novel proposes. The Church and Opus Dei want to destroy the Grail and, with it, the evidence that would contradict the basis of Church doctrine; to do so, they must defeat the Priory, who wants to preserve and maintain control over it. Langdon and Neveu, meanwhile, begin as innocents drawn into this struggle by the clues Neveu’s grandfather has left. Deploying their ability to uncover secrets embedded in symbols and codes, as well as their desire to solve the murder with which the novel begins, they heroically attempt to protect the truth from those who would steal it. Decoding da Vinci, and thereby ﬁnding conspiracy, is the central action of the novel, and the book’s

6

|

I N TRO D UCT I O N

invitation to decode and ﬁnd is the key to its narrative momentum and pleasure. “Everyone loves a conspiracy,” Langdon tells Neveu, and in a close reading of da Vinci’s art, “the conspiracies [keep] coming” (Da Vinci Code, 169). Indeed, reports of the novel’s success cited the cultural and aesthetic appeal of its conspiracy-themed plot. The book invites the reader into the “netherworld” of conspiracy theories, U.S. News & World Report suggested, while an article in the Los Angeles Times listed the novel as part of a “wave” of conspiracy theory in popular culture.14 Each act of decoding by the protagonists leads to another clue, until the great secret that is revealed is that the secret conspiracy itself is concerned above all with keeping knowledge secret. The heroes’ role, they are told, is to make certain that “the information” about Jesus can survive (Da Vinci Code, 256). The novel’s conspiracy theory thus is doubly about information: the characters and readers both gather information to learn about a conspiracy and then they learn that the conspiracy itself is about the conspiratorial suppression and disclosure of information. Although putatively about the truth of historical Jesus, the Holy Grail is the object of a conspiratorial plot by the Church and Opus Dei, which hope to steal it, but it is also itself a conspiratorial plot on the part of the Priory, which hopes both to retain it and keep it hidden. The heroes, drawn to aid the Priory, and the readers, drawn to root for the heroes and to decode da Vinci along with them, become part of this latter conspiracy. Strangely, the novel’s resolution—which reveals Sophie’s preeminent family but also allows the Priory’s representatives to explain why this revelation must be kept secret from the public—invites readers within the Priory’s circle. The conspiracy is thus everywhere within the novel and, in the novel’s omnipresence as an international bestseller and blockbuster movie, the conspiracy exists outside the novel, in the world of popular culture and in the numerous conversations and book club meetings where friends and strangers discuss it. The Da Vinci Code’s resolution suggests that the novel’s readership is now part of a conspiracy that maintains the truth as a secret, and that the public imagined in the novel and nonreaders in the real world live unaware of the secrets that remain available only to those initiates who can decode them. At the same time, initiates continue their conspiracy hunt even after they put their books down. They can read Brown’s earlier novel starring Robert Langdon, Angels and Demons (which concerned another “real” secret society, the Illuminati),15 and await another, The Solomon

INTRODUCTION

|

7

Key (reportedly about the Freemasons). At least twenty books are available that attempt to debunk or explore further The Da Vinci Code’s conspiracy, while the especially obsessed can take Code-speciﬁc tours of Paris to the sites and art works that the novel claims offer great symbolic meaning.16 Conspiracy is not a “theory”—in fact, it is everywhere—once you learn to see and read the code. Conspiracy theory’s ubiquity presents a problem for those implicated in the conspiracy it ﬁnds. The Da Vinci Code’s heady mixture of fact, ﬁction, and conspiracy has led both Catholic and Protestant church leaders to worry that readers are unable to separate the spiritually and historically true from the ﬁctional fantastic and may ultimately come to question their faith based on nothing more than paranoid fantasies about hidden secrets.17 This concern has extended beyond clerics. Summarizing her worries about the book’s potentially harmful inﬂuence, the critic Laura Miller declared in the Sunday New York Times Book Review that “[t]he only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy, it seems, is our desire to believe in one.”18 Dan Brown exacerbated such anxiety when he claimed, soon after the book’s publication, that The Da Vinci Code was the product of signiﬁcant historical research in credible sources and offered an educational experience as well as a pleasurable one.19 In fact, as a wary reader can easily learn through a Google search, most of Brown’s sources (many of which he cites in the novel itself) make claims that have been thoroughly discredited. But, as Andrew Greeley noted in an interview on the Today Show, The Da Vinci Code ably exploits not only people’s “love” of conspiracies but also the Church’s lack of credibility, especially in the wake of its efforts to keep secret its clerical sex abuse scandals.20 We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now

These quite different conspiracies, one putatively based in fact and the other thoroughly ﬁctional, one political and the other religious, one circulating within a relatively narrow public and the other a mass cultural phenomenon, share certain qualities. Each concerns an alleged truth hidden by and damaging to an existing order. Each presents a narrative of heroic investigation—an intrepid investigative reporter is punished for uncovering the truth in one, while the master interpreters of symbols and codes succeed in discovering and preserving the historical truth in the other. And at bottom, each suggests that although the underlying

8

|

I N TRO D UCT I O N

truth of a conspiracy remains hidden to the general public, anyone with enough fortitude and intelligence can ﬁnd and properly interpret the evidence that the conspiracy makes available. Similarly, accounts of “Dark Alliance” and The Da Vinci Code in the mainstream media and by authoritative commentators share certain characteristics. Besides identifying the inaccuracies in these texts, critics attempt to explain the texts’ general appeal by identifying why and how they captivate audiences. On the one hand, conspiracy stories are simple, understandable, and attractive to people seeking an explanation for their woes. Conspiracy theory is tempting, too, because it preys on believers’ weaknesses, including their excessive distrust of or cynicism about powerful institutions, as well as their stupidity and irrationality. Conspiracy theory’s ability to captivate in turn has signiﬁcant effects: it causes people to believe in falsehoods, to trust duplicitous or unprincipled sources, and to become alienated from prevailing orthodoxies and institutions. Underlying these accounts is the sense that some essential aspect of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorists is not merely wrong but pathologically wrong. The pathology concept, which is most closely associated with the historian Richard Hofstadter’s enormously inﬂuential characterization of conspiracy theory as an expression of the “paranoid style in American politics,”21 has dominated academic and intellectual approaches to political extremism and populist fear of conspiracy. Hofstadter described conspiracy theory as an alternative (though longstanding) element in American politics, one that operates at the margins but occasionally threatens the mainstream, consensus-driven operations of pluralist democracy. Although Hofstadter used the term “paranoid” analogically rather than in its clinical sense, by coupling it with the noun “style” he implied that conspiracy theory constitutes a malady or afﬂiction that differs fundamentally from a healthy engagement in politics and surfaces in trivial and groundless claims made by marginal groups and individuals that can threaten the pluralist consensus of American democracy. He resolved the seemingly contradictory view that considers conspiracy theory as both marginal and pervasive by positing that the paranoid style always exists but dominates only occasionally and under certain conditions. Given conspiracy theory’s apparent omnipresence and the crisis of legitimacy that worried commentators associate with it, the “paranoid style” concept can lead to an inherently frightening

INTRODUCTION

|

9

conclusion: in the contemporary political culture, the dangerously, pathologically marginal has become mainstream—or at least afﬂicts some large, powerful segment of the population. This book is premised on a contrary proposition: the prevalence of conspiracy theories is neither necessarily pernicious nor external to American politics and culture but instead an integral aspect of American, and perhaps modern and postmodern, life. Not simply an outlying “style” of American politics, conspiracy theory has always been a signiﬁcant element of American political rhetoric, with wide-ranging, sometimes salutary effects.22 Populist concerns about the concentration of public and private power and of foreign control of domestic authority, for example, have long animated American political practice and governance.23 These fears help to explain, for example, the tripartite, federal system of American government that dissipates power among coequal horizontal institutions in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, and overlapping vertical seats of power in federal and state governments. They also animate federal and state antitrust laws that seek to control and regulate the market power of private corporations. Populist fears of conspiracy have also played a remarkably productive role in American intellectual history. A secular Enlightenment rationality, theorizing and participating in intellectual and political revolutions and suspicious of authority, at once feared conspiracy and engaged in conspiratorial actions through writing and political and social action.24 Doing so, revolutionary colonists perceived power and agency to reside in the hands of humans rather than within a divine entity, and inscribed a limited, secular state and protections for individual rights in the construction of the new American nation and its national identity—a state and identity that sought an end to elite, monarchical conspiracies even as the United States had itself been created by a revolutionary conspiracy.25 Conspiracy theory is thus an aspect of the longstanding populist strain in American political culture—an especially intense strain, to be sure, and one that can have violent, racist, and antidemocratic effects (as well as salutary and democracyenhancing ones) on the political and social order, but a strain that is neither independent from nor necessarily threatening to the country’s political institutions or political culture.26 The suspicion that conspiracies occur does not necessarily make one crazy or paranoid. Politics encourages conspiracy of one sort or another

10

|

I N T RO D UCTI O N

because successful governance frequently requires the privileges and advantages afforded by secrecy and the levers of instrumental power.27 Secretly collaborative and even collusive behavior may enable political actors to achieve an agreed-upon end. Such conduct, of course, can be illegal or can seek to achieve illegal ends, but withholding information prior to (or even after) a decision is made or a compromise is reached can also serve as a legitimate administrative or governing strategy. Political opposition, in turn, attempts to take advantage of such actions by drawing attention to them and arguing that secrecy suggests corruption, perﬁdy, even treason. Governance and politics create situations in which multiple institutional entities struggle over limited power and resources, strategically engage in opaque and secretive behavior, and then strategically criticize their opponents’ relative power, opacity, and secrecy in order to gain political and rhetorical advantage. The fact that complex, secret conspiracies might occur makes the evaluation of any somewhat plausible conspiracy theory exceedingly difﬁcult, as no a priori grounds exist for distinguishing correct, or at least warranted, conspiracy theories from incorrect or unwarranted ones.28 This indeterminacy inspires pitched rhetorical battles for political popularity and legitimacy, as conspiracy theory serves as a means to rally support (We must ﬁght against the secret, powerful interests that oppose us) and to condemn opponents as part of a conspiracy (They threaten our interests and way of life); and, in turn, to delegitimate the opposition by branding their beliefs as paranoid (If you believe that, you must be a conspiracy theorist). In this respect, both conspiracy and conspiracy theory frequently serve as political strategies, not pathologies. Finally, and not unimportantly, signiﬁcant illegal conspiracies do occur.29 The Da Vinci Code and the conspiracy it alleges may be mostly fantasy, but it is a matter of historical record that the Reagan Administration illegally funded the Nicaraguan Contras, even if no clear proof exists of governmental complicity with Contra agents to supply cocaine to American dealers. Foreign covert actions that employ political assassinations and suborn subversion of democratic and revolutionary movements, as well as domestic policies of covert surveillance and “countersubversion” such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, have played important roles in twentieth-century history. The Jim Crow era of racial apartheid required covert, conspiratorial acts—indeed, given the history of both overt and secret state-sponsored

INTRODUCTION

|

11

racial subordination in America, African Americans frequently have a defensible claim that someone is out to get them.30 Secretive alliances between private individuals and groups with shared class interests do enjoy control over seats of public and private power that is greater than their numbers would allow them in a purely representative, thoroughly accountable democratic state in which well-informed voters participate and knowledgeably vote. Given the history of conspiracy and the inequitable distribution of access to capital and political power, the notion that conspiracy theory necessarily expresses a political pathology ignores the fact that it can correctly identify present and historical wrongs. To be sure, conspiracy theory is frequently wrong—and outrageously, even seemingly pathologically so, at times. Totalizing conspiracy theories frequently lack substantive proof, rely on dizzying leaps of logic, and oversimplify the political, economic, and social structures of power. Structural, institutionally-based inequities in the distribution of power, capital, and resources, and the manipulation and abuse of state power to establish, maintain, and extend political control, do not constitute conspiracy in the sense that conspiracy theorists would describe (as some anomalous, apocalyptic moment within a heretofore perfect democratic republic). Rather, they constitute the political economic consequences of capitalism and an inevitably imperfect system of politics and governance. More dangerously, conspiracy theories can express—and in American history frequently have helped organize—virulent hostility to racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or political Others. Even if it can constitute a pathological threat to democracy, then, conspiracy theory does not necessarily do so. We may prefer a rational political discourse in which claims about the existence of a conspiracy require more empirical grounding than conspiracy theorists generally provide. We may also prefer a less divisive means to rally support and condemn opposition. But even if they could be widely accepted and implemented, such rational ideals are not the only elements of the political discourse we have. Conspiracy theory does not pose a threat from outside some healthy center of political engagement; rather, it is a historical and perhaps necessary part of capitalism and democracy. At the same time, the presumption that conspiracy theory represents nothing more than pathology simpliﬁes and ﬂattens our understanding of popular political belief generally and conspiracy theory in particular. It presumes both that some pathology-free position exists and that the

12

|

I N T RO D UCTI O N

pathogen can be eradicated from individuals beset by it and a society infused with it. But an approach that deﬁnes conspiracy theory as a set of political beliefs that can be described within existing frameworks of political behavior and evaluated within normative schemas as extremist or pathological ultimately disappoints: it can do little more than map these activities and beliefs onto limited conceptions of rational or irrational actions. Equally important, the pathology approach ignores conspiracy theory’s internal tensions. In viewing the democratic order as a sham, conspiracy theory demonstrates antidemocratic tendencies; embedded within many conspiracy theories and their understanding of power, however, is a longing for a better, more transparent and representative elected government. Conspiracy theory rejects an existing political or social order, but does so in the belief that a better one is possible—one that, in some conspiracy theories, would be more democratic and more equitable. Part I of this book summarizes, historicizes, and critiques the pathology approach to conspiracy theory. It closely reads Hofstadter’s work and that of his contemporaries during the 1960s in chapter 1, and then traces the effects of that work in the more recent analysis of the militia movement, which during the mid-1990s was a leading proponent of conspiracy theories, in chapter 2. A reading of conspiracy theory that understands it merely as a form of pathological, marginal politics, part I argues, is inevitably partial, although Hofstadter’s attention to conspiracy theory’s cultural practices and populist underpinnings offers a base upon which an alternative approach can build. Part II offers one such alternative approach by presenting ways of understanding how conspiracy theory works within political culture— the constitutive cultural practices and signifying system through which the social and political order is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored—and to what effect.31 Understanding conspiracy theory as an aspect of popular political culture offers a symptomatic critique of conspiracy theory and a cultural analysis of the signifying practices of its endless circulation through countless cultural texts such as ﬁlms, television, novels, fanzines, computer networks, and the like. If conspiracy theory is, in Christopher Hitchens’s provocative terms, “the white noise which moves in to ﬁll the vacuity of the ofﬁcial version,”32 then we must understand the noise of popular politics. In this regard, this book is part of a larger project of scholars working within a range

INTRODUCTION

|

13

of humanistic disciplines that attempt to view conspiracy theory as a speciﬁcally cultural and political phenomenon and that, like Hofstadter in an earlier era (although to different normative ends), apply contemporary cultural and political theory to its analysis.33 Chapters 3 and 4 argue that conspiracy theory operates as a cultural practice of interpretation and as a narrative form that circulate throughout political campaigns and movements, journalism, and popular culture. As I explain in chapter 3, in order to construct a conspiracy theory, a theorist must ﬁrst reinterpret the meaning and signiﬁcance of historical and current events as evidence of some hidden truth. Driven by a circular, inexhaustible desire for more information to prove a conspiracy’s existence, this active, endless interpretive practice never arrives at a ﬁnal, determinate answer—the conspiracy always remains identiﬁable but elusive and never entirely knowable. As an interpretive practice, conspiracy theory represents an impossible, almost utopian drive to seize and fetishize individual signs in order to place them within interpretive structures that unsuccessfully attempt to stop the signs’ unlimited signiﬁcation. This process ultimately directs the theorist’s desire for political engagement toward a signifying regime of endless possibilities, where conspiracy reveals itself in every new piece of evidence. Like the heroes in The Da Vinci Code and those “Dark Alliance” readers who inferred a direct and systematic CIA–Contras–cocaine connection, the conspiracy theorist interprets and then draws links among disparate pieces of evidence—and in this practice ﬁnds conspiracy. In chapter 3, I illustrate this practice by analyzing some of the prominent theories that circulated about the Bill Clinton presidency. Conspiracy theory’s drive to interpret moves incessantly toward a narrative structure, one whose logic suggests an efﬁcient coherence. This is the focus of chapter 4, which explains the conspiracy narrative at the formal and narratological level through Oliver Stone’s JFK, “The Gemstone File” (a famous conspiracy document that originally circulated in abbreviated form as A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File during the 1970s), and the television series The X-Files. All of the messy details of contemporary and historical politics, conspiracy theory asserts, are merely effects caused by a single narrative agent (the CIA in “Dark Alliance,” for example, and Opus Dei and the Catholic Church in The Da Vinci Code). This agent has some clear, rational motivation that the theorist has isolated. Further evidence of the conspiracy’s

14

|

I N T RO D UCTI O N

existence and its inevitable progress towards completion emerges—or will emerge—with the passage of time. But this efﬁcient coherence of agency, movement, and logic continually threatens to unravel, as the narrator/theorist/author attempts to manage the actual complexity of history. The resolution that a conspiracy theory ultimately offers appears at once procrustean, ﬁtting complex events into a simple schema, and increasingly ramshackle as it attempts to accommodate a proliferation of complicated and conﬂicting data. More troubling still, the narrative faces the nearly impossible burden of ﬁnding an ending. A conclusion would call a halt to interpretation—conspiracy theory’s key practice and source of pleasure—by suggesting either that the conspiracy has won or that it did not represent the existential threat it seemed to promise. Either ending is unsatisfactory: the former offers defeat by an enemy, while the latter suggests a formal defeat of what was clearly a lesser conspiratorial threat. Chapter 5 turns to the question of how conspiracy theories are utilized by groups and individuals. Conspiracy theory offers certain satisfactions in its formal qualities and participatory practices, and in its ﬂuid movement between politics and culture. Popular novels and games featuring conspiracy, even if tied to a singularly frightening revelation, constitute a form of play and enable a sense of pleasure in which participants can “experience” the rush and vertiginous feelings associated with discovering conspiracy, and have the opportunity to create conspiracy narratives through imaginative interpretive efforts. These individual pleasures can lead an individual to ﬁnd or to found a conspiracy community that engages in collective investigative and political action. Three examples of conspiracy communities discussed over the course of the book are the militia movement (described in chapter 2), the 9/11 “truth movement” (discussed in chapter 7, which concerns 9/11 conspiracy theories), and the subcultures of conspiracy theorists that became increasingly organized during the 1990s through fanzines, independent book publishing, and conferences, which are described in chapter 5. The idea of a “conspiracy community” appears paradoxical for two reasons. First, conspiracy theory assumes a disabling vision of political power in which control is always elsewhere, and it suggests political engagement that is either vanguardist (for example, a “truth movement” attempting to lead followers to action while dismissing outsiders

INTRODUCTION

|

15

as knowing or unwitting co-conspirators) or separatist (for example, radical White Power and Christian Identity sects that remove themselves from society). Second, conspiracy theory suspects everyone of complicity with the conspiracy, making collective action quite different (if no one can be trusted, how safe or worthwhile is it to work with others?). At particular conjunctures, however, it enables the construction of a kind of secular, shadow intellectual collective that can organize—often in contentious and stumbling steps—social and political activity. It can also have important effects on major political parties, as in the tenuous association between the John Birch Society and parts of the Republican Party in the 1960s and the mobilization of the Christian Coalition on behalf of Republicans in the 1990s.34 I consider individuals’ affective engagement in conspiracy theory and conspiracy theory’s potential as a focus of collective action in chapter 5, and return to the concept of a conspiracy community again in chapter 7’s description and analysis of the so-called truth movement formed by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Part III presents two case studies intended to illustrate more fully the ways of understanding conspiracy theory presented in part II. Chapter 6 analyzes a particular set of religious texts and practices that resemble and are closely tied to conspiracy theory: popular Christian eschatology that attempts to provide an accessible, comprehensible, and all-encompassing narrative frame to explain the apocalyptic, imminent return of Christ to a mass audience. In addition to constructing a narrative, popular eschatology provides a call for believers to interpret current events in relation to Scripture in order to know and celebrate the rapture and Christ’s return. Although overtly spiritual, popular eschatology is implicitly political in its strong linking of a coming millennium to conservative political dogma speciﬁcally opposed to a presumed “secular humanist conspiracy.” It also offers ardent political support for Zionism and a strong Jewish State of Israel, while holding anti-Semitic spiritual beliefs that characterize Jews who refuse to convert to true Christianity as being doomed to the Antichrist’s seductive powers and the tribulation’s apocalypse. Although distinct from more “secular” conspiracy theories—particularly in its perverse desire for the conspiracy’s victory, in that such a victory would further ensure Christ’s return—popular eschatology shares a number of interpretive practices and texts with secular conspiracy theorists, and at times forms overt alliances with them. As a set of interpretive practices and a master

16

|

I N T RO D UCTI O N

narrative that overlaps with and is quite similar to that of right-wing conspiracy theory, popular eschatology demonstrates the struggle over the meanings of history, the relation of history to the present, and the meanings and possibilities of the apocalyptic future. Chapter 7 considers the dominant event and theories of the conspiratorial present: 9/11 and the “truth movement” that organizes and represents researchers and activists seeking to uncover the real story behind the terrorist attacks. During the mid-1990s, what Hitchens called the “white noise” of conspiracy theory came from three general directions and only incidentally found points of overlap: from radical conservative groups either afﬁliated with the militia movement, fundamentalist Protestantism, or a generalized hatred of Bill Clinton; from a shambolic conspiracy subculture that was not identiﬁable with any point on the political spectrum; and from a more inchoate aesthetic and narrative movement in popular culture to appropriate the conspiracy form and practice in ﬁlms and television. Since September 11, 2001, however, otherwise diverse conspiracy theorists and their theories have focused on the events of that day, and their efforts allow for a snapshot of an historic moment in which their collective actions enter and attempt to challenge and change mainstream opinion and politics. Chapter 7 summarizes and analyzes these efforts, and extends the book’s focus in an additional direction: toward the state. The 9/11 Commission, created by Congress (against the White House’s wishes) to study the attacks, recognized that in order to establish its own legitimacy, it would need to distinguish itself from a previous independent commission established to study a famous, traumatic, and anomalous event—the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Both the 9/11 Commission and the truth movement strategically responded to each other, the Commission by attempting to ignore conspiracy theorists while it addressed at least some of their concerns about government secrecy, and the truth movement by both dismissing the Commission as part of the conspiratorial state and expending signiﬁcant energy responding to the Commission’s report substantive ﬁndings. The conﬂict between the 9/11 Commission and the truth movement thus raises but leaves unresolved the issue of precisely how the state can respond to conspiracy theory as both a political challenge to its legitimacy and a set of cultural practices of interpretation and narration that proliferate in political and popular culture. The chapter closes with a discussion of the

INTRODUCTION

|

17

most popular and inﬂuential text of the 9/11 conspiracy community: the video documentary Loose Change. An effort to introduce conspiracy theory to a post-adolescent demographic via streaming video, Loose Change deploys all of the interpretive and narrative practices the book identiﬁes, as well the formal possibilities of digital video, in order to interpellate its audience as conspiracy theorists. The Afterword seeks to confront the populist vein that runs through much of the popularization of American cultural studies with the most regressive and dangerous tendencies of populist politics, exempliﬁed by the novel that has become a central cultural artifact of the contemporary American neo-Nazi movement, The Turner Diaries. A penultimate example of “resistance,” The Turner Diaries is a virulently fascist, racist, patriarchal, and anti-Semitic novel that presents a utopian future of white supremacy by misinterpreting and reimagining the past and the present. In order to theorize populism and evaluate its political valences, one must confront and challenge the most virulent tendencies of populism’s antagonism between “the people” and “the power bloc” without simply dismissing populism as necessarily racist and reactionary. This concern is not unique to the study of conspiracy theory but reverberates throughout the study of popular culture and the larger theoretical and political project of cultural studies—an issue that the Afterword considers as it thinks through the implications of recuperating, in a limited way, a political phenomenon as unstable as populism. Some ﬁnal words on what this book is not. It is not intended as an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories or as a compendium of the most logical explanations of the plots on which conspiracy theorists obsess, or as a thorough account of the range of communities of conspiracy theorists.35 Each of these would be an enormously valuable contribution to current political debates and the study of contemporary social movements, but they are quite different projects from the one I have chosen. This book is intended, rather, as an analysis of the role of conspiracy theory in contemporary populism and political culture that attempts to provide both a theoretical and a political take on the cultural present. It is intentionally partial and provocative, and is meant to spur debate about the role of interpretive and narrative practices in popular politics, as well as about the relationship between the political discourses of the marginal and extreme, and the mainstream and dominant.

18

|

I N T RO D UCTI O N

In addition, this book does not purport to identify one or a number of causes for conspiracy theory belief. Following the social science norm that the study of a particular phenomenon should isolate its cause, cognitive and social psychology suggest a number of sources for conspiracy belief: individuals prefer to associate complex, major causes with events that have substantial, signiﬁcant or wide-ranging consequences; individuals’ ability to reason is limited by a conﬁrmation bias that accepts information consonant with existing beliefs and rejects information that would contradict those beliefs; the tendency to hold fast to an incorrect belief cripples individuals’ ability and willingness to seek and process non-conﬁrming information; proliferating rumors and speculation about conspiracy tend to induce a “conspiracy cascade” in which an increasing number of individuals are persuaded of the conspiracy’s existence or plausibility; and group membership and participation can skew members’ belief into a more polarizing and extreme direction.36 One experiment found that subjects were more likely to believe a conspiracy theory that explains the successful assassination of a president than one that explains an attempted but failed assassination attempt.37 The ways our minds and behavior work both individually and socially, psychology tells us, causes conspiracy theory. In a more awkward but occasionally just as certain fashion, humanities and qualitative social science scholarship performs the same rite of causal explanation but focuses almost entirely on larger historical and social causes for conspiracy theory. Thus, variably, conspiracy theory is described as being caused by the loss of postwar economic and geopolitical stability,38 information overload and the concomitant loss in intellectual authority and expertise that allow people to sort the quality and veracity of truth claims based on that information,39 the loss of individual agency and a resulting “agency panic,”40 the crisis of life lived under the constant surveillance undertaken by the state and by corporate interests,41 and the ongoing identity crisis and cultural paranoia that are the result of postmodernity and late capitalism.42 I understand and appreciate this desire to identify and describe causes—in the ﬁrst edition of this book, I engaged in the same diagnostic speculation. Much of my discussion in the current edition about interpretation, narrative, pleasure, and collective action presumes that the cultural practice of conspiracy theory is sufﬁciently attractive, satisfying, and related to everyday political and cultural life in contemporary America to sustain

INTRODUCTION

|

19

engagement. In this second edition, I have abandoned the explicit search for an underlying causal agent, however, and assume both that something cognitive and something cultural can help explain conspiracy theory, and that in this process of overdetermination, all of the identiﬁed causes play some role. But the search for a cause is both too easy and too difﬁcult, given conspiracy theory’s pervasiveness and its overdetermination. It is longstanding in American (and human) history, and while it operates distinctly in different cultures and historical periods, some of its basic forms and practices remain consistent. Conspiracy Theories focuses on the description and analysis of these forms and practices, on the assumption that understanding how conspiracy theory works offers insight into the narrow world of conspiracy theorists, as well as into the broader implications of conspiracy theories as they circulate throughout the entirety of American popular political culture.

This page intentionally left blank

PART I

Conspiracy as Politics

This page intentionally left blank

1 Theorizing Conspiracy Politics The Problem of the “Paranoid Style”

G

rand conspiracy theories propose that the existing order is a sham and nothing short of a comprehensive political, social, and economic transformation of the nation—and perhaps the world—is necessary. They may not focus solely on politics in its relatively narrow, classically liberal sense because the conspiracy’s secret control of the government is merely one aspect of its power. Nevertheless, the capture of the state looms as one of the conspiracy’s great triumphs. Unsurprisingly, then, the prevailing academic and intellectual accounts of conspiracy theory (at least until the cultural turn in conspiracy theory studies that began in the late 1990s) focus on its political nature—its root causes in a clash of political ideologies, its effects on political systems and in the politics of a particular historical period, and its signiﬁcance for understanding politics generally. No account has proven so inﬂuential among academics and in the wider cultural debate about conspiracy theory than Richard Hofstadter’s characterization of conspiracy theory as a manifestation of the “paranoid style” in American politics. Surveying and critiquing the approaches to conspiracy theory as a speciﬁcally political phenomenon, this chapter begins with Hofstadter and his contemporaries, and then moves to a related but distinct body of contemporary work by leftist-progressive political activists concerned

23

24

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

with the danger of conspiracy theory in general, and of the tendency by those on the left to believe in conspiracies. The primary question that this part of the book raises is how conspiracy theory is understood, and should be understood, as a speciﬁcally political practice. Hofstadter’s interest in this question was both historical, insofar as he described a longstanding strain in American politics, and presentist, insofar as his work was intended as a rejoinder to and condemnation of the New Right of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The left-progressives focus more speciﬁcally on how conspiracy theory affects the political project of the contemporary left. My purpose in this chapter is to draw out and contextualize the assumptions of these two approaches, as well as review their similarities, differences, and relative strengths and weaknesses. The chapter closes by suggesting that a shared weakness in the two approaches is their simplistic understanding of populism and their resulting failure to capture the relationship between conspiracy theory and the populist underpinnings of American politics—a claim that the end of chapter 2 will bring to the fore. Richard Hofstadter and the “Paranoid Style”

No serious consideration of conspiracy theory can avoid the work of Richard Hofstadter and that of his contemporaries in the ﬁelds of history and political science between the late-1950s and the early-1970s. Hofstadter at once created and cleared the ﬁeld, establishing both that extremist political movements and thought were important objects of research and that the researcher’s normative position should be that of a detached, centrist critic who explains and admonishes extremism’s marginal role in the unfolding American historical and political narrative. This work arose from within two movements that dominated the disciplines of history and political science during the postwar era, the “consensus” or “counterprogressive” historiography among American historians, of which Hofstadter was a leading ﬁgure, and the broad theory of “pluralism” in American political science. What Hofstadter and others termed “political paranoia”—a pathology suffered by those existing outside of the pluralistic consensus who promoted fears of conspiracy—was merely one issue associated with the study of pluralism and consensus.1 Their work on conspiracy theory responded to the rise of the “New American Right” of McCarthyism and, later, Barry Goldwater, as well as the surge in visibility of reactionary groups such as

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

25

the John Birch Society. The work’s timeliness signiﬁcantly increased its visibility within academia and among concerned intellectuals, offering a well-crafted, palatable means for elites to understand the threatening political movements that arose from outside mainstream political parties and the academic and media institutions that built and shared a postwar liberal consensus. Such work, and especially Hofstadter’s, remains inﬂuential in academic and popular conceptions of the politics and signiﬁcance of conspiracy theories.2 During the George W. Bush administration, for example, journalists and political commentators deployed the term “paranoid style” to refer not only to run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorists3 but also to the Republican Party, President Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney;4 to the Democratic Party;5 to conservatives and the political right-wing;6 and to liberals and the political left.7 These citations were the low-hanging fruit found in a quick NEXIS search; a similar search I conducted in the mid-1990s for the previous edition of this book returned a similar yield.8 The “paranoid style” framework continues to cast a long shadow, to good and ill effect, by taking conspiracy theory seriously as a matter of political culture and using it as a means to offer and enforce a normative deﬁnition of political belief and practice. In order to explain how this term emerged from within postwar liberalism and the implications of that genealogy, I begin by placing Hofstadter’s work in the historical context of its emergence. PLURALISM, CONSENSUS,

AND THE

FEAR

OF

“EXTREMISM”

The theory and advocacy of “democratic pluralism” in contemporary American political science have resulted from a conﬂuence of a number of distinct traditions in social theory. Pluralists base their notion of governance and political practice on the assumption that a democracy is composed of a multiplicity of competing groups, themselves made up of individuals acting to advance their own interests. The modern notion of pluralism has relied on Max Weber’s concern for a rational, impersonal society, as well as Émile Durkheim’s interest in how social order limits the number and inﬂuence of individuals without strong attachments to groups.9 It employs a market-based theory of political practice in which, according to William Kornhauser’s 1959 work The Politics of Mass Society, “Democracy is essentially an institutional procedure for changing leadership by free competition for the popular vote.”10

26

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

In order to win the consent of their constituents, political parties and representatives “compete” for the votes of interested groups in the marketplace of politics. By trading their members’ votes for the fulﬁllment of their own practical political interests, groups play a meaningful role in electing and constituting a genuinely pluralistic democracy. The fact that certain elites can manipulate and control the political marketplace does not negate the effectiveness of a pluralistic democracy for defenders of such a system. Political theorist John Dunn characterizes the assumptions of pluralists: America was the stablest of all democracies and the most pluralist of all democracies; and, if it turned out that it was also less politically egalitarian than had previously been suspected or at least claimed, then this meant that the ﬁndings of American political science (a notoriously value-free intellectual practice) were that stable and authentically pluralist democracy was somewhat more oligarchical than had previously been supposed. Even in its own dreary terms the democratic government offered in this theory seems a somewhat ineffective mechanism for protecting the interest of quite a number of governed.11

The Other to a pluralist democracy during the postwar period was a “mass society” marked by “large numbers of people who are not integrated into any broad social groupings,” and elites who no longer have the autonomy and protection to rule and do what is best for society in an impersonal manner.12 In a mass society, atomized masses, no longer associated with or beholden to groups that can channel their needs and discontent into proper political and social behavior, place undue pressure on elites, thus inviting totalitarian rule by a “charismatic,” as opposed to a rational and practical, leadership. If “pluralism” represents the goal of a democratic society, mass society represents democracy’s inherent dangers. Fearful of the latter, proponents of pluralism warn of “extremists” on the left and the right who “must be deeply alienated from the complex of rules which keep the strivings for various values in restraint and balance. . . . [Extremists’] hostility is incompatible with that freedom from intense emotion which pluralistic politics needs for prosperity.”13 The “alienated mass man,” estranged from his “unwanted or unknown self,” often seeks “ﬂight into activism” in these extremist groups, substituting a real knowledge and practice of politics for the

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

27

pathological demagoguery of extremist ideology.14 One element of such extremist ideology is a “paranoid” fear of conspiracy. “Consensus” history shares many of the same assumptions concerning reasonable and irrational politics as political-theoretical concepts of pluralism. Within the discipline of history, consensus conceptions of the history of American politics were counter to (though not necessarily and at all times against) the Progressive school of Charles A. Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and other earlier twentieth-century historians, and thus in addition to being called consensus historians, they are also referred to as counterprogressives. Consensus history critiqued the Progressives’ celebration of liberal reform in the Progressive era and their admiration for the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, as well as their narrative of American history as a series of conﬂicts between differing philosophies (for example, between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson) and between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. Beyond mere rejection of their predecessors, however, consensus historians also developed a distinct counternarrative to that of the Progressives that described what they saw as a uniquely American history, identity, and form of political philosophy and practice, produced through a particular historical experience. The distinctly American politics described by consensus historians was moderate and pragmatic; even the conﬂicts identiﬁed by Progressive historians and accepted by counterprogressives were perceived by the latter as practical linkages among conﬂicting political parties and interest groups rather than as intense ideological battles.15 Consensus historians thus strongly echoed the mid–nineteenth-century observations of Alexis de Tocqueville— whose Democracy in America was out of print and had been nearly forgotten during the Progressive era—of America as an organic, distinct whole.16 The distinctions between Progressive and consensus historians reﬂected the differing class, geographical, and ethnic backgrounds and political commitments of the two schools, and resulted in quite divergent visions of popular movements of dissent.17 For Progressive historians, the Populist and Progressive eras were historical precedents to be championed; consensus historians (and especially Hofstadter), by contrast, viewed them with detached ambivalence as mixed episodes of reform and extremism.

28

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

As the Cold War developed, predominantly mainstream liberal and neoconservative historians articulated a notion of consensus in their vision of the United States as an outpost of pragmatic rationality in a dangerous world of ideology, totalitarianism, and fascism. Fearful of the excesses of the left, epitomized for consensus historians by all forms of communism and particularly by Stalin, and of the fascist right of Hitler and Mussolini, counterprogressive/consensus historians prized moderation and unity as uniquely positive aspects of a peaceful, pluralistic American tradition (though some, like Louis Hartz, were more critical of what they saw as America’s stiﬂing, anti-intellectual unity).18 Much of their work described American consensus as a project that was still incomplete. For Richard Hofstadter, “consensus” worked best when conceptualized in historical writing as analogous to the role played by an appropriate frame . . . to a painting: it sets the boundaries of the scene and enables us to see where the picture breaks off and the alien environment begins. Consensus is, in other words, the limited ﬁeld within and upon which any (thus limited) conﬂict takes place; it does not play the role of a general theory that functions outside of historical context and circumstance, but instead works best as a measure of the degree of legitimacy and acceptance a political system or speciﬁc issue achieves among ‘the politically active public.’19

Consensus history was ascendant during the era of the liberal Cold War intellectual, a time in which, at least among members of the intelligentsia, such political consensus was achieved and such a frame was successfully built. As C. Wright Mills asserted in The Power Elite (1956), postwar American intellectuals had “abandoned criticism for the new American celebration.”20 Andrew Ross, employing Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony, has described this process of consensus building among intellectuals during the period as the formation of a “historic bloc” in which intellectuals served as “functionaries or cultural deputies of the dominant group, by lending their cultural authority to the process of eliciting ‘spontaneous’ or popular consent for the ideas and authority of this group.”21 In this sense, consensus historians, as part of an entire class of dominant intellectuals, played a central role in the legitimation process of Cold War policy and ideology. Despite calls for and proclamations of “the end of ideology,” the commonsensical assumptions of American “consensus” in the historic past and the political present assumed the status of “objectivity” as described

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

29

by Gramscian notions of ideology.22 In a sympathetic but detached analysis of consensus historians during the period of their dominance in American history, J. Rogers Hollingsworth describes this process well: “In a period when the American people have had an insatiable desire to develop an image of themselves and to explain their institutions to people of other nations, the consensus and continuity themes have helped to point out the distinctiveness of American history—thus permitting the American people to better understand what it means to be an American.”23 Rather than identifying consensus, however, Hollingsworth describes the role of intellectuals linked to ruling “historic blocs” in the winning of consent from the masses. As Gramsci wrote, “To the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity which is ‘psychological’; they ‘organize’ human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.”24 “Consensus”— or, more precisely, consent—must be won and protected; the “painting’s frame,” in Hofstadter’s terminology, must be tight, the “alien environment” seen as such, and measurement must constantly be taken of past and present and either found reasonably secure or made so. In this context, it is not surprising that although they focused chieﬂy on right-wing extremists at the time, those consensus historians and political-science pluralists concerned with this political paranoia were suspicious of virtually any type of populism.25 Populisms of the right were not the only worry; according to Hofstadter, McCarthyism “aroused in some intellectuals more distaste than they had ever thought they would feel for popular passions and anti-establishment demagogy. The populism of the right inspired a new skepticism about the older populism of the left.”26 This became particularly important during the years of student activism and the emergence of the New Left, contemporaneous with some of the later work of consensus historians on political paranoia, when what were seen as new left-wing populisms became the object of many older historians’ scorn and criticism. From its earliest moments, consensus history has used “extremism” as a convenient and versatile label for a variety of forms of dissent. This skepticism of the New Left is not inconsistent with Hofstadter’s own political journey to centrist liberalism, especially in response to the student riots at Columbia, where he spent most of his career. Earlier, in The American Political Tradition (1948), Hofstadter had chastised

30

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

America’s political tradition for being “a democracy in cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity,” and offered a critical analysis of what he saw as both a central aspect of American politics and its main defect: the overwhelming dominance of political structures by elites.27 As Hofstadter’s work developed over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, however, he began to describe consensus in far more positive terms, privileging American substantive political moderation and its structures of political process as fortiﬁcations against the extremism and insurgency of mass democracy. Hofstadter’s own political views moved increasingly toward those of mainstream liberalism throughout the 1950s, and he came to celebrate the New Deal as a triumph of rational politics over the decidedly mixed tradition of reform and progressivism that he had more critically examined in The Age of Reform (1955).28 His vision of democracy shifted increasingly from one of substantive ideals or principles to one of pragmatism and proceduralism, moving him further toward the position of his pluralist contemporaries in political science.29 In his next book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) (which, like Age of Reform, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), he championed what he termed “political intelligence,” by which he meant the pragmatic engagement with structures of power and consensus. Those outside the center lacked the willingness to so engage: “Whereas the distinctively political intelligence begins with the political world, and attempts to make an assessment of how far a given set of goals can in fact be realized in the face of a certain balance of forces, the secularized fundamentalist mind begins with a deﬁnition of that which is absolutely right, and looks upon politics as an arena in which that right must be realized.”30 Given this epistemological framework, conspiracy theory can be found virtually anywhere the “fundamentalist mind” dwells—in the past and the present day, as well as in the margins and mainstreams of American history and political practice. Indeed, the need to account for the rise in such extremism through explanatory frameworks and historical parallels consumed a sizable body of literature in the journals, essay collections, and books of American historians, particularly from the mid-1950s to 1970.31 Ironically, given Richard Hofstadter’s inﬂuential emphasis on the social-psychological basis for conspiracy theory, this overproduction of worried scholarship seems rather neurotic, if not paranoid.

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

REVOLTING

IN

STYLE: THE STYLE

AND

PRACTICES

OF

|

31

PARANOID POLITICS

By the time he focused his attention on political extremism and conspiracy theory, Hofstadter was already a leading and popular academic historian whose writings were marked by a broad historical scope, an engaging narrative style and authorial voice, the political moderation and ironic detachment of a Cold War liberal intellectual, and a powerful challenge to the dominant Progressive historiography of the previous generation. The essays that make up Hofstadter’s work on conspiracy theory, written between the mid-1950s and early 1960s and collected in a 1966 book, are the most inﬂuential and widely cited on the subject of conspiracy theory and countersubversion.32 Borrowing from social psychology and literary studies in their emphasis on symbols and notions of the personal and social unconscious, these essays set many terms of the debate over the style and causes of political extremism that followed. Hofstadter’s work is especially important for contemporary studies of conspiracy theory—more important than those of his contemporaries—because of the stress that he placed on the rituals and symbols of popular political practice. This culturalism should make one pause before simply rejecting his concept of political paranoia. He correctly emphasized the culture of popular politics, explaining in the introduction to his 1966 collection of essays on the topic: “[These essays] focus on the way large segments of the public respond to civic issues, make them their own, put them to work on national problems, and express their response to these problems in distinctive rhetorical styles” (Paranoid Style, viii). For Hofstadter, politics as it is practiced and experienced on the popular level is not created from above and imposed on those below, nor is it composed simply of rational responses to policy issues or the platforms of political parties. Instead, popular politics exists in rituals and symbols. While it does not create civic issues, the public plays a role in appropriating, reshaping, and “working” on the political; indeed, “political life acts as a sounding board for identities, values, fears, and aspirations” (ix). His emphasis on the symbolic realm of politics broke from the Progressive school of historians, who had instead viewed American history largely as a chronicle of competing interests. Nineteenth-century Populists, according to the Progressive historians, had undertaken rational efforts to advance the interests of their membership; for Hofstadter, by contrast, theirs was more a symbolic and

32

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

rhetorical effort ﬁlled with expressions of prejudice and passion (as well as attempts, to a lesser extent, to advance their interests). In its emphasis on culture and the nonrational, consensus history offered a “rediscovery of the complexity in American history,” Hofstadter maintained, and it recognized the multiplicity of sociological, ethnic, and cultural forces at work in it.33 Having read the work of Karl Mannheim and Max Weber, and that of his Columbia colleague Robert Merton, and having at least been exposed to the Frankfurt School, Hofstadter sought to incorporate some of the insights from qualitative sociology and social theory into his work and into history as a discipline.34 In The Paranoid Style and other writings from this period of his career, this interest led him to consider how knowledge, ideology, and practices are adopted, and to broaden, rather than reduce, the role of social forces in historical accounts. His work sought the latent content and motivations lurking behind the manifest purposes of human behavior. Although he deemed culture and nonrational behavior historically signiﬁcant, he concluded that they played a dangerous, potentially destructive role in American politics and were more to be feared than championed or even tolerated. The rhetoric of the public—or at least of a sector of the public signiﬁcant enough to require documentation, analysis, and dread—lacks the rationality and mental health necessary for proper political discourse. Instead, popular, or perhaps more precisely, mass reaction to “striking symbolic acts or memorable statements, or . . . public ﬁgures who themselves have symbolic appeal” demonstrates “the nonrational side of politics” (Paranoid Style, ix). The study of the political rhetoric of popular or mass political symbols enabled Hofstadter “to get at political pathology” as an object of study (6). The term “political pathology,” which he contrasted to properly rational political action, describes an objectionable manifestation of aberrant practices expressed in speciﬁc forms of rhetoric and symbols. Rather than communicating through the true, transparent statements of the interest politics that should characterize a representative democracy, “pathological” rhetoric communicates as a “style.” Style is, “above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself ” (4) that is concerned with “the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content” (5). Hofstadter conceded that a pathological style could stumble upon the truth, or at least have some “foundation” of truth beneath its

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

33

fulminations. The kernel of fact, however, would inevitably be placed within an “apocalyptic and absolutist framework” that either rendered it false or exaggerated its implications (17). Conspiracy does exist, Hofstadter noted: legitimate political strategies often require secrecy, and thus they demand some measure of conspiracy. Yet, such strategies may merely be mechanisms to a properly political end and do not, in and of themselves, constitute historical forces with real-world effects. To think so is merely to fall into the paranoid style, to convert a singular incident into a larger framework, and to willfully misinterpret or misread evidence and incorrectly place it into a pathological explanatory framework. Thus, Hofstadter implied a continuum between proper politics and pathology, as well as between justiﬁable or understandable prejudice and fear and those expressions of prejudice and fear that are beyond the limits of legitimate politics. Some expressions of group fear, particularly of a threatening, distinct Other, are not necessarily forms of unjustiﬁable paranoia or instances of a paranoid style. For example, he argued that the desire for ethnic and religious homogeneity among “Yankee” Protestants in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century need not be dismissed “out of hand” (that is, categorically condemned as bigoted), except when anti-Catholic sentiments were expressed in a militant style, or suffered from “a large paranoid infusion” about Masonic rituals and secret plots (19). Although “style” refers most directly to the form that extremist political rhetoric assumes, then, it also clearly refers to the content within this form. A little fear (legitimate or otherwise), a little xenophobia, and even a touch of racism are defensible within political discourse if phrased correctly and taken a reasonable spoonful at a time. A more substantial “infusion” of paranoia, however, does not simply alter the framework of the paranoid explanation; it also shapes the evidence that would be poured into such a framework. The paranoid style transforms both the terms and the speciﬁc substance of potentially legitimate issues into irrational rhetoric. As Daniel Bell had commented a few years earlier, “The tendency to convert concrete issues into ideological problems, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, is to invite conﬂicts which can only damage a society.”35 The calls of the “paranoid style” to morality and emotion, and the “damaging conﬂicts” that this style attempts to produce, emanate from the ideology on which the style is based rather than on the rationality and objectivity of a truly democratic political order.

34

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

Although Hofstadter did not deﬁne all forms of dissent as outside the norm, he equated his notion of legitimate dissent and rational discourse with that of establishment liberals and conservatives during the Cold War period in which his and others’ discussion of political paranoia took place. In his treatment of Barry Goldwater and the 1964 Republican presidential primaries and general election, for instance, Hofstadter explicitly described the two-party system as demanding a “loyal opposition” that “accepts the ultimate good intentions of the other” and that includes a “certain sobriety born of experience” of compromise, consensus, and the realities of the “professional code” of political process (Paranoid Style, 100–106). By contrast, Goldwater and his followers had “little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word” (43–44). Hofstadter’s example of an acceptable conservatism was Senator Robert A. Taft’s reasonable Republican opposition to the New Deal, which recognized expediency and responsibility in the political process and shared at least some of the New Deal’s basic assumptions (if not sympathy for or belief in the full program) concerning the need for some form of social and economic protection for the unfortunate dispossessed of capitalism (97). Similarly, a strong, rational anticommunism was acceptable, particularly in foreign policy; the problem with the “pseudoconservatism” of Goldwater was its inward-looking paranoia. Rather than looking abroad, where realistic measures to strengthen anticommunist forces might be made, Goldwater focused almost exclusively on the largely phantom threat of communist “inﬁltration” (46).36 For the Cold War liberalism to which he subscribed, Hofstadter saw his political assumptions and preferences as the normative common ground and common sense from which any properly consensual political opposition must begin.37 If Taft represented a reasonable conservatism that Goldwater exceeded, the emergent New Left represented a parallel example of extremism at the other end of the political spectrum. For example, Hofstadter cited the “popular left-wing press” in a list of movements that ﬁt within the paranoid style, a list that included abolitionists who suspected a slaveholders’ conspiracy, anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic groups, nineteenth-century Populist Party fears of international bankers, and the contemporary American right wing (Paranoid Style, 9). When he looked out at the current scene, Hofstadter spent far more of

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

35

his time lambasting McCarthy, Goldwater, and their followers than the left, but this is undoubtedly less because in the early to mid-1960s he saw any essential distinction between the far left and the far right and more because of the prominence of the far right at the time in which he wrote. When Hofstadter asserted that “[w]hat most liberals now hope for is not to carry on with some ambitious new program, but simply to defend as much as possible of the old achievements and to try to keep traditional liberties of expression that are threatened” (43), his rhetorical ﬂourish of “most liberals” assumes a common sense of Cold War liberalism that denies the legitimacy of all but the most loyal opposition. Again, he deﬁned extremes of right and left both by the content of their positions (right-wing libertarian economic policy connected with a paranoid fear of domestic communist inﬁltration, social conservatism, and antiintellectualism on the one hand; radical “new programs” inﬂuenced by socialism on the other) and the form of their rhetorical opposition.38 The necessary protection against such extremism for both Hofstadter’s consensus politics and for “pluralistic” democratic theory was a functioning two-party political system. In The Politics of Unreason (1970), a work that followed the tradition that Hofstadter had established, leading political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset and co-author Earl Raab argued that the two-party system works as a bulwark against development of extremist movements; the 1964 presidential election was simply an exception that proved the rule, given Goldwater’s convincing defeat. Mainstream political parties, they argued, “have not been ideological agents, but coalition parties, compromise parties, designed pragmatically for electoral victories.”39 Indeed, Hofstadter went so far as to say that in their deep distrust and hostile attacks on mainstream, establishment political leaders, Goldwater conservatives (and, by implication, far leftists) moved beyond simple personal attack and into radical critique by calling “into question the validity of the political system that keeps putting such [leaders] into ofﬁce” (Paranoid Style, 100). In a sense, Hofstadter was absolutely right. Among leftists, fear of an economic and power elite (whether conspiratorial or not) is symptomatic of profound suspicions of not only the process but the very structures of the American political system—a system in which, by this point in his career, Hofstadter found little of importance at fault. Goldwater conservatives also viewed the success of corrupt leaders and the electoral

36

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

failures of their own candidate not as the fault of the structures of the American democratic system per se, but rather as the fault of some aspect(s) of the political process, such as the Republican Party establishment, the media, or political dirty tricks by political opponents. For Hofstadter, such claims were unfounded and emblematic of the New Right’s pathologies. Whether the dissent came from the left or right, Hofstadter sought to reduce and demean it by positing a binary opposition between the pathological and ideological style of the political margins and the properly rational political substance of centrist liberalism. STATUS SYMBOLS: MASS SOCIETY, ANXIETY, PARANOIA, AND THE CAUSES OF THE PARANOID STYLE

Despite his ﬂat, simplistic theory of political belief and action that divided the universe into two distinct camps, Hofstadter brilliantly recognized that the expressive style of conspiracy theory required serious consideration. That is, his conception of conspiracy theory as a style, a complex political and cultural rhetoric and means of seeing the world, was brilliant; his understanding of it as paranoid was confused and confusing in his own work, and has only become more simplistic and useless as it has been taken up by others. But what precisely did Hofstadter mean by “paranoia” and “pathology,” and what caused it? He clearly wished to delineate his usage of the concept from its psychoanalytic and social-psychological origins: “Although they both tend to be overheated, oversuspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world directed speciﬁcally against him; whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style ﬁnds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others” (Paranoid Style, 4; emphasis in original). Hofstadter relied on many of what he assumed were the components of a psychoanalytic deﬁnition to analyze the paranoid style, such as the degree to which the paranoid’s enemy is a projection of the self, which is then imitated (as in, for example, the John Birch Society, a “secret” group formed to study and root out communists’ secret inﬁltration of the United States, or in the tens of quasi-secretive militias of the 1990s), and the fact that the “paranoid [style’s] mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities” (4, 32–36). Hofstadter intended an analogical, rather than clinical, use of the term “paranoid,”

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

37

but left undeﬁned precisely how far short the phenomenon is from a clinical pathology. Instead, it seemed to offer him a useful means for describing, rather than theorizing, historicizing, and prescribing a cure for conspiracy theory.40 Hofstadter offered no greater clarity about the causes of the paranoid style. He did, however, identify two, though he failed to explain precisely how and to what extent each caused outbreaks. The ﬁrst such cause was the general historical development of “mass society,” the modern precondition for the mid–twentieth-century rise of the paranoid style. Many American intellectuals throughout the 1950s and early 1960s participated in worried discussions of mass culture and society, discussions that had begun in Europe with the work of Gustave Le Bon, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and, later, the Frankfurt School.41 The postwar American version linked the social, political, and cultural conditions of American mass society with disease, such that the body politic and the hallowed but fragile ground of culture (whether seen as a distinctive “American culture” or an aristocratic “high culture”) were perceived as existing under the continual threat of infection from outside forces. This was a period in which the “consensus” about the identity and distinction of American culture was never so clear and yet never seemed so threatened, in which consensus was built in and on fear of annihilation. Much of the discourse of the Cold War—a battle taking place at home and all over the world between the objective, rational, and moral democracy of the United States and the irrational, monolithic militarism of the Soviet Union—provides a frame of reference for consensus history’s fear of extremism and pluralist political theory’s fear of the rise of a “mass man.” Elite postwar intellectuals deeply dreaded and harshly criticized the pervasiveness of commodiﬁed mass and middlebrow culture, which they viewed as a threat to the sacred domain, fully realized aesthetics, and reasoned public appreciation of the best of American culture. Of particular signiﬁcance was the distinction between high and various levels of commodiﬁed culture, a distinction that was a subject of widespread intellectual debate throughout the postwar era. Intellectual authority established itself during this period in the act of deﬁning categories of “taste” and speciﬁcally by deﬁning those categories distinguished as aberrant and/or mass.42 For example, in delineating the distinctions between high, middlebrow, and mass culture, the cultural

38

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

critic Dwight Macdonald, constituting himself as both defender of the high and as sympathetic supporter of the masses who no longer produced their own “authentic” culture, perceived the greatest danger to high culture coming “not so much from mass cult as from a peculiar hybrid bred from the latter’s unnatural intercourse with the former. A whole middle culture [which Macdonald deﬁned as mass culture with a ‘cultural ﬁgleaf ’] has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents.”43 For Hofstadter, the production and consumption of the paranoid style paralleled the production and consumption of commodiﬁed mass culture. A “distorted” political style, he wrote, sent a possible signal that may alert us to a distorted judgment, just as in art an ugly style is a cue to fundamental defects of taste” (Paranoid Style, 6). Mass culture produced poor judgment, which in turn produced “ugly art,” while the mass media produced an impoverished politics. “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena in which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilization” (63).44 The problem created by the paranoid style did not particularly come from “the masses,” whose passions had always been reasonably well absorbed and blunted within the structures of American politics. But the masses were not themselves new; they had arisen before in the Populist era and been beaten back by the modern liberal state. Antiintellectualism, Hofstadter had already warned, had a long and deep history in America. But now, a new form and practice of politics that threatened the older stability came from the effects of mass communications and mass culture, which enhanced the dynamics that shaped earlier pathological outbreaks. The resulting mass man, created and manipulated by new technologies of control, posed a potentially more dangerous threat to political order. Speciﬁcally, mass culture threatened to destroy boundaries crucial to the success and stability of the postwar consensus. Andreas Huyssen has identiﬁed the dominant binary in nineteenth-century culture as being between, on the one hand, “mass culture” and women, and, on the

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

39

other, “authentic culture,” the prerogative of men. Although this strong association made by modernist European artists and intellectuals was somewhat less pervasive in American postwar mass culture debates, it remains as a residual element in Hofstadter’s argument. Huyssen writes, “The problem [for the modernist artist] is not the desire to differentiate between forms of high art and depraved forms of mass culture and its co-optations. The problem is rather the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued.”45 Hofstadter’s brand of modernist politics was based on a series of crucial divisions between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the rational and the emotional, and the political and the personal. Retaining that boundary was crucial, and he and his contemporaries worried that McCarthyism, Goldwater, and any “extremist politics” or “irrational” political discourse would prove victorious over the legitimate and rational (though such fears were certainly present), and that the border between order and its other would disappear. In this sense, Hofstadter’s fear of the loss of a clear set of divisions included the fear of secure gendered boundaries as a structuring principle, just as the politics (not to mention the history and political science departments) of his era was based on the exclusion of women and the lesser qualities they would have brought with them had they been allowed to enter the political and the historical realms. Extremism is emotional, hysterical, and pathological; proper politics is logical, ordered, pragmatic, and efﬁcacious. The paranoid style threatened the American political system from within as its pathological Other—made that much more threatening by the electronic media that made its liberal core that much more vulnerable. An expansionist Soviet Union under Stalin presented a signiﬁcant threat, to be sure, but another, closer enemy lurked. Like McCarthy and Goldwater, who feared an enemy within striking distance of the heart of American order and democracy, so Hofstadter and his colleagues feared the expansion of the paranoid style in the democratic order through the new mass man. The concept of the paranoid style described a pathology that could be spread more easily through an unwitting public weakened by the breakdown and disintegration of traditional American cultural, social, and political structures. Paranoid about paranoia, Hofstadter had pathologically located the pathology at the heart of conspiracy. As Sander Gilman explains, “Order and control are the antithesis of ‘pathology.’ ‘Pathology’ is disorder and the loss of control, the giving over of the self to the forces

40

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

that lie beyond the self. It is because these forces actually lie within and are projected outside the self that the different is so readily deﬁned as the pathological. Such deﬁnitions are an efﬁcient way of displacing the consciousness that the self, as a biological entity subject to the inexorable rules of aging and decay, ultimately cannot be controlled.”46 If the development of mass culture provides a speciﬁc historical context to the twentieth-century example of “the paranoid style,” Hofstadter’s social-psychological explanations provide a more universal frame of reference. The paranoid style, he argued, is “always present in some considerable minority of the population” (Paranoid Style, 39) even if it only manifests itself in episodic waves. He cited Norman Cohn’s work on millennialism throughout medieval Europe in order to demonstrate the degree to which the paranoid style has appeared in different places over centuries of Western history.47 In order to be activated, this “paranoid tendency” must be mobilized by “social conﬂicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action. Catastrophe or the fear of catastrophe is more likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric” (Paranoid Style, 39).48 Hofstadter’s distinction between two types of political discourses and practices would seem to contradict this assertion, however. “Status” politics, “the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives”—and the general type of political discourse within which the “paranoid style” exists—tends to become dominant during periods of prosperity. On the other hand, during times of depression and economic crisis a more constructive “interest” politics, based instead on “the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs” and focused on passing legislation, must necessarily become dominant (53–54). Whereas status politics is based on emotion and ideology, interest politics concerns the more properly political struggle for jobs, economic security, and bargaining power.49 Although Hofstadter did hedge this polarity to a degree in theory (in times of depression, “politics is more clearly a matter of interests, although of course status considerations are still present” [Paranoid Style, 53]), he implicitly described the historical periods of interest and status as mutually exclusive.50 Because status politics is difﬁcult to reconcile within “the normal political processes of bargain and compromise” (Paranoid Style, 39), and proponents of such politics, “being less concerned with the uses

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

41

of power than with its alleged misuse, do not offer positive programs to solve social problems” (87–88), the paranoid style rises in importance when struggles over status that cannot be or refuse to be resolved through rational political discourse become most visible. The notion of status politics was an attempt, Hofstadter explained, to account for three separate but related aspects of American culture: “First is the problem of American identity, as it is complicated by our immigrant origins and the problems of ethnic minorities; second, the problem of social status, deﬁned as the capacity of various groups and occupations to command personal deference in society; and, ﬁnally, the effort of Americans of diverse cultural and moral persuasions to win reassurance that their values are respected by the community at large” (87). Hofstadter rightly identiﬁed some of the most crucial strains for American political practice, and particularly for American cultural politics: the problems of constructing and maintaining “nationhood” and a “national identity” within a society of ethnic and racial (and, although not mentioned in this context by Hofstadter, class, gender, geographic, and sexual) diversity and conﬂict; and of competing groups and individuals, structured by those conﬂicts, attempting to classify their tastes and values and those of others within structures of economic, educational, and cultural capital. Yet, he perceived the central problem that status politics represents to be the problematic role that emotions and the psychological makeup of groups and individuals play in the attempt to resolve these strains through reasonable political means in a pluralistic democracy. He proceeded from the assumption that these problems can be and are resolved when “interest politics” dominates because these problems are historically speciﬁc and psychological rather than endemic to the American political system, which is fundamentally sound.51 Hofstadter thus again relies on his essential dualities: rational versus pathological politics, and political pragmatism against ideological idealism, with the former term in both dualities deﬁned as rational and the latter as pathological. The paranoid “style” and “tendency,” then, are not so much universal as they are conjunctural—which is to say, these are not theoretical models that could be applied prospectively but are interpretive historical concepts that an enlightened analyst can ﬁnd in earlier historical movements that fail to match the analyst’s political and social preferences.52 In this schema, it is unclear which are the effects and which are the

42

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

causes, and where the tipping point of social and economic crisis lies that would cause interest politics to subside and status politics to rise. Ultimately, Hofstadter applied a theory of individual pathology to a social phenomenon—an interesting, perhaps productive exercise for an analogy, but problematic if, as with Hofstadter, one is attempting to produce a concept that can be used across history to explain, for example, populist political dissent today.53 As American historiographer John Higham argued in his 1959 critical analysis of consensus historians, Hofstadter and others who posited political conﬂict as psychological pathology “substitute[d] a schism in the soul for a schism in society,” and either refused to see or trivialized conﬂict by describing it as “psychological adjustments to institutional change.”54 By broadly labeling as pathological any challenge or resistance to consensus, the notion of the paranoid style serves as an excuse for neglecting, equating, and even repressing political protest and mass political action of all sorts, equating diverse movements and distorting our understanding of them in the process.55 “Consensus” and “pluralism,” in their understanding of conspiracy theory and populism, also offer a narrow vision of politics and especially of democracy. They reject the redemptive aspects of liberal democracy—its placement of the people at the center of democracy, the promise that a sovereign people can direct a nation towards a collective goal by unmediated control of the state and its resources—in favor of a much thinner, institutional understanding of politics as the “pragmatic” working out of pre-political interests.56 As Margaret Canovan explains, however, the pragmatic and redemptive are two constitutive faces of democracy, each making necessary contributions to its power and legitimacy as a political order.57 Hofstadter’s analogical use of paranoia, then, brings along with it a normative description of conspiracy theory and populism as necessarily extreme and marginal, as well as an attenuated theory of democracy and politics. The latter term that makes up the “paranoid style” concept productively opens analysis to the study of political culture, rhetoric, and popular discourse; but the former part, “paranoid style,” anchors analysis to a narrow, normative consideration of ideology, pathology, and status anxiety. The Progressive Critique: Conspiracy Theory as Seduction

Hofstadter’s inﬂuence extends to a left-progressive political critique of contemporary populism and conspiracy theory that departs in

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

43

important ways from the conspiracy-as-pathology approach by opposing the American consensus that the paranoid style seeks to uphold. Leftists who condemn conspiracy theory fear the seduction of the public, and of the left in particular, by simplistic and potentially dangerous pursuits that would distract the public and progressives from more substantive investigations and condemnations of dominant American political and economic power. This critique has arisen in part as a way to explain the success of conservatism as a popular political phenomenon and the waning of the left following Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in 1980. In its more instrumental form, it asserts that right-wing populist conspiracy theory, which is frequently funded by conservative groups or circulated by conservative media outlets, has “mobilized resentment” against the left and progressive social and economic reforms.58 Its more complex iteration contends that right-wing conspiracy theories and the populist movements that formulate and trumpet them enjoy close links with political and economic elites, but are also independent from them. More important, however, conspiracy theory and populism both express and exploit existing social tensions by demonizing and scapegoating certain groups (especially women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities) and by engaging in conspiracist fantasies—and in so doing, offer an attractive and simplistic explanation for political dissatisfactions that in turn forces further social and economic oppression and pushes the political center rightward.59 In addition to its concern about conspiracy theory’s ability to capture the center’s imagination, the leftist critique also worries both that some elements of the left dabble in conspiracy theory and that, as a result, the left ﬁnds itself labeled conspiracy theorists by the mainstream media. Oliver Stone’s “solution” to the Kennedy assassination mystery in JFK offers an example of both developments. Asserting that an alliance of the political, intelligence, military, and corporate elites combined to kill Kennedy, Stone’s ﬁlm was identiﬁed by conservative and some mainstream periodicals as an example of leftist conspiracy theory, largely because the perpetrators that the ﬁlm identiﬁed were individuals and institutions that the antiwar movement, the New Left, and radical movements have vigorously critiqued in the years since Kennedy’s death.60 Stone seems leftist; Stone is a conspiracy theorist; therefore, all leftists are conspiracy theorists. More recently, many of the 9/11-focused conspiracy theories and theorists assume an anti-imperialist, anticorporate

44

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

cast, and are associated with leftist causes.61 This is not new, even if it has not been as pervasive as Hofstadter’s followers claimed in their condemnations of the New Left. Some individuals and groups that have been identiﬁed with the anti–Vietnam War and later protest movements since the rise of the New Left have publicly espoused beliefs in a “secret team” and/or other entities that control political events.62 Progressive critics of conspiracy theory argue that such conspiracism works only to harm the greater left-progressive cause. It blames illusory groups for structural problems and it legitimates conservative and mainstream dismissals of the left as paranoid kooks. Worse, it leaves the left vulnerable both to manipulation by right-wing and fascist elements that compose much of the conspiracy theory network and to the fascist scapegoating— exempliﬁed in anti-Semitism and racism—that is the inevitable result of such paranoia.63 The progressive critic who has most often and vehemently criticized conspiracy theories is Chip Berlet, an investigative journalist and political activist whose monograph Right Woos Left forcefully asserts that vulnerable individuals and groups on the left are being seduced and ultimately corrupted by right-wing populists through conspiracy theories.64 Documenting practitioners on both sides of the political spectrum, Berlet warns that this seduction leads inexorably to the demagoguery and racism that are characteristics of fascism. In Right Woos Left, he notes several incidents in which such seduction has occurred, including the protest movement against the ﬁrst Persian Gulf War, at which perennial outlier presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche’s organization tried to recruit new members, and among some investigative journalists, who either naïvely or unscrupulously accept aid and information from individuals with ties to right-wing and fascist organizations.65 More recently, Berlet has chastised individuals and media organizations associated with the left that have promoted conspiracy theories about 9/11.66 The left is particularly susceptible to such inﬁltration and manipulation after decades of conservative ascendancy, Berlet argues. Out of power, the left has been more committed to critique than progressive prescription, and leftists have become increasingly open to alliances with those who might share their dislike of the dominant political order, even if those with whom they would ally work from a radically different perspective.67 The title of an article he published in the magazine The Progressive, “Friendly Fascists,” epitomizes a theme that at times

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

45

pervades Berlet’s approach: that conspiracy theory operates by alluring and then corrupting the left, as right-wing extremists who seem to share leftists’ anti-elitism and fear of centralized power and wish to exchange intelligence and analysis inﬁltrate and pervert left-wing groups and politics. Like Hofstadter, Berlet conceptualizes conspiracy theory as a form of infection that results from this seduction; unlike Hofstadter, however, he does not worry about the health of an American consensus but is instead concerned with the degree to which conspiracy theory contaminates and afﬂicts progressive groups and thought. The leftist concern with conspiracy theory does not deny the historical evidence or future possibility of governmental malfeasance and covert operations. Indeed, Berlet and other leftists who have publicly rebuked conspiracy theory, such as Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert, have written extensively on what they view as the hidden truths of American and capitalist power.68 Instead, their emphasis is on drawing distinctions between conspiracy theory and what they see as proper progressive inquiry along three axes: the analysis of power, the gathering of information about covert power, and properly progressive political activism. The correct analytic approach to the causes of political events, they argue, focuses on institutional, systemic, or structural (terms that are used virtually interchangeably) phenomena rather than on the secretive machinations of one individual or a small, elite group that obsess conspiracy theorists. Albert, writing in the leftist publication Z Magazine, argues that conspiracy theory’s emphasis on an individual or a particular group’s rogue and secretive evil acts fails to recognize how “the normal operations of some institutions generate the behaviors and motivations” that lead to events such as political assassinations.69 Berlet describes proper, as opposed to conspiracist, analysis of power similarly: “It’s not an individual view of history; it’s a structural view. It’s a view that looks historically. What we’ve allowed ourselves to be suckered into is a historical misunderstanding. We now view history as a cabal of individuals secretly plotting.”70 In a more systematic way, Chomsky’s book-length study of the Kennedy administration’s foreign-policy record rejects simplistic conspiracy theories connecting Kennedy’s murder with an escalation of the Vietnam War. Using publicly available government records as well as secondary historical sources, Chomsky attacks the notion that the assassination took place because of Kennedy’s desire to pull the

46

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

American military out of Vietnam, and that Kennedy’s death led directly to escalation in Vietnam: “The available facts, as usual, lead us to seek the institutional sources of policy decisions and their stability. . . . People who wish to understand and change the world will do well, in my opinion, to pay attention to it, not to engage in groundless speculation as to what one or another leader might have done.”71 For Chomsky, the Kennedy foreign-policy record demonstrates continuity with American Cold War militarism before and after his aborted presidency, and thus the core assumption of many conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination’s relationship to his alleged doubts about American intervention in Vietnam misunderstands the structural causes of American international relations. Left-progressive critics also argue that conspiracy theories are often based on wrong or incomplete data from questionable origins. Dependent on unnamed sources and suspect, anecdotal evidence, lacking adequate documentation for the evidence it does present, and drawing illogical, unfounded conclusions, conspiracy theory makes broad claims about power while remaining purely speculative. Conspiracy theories, left critics often argue persuasively, draw attention away from more mundane but better documented histories of the structural causes of political, economic, and environmental exploitation. Berlet especially criticizes investigative reporters who fall prey to unreliable sources from the “murky netherworld of ex-intelligence agents, retired military ofﬁcers, and self-anointed investigators” for both amplifying conspiracy theories and draining the limited resources of progressive political organizations and media toward unveriﬁable speculation.72 Finally and most important, these critics also condemn conspiracy theory for leading leftists and the general public away from effective political action. Activists can organize protests strategically and build collective, alternative institutions in order to effect real social change only if they can identify both the speciﬁc economic and political structures that oppress and dominate the majority of the public. Conspiracy theory, on the other hand, cannot enable effective political activity; rather, as Chomsky has asserted about 9/11 researchers, the pursuit of evidence of a conspiracy draws attention and energy “away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state and their institutional background, crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis.”73 Worse, it leads to

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

47

harmful scapegoating, or it misleads activists into thinking that merely removing an individual or a secret group will transform society, or it leads directly to fascism: “If [conspiracy theorists] dominate [political] debate,” Berlet claims, “then political discourse in the U.S. will soon echo the themes of the fascist era in Europe where hysteria and holocaust, blood and bounty, blind patriotism and deaf obedience became synonymous with the national spirit.”74 Berlet’s desire to keep the left free from the contagion of conspiracy theory—what one of his critics has called his “politically correct purity”—leads him to see an irrevocable taint in any work that relies upon information or an association with a suspect, conspiracy-minded group.75 He also tends too often to focus on the threat of small, marginal groups, and appears to minimize the threat from real centers of power and the abuses they perpetrate, thereby engaging in the same practice for which he condemns conspiracy theory: misidentifying the enemies of democracy in general and the left in particular, and paying too much attention to individuals and groups that are far less important in the struggle to achieve positive social change.76 Berlet and his left-progressive colleagues’ critique conceptualizes conspiracy theory largely as a form of political knowledge and behavior that becomes increasingly popular as a result of the pressure of external forces.77 It tends to rely on the same functionalist, simplistically psychological explanation outlined by Hofstadter in his discussion of “status” anxiety and political “pathologies,” wherein popular politics is a pathological stimulus response to threatened status. For example, Berlet writes: “Typically, proponents of conspiratorial theories remain an isolated minority except in times of economic or social stress, when demagogic appeals tend to attract a larger following.”78 Another passage could have been lifted directly from Hofstadter. Conspiracy theorists, Berlet has argued, “take advantage of situations in the historical moment where there’s great economic and social stress, a change in relationships in terms of a country’s status in the world. What they do is pick up on the anxiety that is produced during those periods and come up with a very simple, comforting scapegoat for these complex situations.”79 Based on a more leftist, activist approach to contemporary power than Hofstadter’s, Berlet’s is a critical functionalism, one that sees the “production of anxiety” when “the electorate has lost faith with the government and there are economic hard times.”80 But it still

48

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

simplistically assumes that political beliefs and behaviors are largely the result of crisis and manipulation, and that “the people” believe or disbelieve in conspiracy theory based on the level of anxiety produced by their political and economic situation. It depends on seeing the belief in conspiracy as singular (all who believe in conspiracy are equally seduced victims of ideology), pathological, and unwarranted, and as a wholly political product of largely marginal demagogues. In addition, this ideological critique remains almost entirely at the level of political content, without any interest in the form of symbolic expression.81 It hardly describes or discusses the relationship between political and popular culture—from ﬁlms, novels, and television, to the numerous and varied groups that produce and distribute conspiracyrelated material, to the paranoia of everyday life in contemporary bureaucracies and capitalism—which circulate, in often complex and contradictory ways, in the larger narratives and smaller details of conspiracy theory.82 Nor is it interested in the speciﬁc forms that these narrative and interpretive practices take, the speciﬁc drives at work in the production of “conspiracy”—practices that, in their circulation in mainstream cultural and political discourses and in their relationship to populist assumptions about power, require more than mere labeling and dismissal.83 Nor, ﬁnally, do they offer a complex theory of political subjectivity: one is either pathological—and so vulnerable to the seductive powers of conspiracy theory—or one is not. The left-progressive critique thus largely ignores Hofstadter’s strength, the concept of conspiracy theory as a “style” of popular political culture; while at its worst, it too uncritically adopts Hofstadter’s ﬂattening of politics and democracy in the concept of paranoia and the dualities of pathology/wellness that follow from Hofstadter’s work. At its best, the left-progressive critique offers a welcome contrast to the stiﬂing, mandarin centrism of the consensus and pluralist approach to conspiracy theory. Its limited conceptualization of the social and cultural context of conspiracy theory, however, assumes the most basic deﬁnition of ideology as causal agent in the production of a singular “conspiracism.” The Problem with Populism

Michael Rogin’s historiographical work on competing accounts of American demonology and conspiracy theory helps make sense of the

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

49

shared assumptions and different emphases in these two approaches. Rogin contrasts what he calls a “symbolist” approach to populism, exempliﬁed by Hofstadter’s notion of “political paranoia,” with a more politicized “realist” approach, which was originally employed by Progressive historians like Charles Beard.84 The realist considers the labeling and creation of fear about conspiratorial demons to be a purposive, instrumental tool of power; “realism,” in this sense, refers to the historian’s analysis of the manifest content and motives of the countersubversive conspiracy theorist. Rogin’s realists include not only the Progressives but also New Left historians who focused their analysis on empirical evidence of manipulation by elite groups attempting to use fears in order to achieve their political goals.85 A realist analysis of Cold War anticommunist movements would focus on the expanded powers of the state to “ﬁght”—in reality, to repress—real and imagined communists and leftist movements of all types; a realist analysis of contemporary conspiracy theory would, as current left-progressives like Chip Berlet do at times, view widespread belief in subversive and conspiratorial activities as the result of ideological manipulation by elites in politics and the media. For realists, countersubversives seek to impose or defend the imposition of repression through reference to external or internal threats, and do so, ultimately, to serve the purposes of capitalism, the state, powerful institutions, and/or ruling classes. A realist analysis focuses solely on identifying the entity responsible for creating the countersubversive paranoia, the ends the effort hoped to achieve, and the people who suffered as a result. Rogin uses Hofstadter’s work as the epitome of the symbolist approach. Hofstadter, as we’ve seen, characterized countersubversive expressions and activities as symptoms, in mythological and symbolic form, of the pathologies of peripheral groups. Indeed, the very term that Rogin uses to describe this approach—“symbolist”—denotes the practice by historians like Hofstadter who use “deeper” readings of the historical past to identify the cultural and psychological causes of conspiracy theories. Hofstadter’s analysis of McCarthyism, for example, although strongly critical of most of the Wisconsin senator’s methods and assertions, was less concerned with virulent anticommunism’s effects than with its “root causes” in the social psychology of the masses and in the expressive ﬁght for status between the nativist provinces and the cosmopolitan, rational, and enlightened centers of power. Symbolists

50

|

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

argue, then, that the mere identiﬁcation of a singular purpose and presumably clear referent of conspiracy theory ignores the telling use of certain types of symbols as well as the pathological anxiety from which these symbols arise. The pathology of conspiracy theory is not imposed from without; it develops from within, when populist demagoguery makes the paranoid style relevant and attractive for an anxious group. The contrast between symbolists and realists is in part based on the very different types of groups and individuals that the symbolists tend to recognize and study as countersubversives: dispossessed classes in decline, groups and individuals fearing the erosion of status, power, and money, and rising classes and groups seeking to secure or improve their status—all of them peripheral groups in decline or under stress. These groups share a common desire to mobilize “outsiders” and “extremists” against the state through their use of symptomatically demonological symbols and rhetoric. Rather than the realists’ concern with the instrumental uses of demonological populism, symbolists are interested in the social and psychological symptoms and causes of “paranoia” and resentment. There are, then, three central distinctions between realists and symbolists. First, they focus on different types of countersubversion: for symbolists, countersubversives engage in largely populist movements against the center; for realists, countersubversives enable dominant centers of power to manipulate populist fear and prejudice and thereby repress outgroups and political minorities. Second, they focus on distinct domains and employ different methods of analysis: realists attempt to detect the instrumental motives of the centers of power, while symbolists interpret the expressive discourse of countersubversion in order to diagnose the cultural and psychological symptoms of pathology and ideology. Third, these two very different ways of viewing the signiﬁcance and evidence of countersubversion and fears of conspiracy have their basis in very different political commitments: realists tend to be activist (and frequently, as with the left-progressives, they tend to be left activists), while symbolists, as epitomized by Hofstadter and his generation, have tended to represent relatively centrist afﬁliations and an avowedly “apolitical” approach. Rogin’s categories help clarify the relative strengths of these approaches, and by implication their relative weaknesses. The left-progressive critics correctly identify the ideological tendencies of conspiracy theory—that

THEORIZING CONSPIRACY POLITICS

|

51

seeking to unmask and overturn conspiracy can frequently be an illusory enterprise that harms the interests of those who engage in it, and can harm those who are targeted as subversives as well. By emphasizing the culture and mythology of populism, Hofstadter and the symbolist approach offer an indispensable element for understanding conspiracy theory that the progressive critics either shove aside or ignore altogether. Situating conspiracy theory and political “mythology” in general within the historical, social, and cultural context in which they emerge, the symbolist approach—shorn of Hofstadter’s simplistic conception of a “paranoid style”—can offer a welcome and essential complement to the tendency of leftist critiques of conspiracy theory to focus solely on conspiracy theory’s ideological limitations and effects. In addition to these differences, realist and symbolist approaches share an important tendency: a deep distrust of populism as rhetoric and especially as a means to organize dissent. Hofstadter viewed populist dissent against institutionalized politics as likely to engage in activities that lie outside the conﬁnes of proper politics, and therefore as per se illegitimate. The left-progressive critics reject populist dissent as an untamed force that resembles—and may even be associated with—right-wing conspiracy theory. Their distrust of populism is at the heart of their too-quick dismissal of conspiracy theory as a popular political practice. I take this issue up again at the end of the next chapter, after delving into one recent populist, conspiracist movement that demonstrates some of the weaknesses of these two approaches when they attempt to describe and explain contemporary conspiracy theory.

2 When the Senator Met the Commander From Pathology to Populism

O

n June 15, 1995, less than two months after the explosion that demolished the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information, a subcommittee of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, held a hearing on the increasingly visible national militia movement. The event took place at the height of media coverage of the militias, a loose conglomeration of populist right-wing groups operating throughout the United States who had been largely ignored by the media only two months earlier. After the bombing, the militias had suddenly begun to appear on a regular basis in national and local newspapers and broadcast news reports. Allegations that the suspects had some afﬁliation to one of the largest and most prominent militia groups prompted this heightened coverage. News reports featuring information supplied by watchdog organizations that track far-right groups, as well as from sociologists, law enforcement, and occasionally militia members themselves, framed the militias as outsiders and extremists who displayed a singular irrational pathology in their political beliefs and paramilitary activities.1 Aside from statements from President Bill Clinton and the investigating law-enforcement agencies, there had been no ofﬁcial response to the Oklahoma City bombing from the federal government prior 52

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

53

to June 15, and so the Senate hearing took on special signiﬁcance, if only as a ﬁrst attempt by the recently elected conservative Republican majorities in the Congress to respond to the grassroots far-right movement emanating from the middle of the country. According to subcommittee chair Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), the hearing was convened in order to allow the “airing” and “ventilation” of the beliefs and activities of the militia movement.2 These metaphors of exposure and release, which Specter used throughout the three-hour session, gave the impression that he viewed the hearing as the opening of a dark, forbidding closet out of which seeped an annoying odor—an odor that might signify some greater danger lurking deeper inside. He based his strategy of confrontation on assumptions about the inherent rationality of the American political process and the “marketplace of ideas,” both of which, he seemed certain, would provide the necessary air and light to dispel the danger. For Specter, permitting the militias to speak in their own words before his distinguished fellow senators would allow the American people to “draw their [own] conclusions” as to the dangers of the militias. He told gathered militia members: “My own sense is that it’s healthy and the American people will applaud letting you speak your piece, no matter how much we disagree with you” (The Militia Movement, 114). Specter offered himself up as both the paternal voice of the country and spokesman for the American political process. In so doing, he posited a fundamental conﬂict between the rational structures and procedures of the American political and legal process, of which he was not only a part but also a spokesman, and the fundamentally irrational militias, whose beliefs and practices were inherently pathological. In short, the gentleman from Pennsylvania embodied the great American consensus and its pluralistic system that Richard Hofstadter sought to defend against the paranoid style. Because of Specter’s position as a lawmaker, however, his hearing portended more immediate and recognizable material effects on the world than could be realized by a gaggle of academic historians and social scientists attempting to describe and theorize political activity. To the extent that Specter viewed the militias and himself through the framework Hofstadter and others developed, the subcommittee hearing illustrates how the pathology model animates and shapes the state’s response to a populist movement built in part upon a grand conspiracy theory.

54

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

This chapter explores governmental and mainstream activists’ response to the militia movement in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and the revelation of alleged connections between the suspected bombers and the militias. It illustrates the strong connections, whether intentional or not, between the Hofstadter–consensus–pluralist approach to “political paranoia” and the response to the militias in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. During the period in which the militias created a moral panic, mainstream antimilitia activists on the one hand, and elected and appointed ofﬁcials on the other, worked within vastly different discourses, and the language and images that they employed—from the vivid, alarmed warnings of activists to the bureaucratic and technical terminology of government employees—were quite distinct. Yet both demonstrate the grave limitations of the “pathology” analogy when it comes to analyzing and formulating a response to fringe populist movements. The militias’ moment has largely passed and their vitality and visibility as a movement have dissipated over the past decade (although some militia-watchers argue that the remaining militia-members, many of them dangerous, have gone underground rather than disband and disarm).3 Nevertheless, the historic moment of the militia movement illustrates the inﬂuence of the pathology approach to conspiracy theory and the populism of which it is a part, and it demonstrates how a dominant descriptive and normative theory of politics, which Hofstadter’s paranoia/pathology analogy has become, can affect political actors, the media, and, to an extent, conspiracy theorists themselves. Militias, Patriots, and the Decentralized Far Right

Relatively small but well-armed groups that caught the attention and imagination of the media in the mid-1990s, local militias and national militia-related organizations aspired to lead a return to the “citizens’ army” of the Revolutionary War. Militia members bought arms and trained themselves in military technique and strategy in order to ﬁght what many saw as the rise of a centralized “one-world” government they believed sought to usurp traditional American sovereignty at the local, state, and national levels. In their belief in this conspiracy, militias joined related Patriot groups that collected, interpreted, and disseminated political information and theories but did not necessarily engage in paramilitary training. Both Patriots and militias foresaw

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

55

the New World Order as a multinational force run by a small elite that would pacify the American public ﬁrst through the conﬁscation of privately owned guns and then through the imposition of a global totalitarian state. The most important catalysts in the rise of the militias and Patriots were the FBI’s fatal raids on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; the shooting by federal law enforcement agents of members of the family of white separatist Randy Weaver in a standoff at Ruby Ridge in rural Idaho; and the ban on some assault weapons (called the “Brady Bill”) as part of the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994. Individuals and groups associated with some militias had historical and organizational ties to the survivalist groups of the 1970s and 1980s and reﬂected this heritage in their desire to build a puriﬁed society protected by heavily armed forces in the hinterlands of middle America.4 In addition, many militia members had former, or in some cases current, associations with the U.S. military as members of the Armed Forces, as well as through the purchase or theft of equipment from military bases.5 The militia movement’s rise during the 1990s also coincided with the rise of a transnational far-right wing that had more political success, albeit largely marginal, in Europe.6 Militias and Patriots were not a homogeneous national movement. Quite important ideological and religious beliefs and regional cultures distinguished individual members and groups, and members differently engaged in militias and the “movement” at national, regional, and local levels. Nationally, individual ﬁgures such as Bo Gritz and Linda Thompson became recognized “stars” through their reputation, speaking tours, and sheer force of will;7 in addition, a few militias, such as the Michigan Militia (MM) and the Militia of Montana (MOM), attained national prominence due to size, media coverage, and self-marketing.8 Regional alliances or contacts also existed among groups that met at gun shows and other gatherings. But individual members decided to join a particular militia group and gather to converse about political and social issues at the local level, and it was the local militias that decided whether and the extent to which they would train in paramilitary techniques.9 Although virtually all Patriot and militia groups rejected gun control laws and the constitutionality of federal taxation, their views on other issues could vary. Most strongly opposed the legalization of abortion and other types of federal social legislation (for example, most civil-rights protections), land-use and environmental regulation,

56

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

educational programs (the federal Goals 2000 program, which was an important factor in the establishment of the MM), and modern federal court decisions (Roe v. Wade).10 Many, but not all, individuals and groups subscribed to various oppositional readings of the U.S. Constitution and legal system, including the declaration of “sovereign citizenship” and “freeman” status. Under these beliefs, militia members and Patriots respected only the authority of militia- and/or Patriot-run “common-law courts” and asserted that no constitutional amendments passed after the ﬁrst ten are legal.11 Some militia members and Patriots also were part of, or were sympathetic to, the county supremacy movement of the Posse Comitatus, which holds that government authority rests solely with the county and respects neither state nor federal laws and government. Members of the Posse engaged in violent acts against the federal government in the 1970s and 1980s.12 Some militias and groups participated in survivalist stockpiling of weapons, supplies, and food. Finally, at the furthest end of the spectrum were overtly or covertly racist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi individuals and groups.13 Religious apocalypticism played a central role in the way many, but not all, militia-related individuals and groups interpreted contemporary political and social phenomena, although the precise articulation of this apocalypticism reﬂected different religious convictions.14 The militias’ religious diversity was further reﬂected in different geographic areas. The Mormons and Christian Identity members who were more likely to live in the Paciﬁc Northwest and Intermountain West had different understandings of Christian Scripture, not to mention different privileged biblical passages and distinct scriptures (such as the Book of Mormon), from Protestant fundamentalists living in the same region as well as those in the Midwest and Plains states. Sociologist James Aho provides a useful set of ideological and religious distinctions among far-right–wing groups. He separates their clusters of beliefs into three categories: the most radical are Identity Christians, who hold “Jews” (differently deﬁned among groups of Identity believers, but most often understood simply as an ethnic category) responsible for all of America’s problems; Christian Constitutionalists hold a less deﬁned group of “insiders,” “Bilderbergers,” “Trilateralists,” and the like responsible without reference to ethnicity or race; and issue-oriented Patriots are concerned with speciﬁc social or political issues such as abortion and sex education, and are more likely

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

57

to see themselves as ﬁghting a relatively diffuse threat such as “secular humanism.”15 The divisions among groups are permeable, and groups and individuals can overlap or move back and forth among different categories. One could make even narrower distinctions within these three general rubrics, but Aho’s categories are helpful because they recognize the important differences among groups and individuals who might have seemed from the outside to be virtually identical. For example, the John Birch Society, a long-lived group that would most likely fall within the Christian Constitutionalists category, has strongly distanced itself from violent and racist elements among Identity Christians. While supporting law-abiding militia groups, the ofﬁcial Birch monthly publication, the New American, has asserted that the Ku Klux Klan’s violent terrorism is not the proper method of ﬁghting the conspiratorial elite that controls the federal government.16 The same diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds was apparent in the MM’s membership. Composed largely of Christian Constitutionalists from previously established political movements such as the religious right, Ross Perot supporters, and Libertarian Party members, the group’s membership dropped in the weeks following the media reports of connections between it and the alleged perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing.17 As both a practical and a public-relations strategy, the organization turned to minority recruitment and educational and political action programs in order to distinguish itself from Identity Christian groups.18 Although the militias were decentralized and had limited membership and support, they received implicit, and at times explicit, support from individual elected representatives and larger national lobbying groups. A few federal and state lawmakers, most notably U.S. Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) and State Senator Charles Duke (R-Colorado) sought support from militia and Patriot groups, often resulting in intraparty conﬂicts between far-right and more moderately conservative Republican members of Congress over the extent to which, for example, environmental regulations should be eviscerated or eradicated.19 The National Riﬂe Association (NRA), the largest and most powerful lobbying organization devoted to political action for gun owners and against gun control, epitomized this conﬂict between militias as extrapolitical paramilitary organizations and militias as American citizens attempting to change the country from within. To resolve the

58

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

conﬂict, the NRA attempted during the mid-1990s to appropriate local and regional militia movements and their sympathizers without losing status in Washington as an institution that could approach and successfully persuade members of both the Republican and Democratic parties.20 In this respect, the militias were not simply paramilitary extremists; they became activists on the far right of an increasingly conservative Republican Party and acted as part of the political process and the ongoing struggle to deﬁne American right-wing politics. Ultimately, although militia groups and individuals may have shared many political views, cultural and social backgrounds, and ideological convictions, there was no single “militia movement.” A number of generalizations can be made, however, about militias and Patriots. Most members were reactionary and subscribed to a theory of power that resembles conspiracy theory, and most considered themselves to be politically active in some way—whether by studying or teaching about the “secret truths” of power, ﬁghting abortion or sex education in schools, or by lobbying local, state, and federal representatives. In addition, most owned guns and trained themselves in their use. At the time of the militias’ rise and in the years since their dwindling, academics, journalists, and activists have attempted to discern some underlying cause in the militia movement’s rise in the 1990s beyond what the movement’s membership and leadership claimed—that theirs was a reasoned and rational response to the rise of a One World Government that planned to take away their rights and their guns. The social science literature has failed to authoritatively isolate either this or another particular cause or a widely accepted theory for the militias’ mobilization. During the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant explanatory paradigm for mass political mobilization, called “strain theory” and based on studies of right-wing movements, argued that political mass groups organize themselves in reaction to broad-scale social changes with isolating and harmful social and economic effects, such as an economic crisis or the economic dislocation of a broad class of citizens.21 Research on leftist movements in the 1960s and 1970s led to a competing theoretical approach that came to opposite conclusions: mass mobilization occurs when people have sufﬁcient resources and existing or new political organizations give them the opportunity to act collectively.22 Studies of the militias have failed to support either of these approaches conclusively. Some have concluded that the militas arose as a result of national and

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

59

regional economic restructuring (deﬁned as a decline in manufacturing jobs and family farms).23 One study found that militia movements were strongest in states and counties that faced signiﬁcant economic hardship, while another study found no correlation between and the level of militia activity in state and the degree to which a state was rural and economically depressed.24 Studies of the militias have also posited a gendered, cultural cause of their rise, the prevalence of a highly masculine “warrior culture” on the one hand and a crisis in masculinity arising from the rise of the feminist movement on the other.25 Two signiﬁcant, related correlations with the presence of active militias in a state or county are the presence of “paramilitary culture” (deﬁned by the level of ardent gun ownership, current military personnel and veterans and law enforcement personnel) and of a strong patriarchal order (deﬁned by a low ratio of female to male earning power).26 But none of these studies has offered any deﬁnitive explanation for the militias’ rise. With this snapshot of the militia movement, let us return to the Senate hearing room and Senator Specter’s attempt to “ventilate” the militia movement on the country’s behalf. Greetings from Montana!

The Senate subcommittee hearing on the militias was very odd. Here was Senator Specter, the senior lawmaker readying himself for a quixotic run as a tough but “moderate” candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, walking away from militia “Commander” Norman Olson after shaking hands. “Norm” had recently resigned his leadership position in the Michigan Militia after claiming that the Oklahoma City bombing might actually have been perpetrated by the Japanese government as a response to what he alleged was the U.S. government’s primary role in recent gas attacks in Tokyo’s subway system. In a front-page photo in the next day’s Washington Post, each man appears in the costume that best suits his respective position: Specter wears the conventional dark suit of the veteran senator, whereas Olson wears a loose-ﬁtting camouﬂage outﬁt that covers his large, well-disciplined military body from the top of his head to the tips of his black combat boots. Whatever their differences, these serious, sincere men were both on hand to perform their jobs. Specter’s duty was to warn the American public of the potential dangers that the extremist militias represent; Olson hoped to warn the American public of the real dangers of the

60

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

federal government and the secret powers behind it. Specter, the former prosecutor best remembered for devising the Warren Commission’s “single-bullet theory” of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and for his atrocious conduct during the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, was trying to cast himself as the protector of the nation’s laws and safety;27 Olson, retired military man, gun-shop owner, Baptist minister, and national ﬁgure in the militia movement, was trying just as hard to present himself and his compatriots at the hearing as protectors of the nation’s freedom. If judged by who was able to give the best sound bites for the assembled television and print news media, Olson and his group probably won. Specter’s expression in the Post photo, taken before the hearings, suggests why. Appearing either slightly amused or disgusted as he walked away from the more digniﬁed, at ease Olson, Specter looks entirely unprepared for dealing with these folks from the hinterlands who probably comprised the most peculiar panel that his subcommittee had ever faced. Their theories were irrational, potentially dangerous, perhaps even a little funny—in short, they were not the kind of “experts” or constituents that a distinguished attorney and lawmaker who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and sat in judgment over numerous Supreme Court nominees is prepared to face, except perhaps as witnesses or suspects in a criminal trial that he may have prosecuted decades before. Indeed, Specter and his subcommittee were criticized by antimilitia activists, who had been researching the militia movement and its predecessors for more than a decade, for their lack of preparation and for not including a panel with extensive knowledge of some of the shadier and more dangerous elements at work in some of the militias. Such a panel might have also included individuals and federal employees who had been harassed or assaulted by militia groups. Their testimony could have provided evidence that the militia movement is not the collection of innocent “neighborhood watch” and “community service” organizations that Olson and his fellow militia members claimed to be. The experts could also have demonstrated that not only were there a few “bad apples” in militias, but that parts of the movement had been inﬁltrated by full-ﬂedged white supremacists.28 Instead, the subcommittee’s hearing was split into three panels, the ﬁrst featuring two Democratic senators from the states with the

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

61

most prominent militia groups, Montana and Michigan; the second composed of federal, state, and local law-enforcement ofﬁcials; and the third, which drew the most attention in post-hearing news coverage, made up of militia leaders themselves. The members of the subcommittee, however, did not seem nearly so interested in the hearing as the panelists: the dais on which the senators sat remained mostly empty for the entire proceeding (there were rarely as many as four senators in attendance at any one time). Specter had informed panelists that congressional business was taking place at the same time on the Senate ﬂoor, and he made certain to end the meeting on time in order for the few senators left in the room to participate in a ﬂoor vote. Members’ busy schedules, apathy, or strategic decisions not to attend may have caused the empty chairs, but whatever the reasons, this relatively poor attendance clearly undercut any signiﬁcance the hearing might have had in terms of either ofﬁcial policy consideration or general information gathering. The evening network news shows generally ignored this fact, however, and ran footage that focused on the few senators in attendance and their face-offs with the militia members, thus implying that this hearing was indeed a momentous event with wide-ranging legislative ramiﬁcations. Senators, Law Enforcement, and “Authority”

The ﬁrst two panels focused on the dangers of the militias and possible strategies to contain them. They also attempted to deﬁne, in very precise and celebratory ways, the acceptable forms of civic and political engagement; that is, their concern was not merely to condemn militias as dangerous, but to declare and renew the fundamental health of American democracy and justice. Senator Specter opened his remarks with a discussion of free speech and its limits. He and fellow subcommittee member Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin) introduced the discussion with two of the great sound bites of twentieth-century constitutional law concerning freedom of expression: ﬁrst, that the right to free speech can be limited only by a “clear and present danger;” and second, that these limits to free speech exist because, borrowing a phrase from a 1949 opinion by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the Constitution is not a “suicide pact” (The Militia Movement, 2–3).29 This is a civics lesson’s survey on free speech, asserting a particular individual right while cautioning that this right may be abridged when it becomes necessary to

62

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

balance it against the potential harm to the state or to other individuals that its exercise might cause. If the speech act is dangerous, then it cannot be protected as a right but is subject to censure and restraint. The liberties of classical liberalism’s juridical notion of rights are thus coupled with, and indeed are dependent on, disciplinary controls delimiting proper and safe behavior.30 This was not the end of the subcommittee’s exegesis of the law of speech acts, however. If the constitutional right to free speech is an integral part of the basic groundwork on which America’s liberal democracy rests, balancing the “rights” to be protected against the “threats” to be disciplined, Specter’s other approach to the militias’ speech offered a notion of the social relations of civil society. Here, he relied upon the metaphor of the “marketplace of ideas,” an amalgamation of classical liberalism and capitalism associated with a famous phrase coined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.31 In this marketplace, everyone—even those in militias—is allowed to speak his or her piece. Here, the right to speak becomes a right to be heard, to “sell” one’s ideas in competition with those of others over the deﬁnition of “truth;” as Specter would tell the militia members facing him on their later panel, “What I want to do is I want to hear all your ideas because I want your ideas compared to mine and I want to let the American public judge whether you are right or I am right” (The Militia Movement, 99). The state has no role in Specter’s notion of the market, except perhaps as referee; in the marketplace, the most worthy and efﬁcient ideas will win out. The militias might be dangerous, but under the procedures and structures of a liberal capitalist regime, they can be part of the pluralist mix of opinion, so long as they obey the “rules” of the marketplace as enunciated and adjudicated within the law. The market is, of course, not perfectly free, just as the right to speak is not a transhistorical, absolute protection from limitations imposed by state prosecution, private property owners, and private and governmentrun media organizations. Subject to the disciplinary controls of capital and government, and the relations imposed by class, race, gender, and other social hierarchies, the marketplace of ideas depends on both freedoms of exchange and entrenched disciplinary controls. In the extensive liberties that Specter offered as representative of the liberal democratic state, the discourse and formal freedoms of rights and markets hide the powerful disciplinary controls that ﬁlter and channel a multiplicity of

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

63

voices into a uniﬁed notion of responsible and legal speech acts within the pluralist consensus. In his introductory remarks, Senator Kohl provided a more explicitly stern complement to Specter’s seemingly magnanimous invitation to the Constitution and the marketplace. Kohl described a brief list of recent incidents in which highway patrol ofﬁcers found large weapon stockpiles in militia members’ cars, and more generally warned of the militias’ “gospel of hate” (The Militia Movement, 2–4). In the ﬁrst panel, a few minutes later, Democratic Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Max Baucus of Montana echoed Kohl’s comments and warned of the militias’ deep strain of anti-Semitism and racism. They also detailed further instances of alleged militia threats, violence, and stockpiling of weaponry (4–6, 44–46). The implication was clear: these dangerous people posed a threat to society, and law enforcement should not again be caught off guard by gun nuts with secret arms caches. Specter’s blithe introduction to liberal theories of democracy and capitalist theories of the marketplace was nice, these senators implied, but there are limits to the formal and procedural structures intended to protect individual rights and the social marketplace. Liberties, in short, must be policed in order to remain truly free. The senators thus established early on in the hearing that militias constituted an unknown, and perhaps unknowable, threat, and therefore required some form of surveillance and disciplinary control. In concluding his introductory statement, Kohl invoked what he implied is the greatest, most sacred marketplace that America offers dissenters such as the militias: elections, those “tools of change” originally crafted by the Constitution’s framers and embedded in that hallowed document (3–4). He cited as evidence the recent 1994 elections, in which his own party lost its long-standing majority in the House of Representatives, thereby leading to another in a succession of peaceful changes of party control in the American government. Senator Levin would later explain that in addition to the ballot box, the other democratic instrument of change for dissenters is an independent judiciary, which is able to protect people from the dangers and excesses of government (45). These peaceful “tools” would be mentioned again in the lawenforcement panel and represented, according to the ﬁrst two panels, the best formal solution to the militias’ pathologies. As with the abstract notions of “rights” and the “marketplace,” the equally abstract ideal of

64

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

the universal franchise in democratic elections provides both a rejoinder to the militias and a “healthy” outlet for their political passions. Whether the current structure of political parties and ﬁnancing enables a truly democratic system and truly free exercise—the militias expended much of their energy asserting that it does not—was neither relevant nor contestable within the authoritative discourse of the Senate. The four senators’ opening of the hearing, then, established the following points: We do not know exactly what these militias are, but we think they are dangerous; the militias need to recognize that rational activism that works toward a moderate consensus through electoral processes is the correct path for a political movement; and although the militias have constitutional rights, they must face the stern hand of constitutional but necessary governmental action to enforce peaceful, law-abiding behavior. The central conﬂict was between clear, contentneutral forms, structures, and processes (“rights,” “markets,” “votes,” “justice”) that constitute American democracy and that protect the speech and acts of all Americans, and the opaque, threatening speech and acts of the militias. The law-enforcement panel represented yet another privileged aspect of American democracy: a disinterested, instrumental policing apparatus functioning under the orders of elected ofﬁcials. The panel consisted of a number of federal, state, and local ofﬁcials, but was dominated by the two representatives from federal agencies, although local law-enforcement agencies were the ﬁrst line of response to militias on a regular basis. This likely occurred for three reasons. First, the federal ofﬁcials were the only ones present whose performance Congress has any authority to review directly, and thus their testimony was especially important for funding and lawmaking purposes. Second, any new federal laws the Congress might have passed to curtail the militias, such as stronger gun control or limitations on paramilitary activities, would most likely have been enforced by these agencies. Third, these agencies had been heavily criticized by militias for the Waco and Ruby Ridge tragedies. The testimony of the two federal agents, Robert M. Bryant, an assistant director in the National Security Division of the FBI, and James Brown of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), was thus the most signiﬁcant. Both Bryant and Brown were striking in their apparent desire— presumably reﬂecting the desire of their agencies—to give the appearance

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

65

of a cautious, restrained approach to policing the militias. Both men noted the attorney general’s guidelines regulating “general crimes, racketeering enterprises, and domestic security/terrorism investigation,” which require a “reasonable indication of criminal activity” before authorizing a federal agency’s active response (The Militia Movement, 49–50). Bryant stressed the guidelines’ stipulation that the FBI needs an “objective, factual basis regarding criminal activity” before acting; although this protects the rights to privacy and free expression of those suspected of a crime, Bryant duly admitted that it made ﬁghting “terrorism” a “difﬁcult and complex endeavor” (50). Brown reiterated this with respect to the BATF, which, he asserted, did not initiate an investigation on any “belief ” that unlawful activity was transpiring but on suspected and real violations of law (78). In the testimony of their agents, the FBI and the BATF seemed merely to be following the ground rules set by the post–Watergate-era Church and Pike Commissions, which exposed and called for limiting the excesses of both the FBI and the CIA. The impression that this testimony attempted to create was in direct opposition to the well-known images of federal agents storming the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, and especially to the same compound as it burned out of control less than two months later—the “jack-booted government thugs” that the National Riﬂe Association claimed the FBI and BATF to be.32 Instead, the agencies were composed merely of responsible bureaucrats following the directives and “tough” rules of elected representatives. These spokesmen from two of the most powerful law-enforcement agencies in the country almost seemed to be competing with each other to proclaim their agencies’ hesitancy to perform surveillance and police the militias. At least partially a response to criticism from the far right, this strategy was also an attempt to legitimate the agencies among opinion leaders and supporters who, while defending the FBI and BATF, had expressed reservations about the agencies’ conduct in the recent tragedies. Further, the agencies were also attempting to preempt possible criticism from the Congress if either house should launch investigations and hearings on the two incidents (which the Senate Judiciary Committee did, later that summer). The agencies clearly wanted to establish that their work followed proper bureaucratic procedure. Unlike the violent, unknowable militias, the FBI and BATF followed reason and rules, and obeyed the chain of command of the governing structures of American lawmaking and law enforcement.

66

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

Whatever its purpose, the agents’ testimony produced a response from the senators that was no doubt welcome at FBI and BATF headquarters, and further epitomized the odd qualities of this hearing. During the question-and-answer period, Senators Specter and Dianne Feinstein (D-California) repeatedly questioned all of the lawenforcement ofﬁcers, but especially these two federal representatives, as to whether they had “sufﬁcient authority” under current guidelines to conduct a thorough investigation in response to any speciﬁc or general threat a militia might pose (The Militia Movement, 74–79). The senators’ questions implied that the agencies faced too many limitations on their ability to perform surveillance and “proper” policing actions, and that for the good of the country the federal government should consider lifting these limits. Both Bryant and Brown avoided the question, but the prospect of greater authority for federal law enforcement had been put on the agenda despite—and perhaps even because of—the fact that the agencies themselves acted as though they did not want such authority. Ironically, these ofﬁcers’ description of their agencies’ institutional restraint merely seemed to make the senators more determined to lift those restraints. Because the senators had begun the hearing with reference to the disciplinary structures of the liberal democratic state, this exchange followed logically. Like the senators, the law-enforcement representatives had stressed formal bureaucratic rules and procedures, vowing to protect constitutional rights through responsible policing. Yet, as local and state law-enforcement ofﬁcers reported, these militias were outside such a discursive construct: in Arizona, a sixteen-year-old had perpetrated hate crimes; in Missouri, militias killed innocent state troopers; in Montana, their violent threats paralyzed law enforcement. The only possible response to such pervasive threats within this discourse was through containment and “greater authority” for law enforcement; that is, through expanding the bureaucratic apparatus to allow it to perform surveillance against the militias, to inhibit or prohibit militia activities, and to provide the law-enforcement apparatus with enough authority and discretion to enforce the new laws. In short, the very discourse that required the law-enforcement ofﬁcers to seem more restrained also required them to be given more authority. It is unsurprising, then, that the most important response from the federal government to the rise of the militias was the Antiterrorism and

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

67

Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), originally introduced by President Clinton in 1995, shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, and passed by both houses of Congress in April 1996.33 Although Congress passed the bill as a response to the Oklahoma City tragedy, most of its provisions had little to do with the type of offense that the crime’s perpetrators committed.34 Opposed by civil libertarian groups often associated with the left and gun-owners’ groups allied with the right, the bill widened federal law-enforcement power to authorize secretive “removal courts” to hear evidence in deportation proceedings, and to freeze the assets of anyone deemed to be an “agent” (which could include merely contributing money) of a group the government has designated a “foreign terrorist organization.”35 Further, it gave federal law enforcement greater discretion to initiate wiretaps and otherwise potentially invade the privacy of citizens suspected of engaging in “terrorist” activity. AEDPA represented precisely the expansion of “authority” about which the senators seemed so eager to ask the federal law-enforcement agents during the militia hearing, even if many of its most signiﬁcant provisions had little relevance in policing the militia movement. Constructing the militia “movement” as an Other outside the legal and social apparatus of American society resulted in its members being labeled “terrorists” and subjected to an expansion of disciplinary authority. When the state views populism and conspiracy theory as constituting political demands that are expressed pathologically, the movement becomes an object that requires greater disciplinary control. The state then responds via strategies of containment, legislative enactments, surveillance, and policing. These may well be reasonable, perhaps even necessary responses at times—but they are based on a limited, simplistic understanding of how a populist movement and belief in conspiracy arise. Militia Populism: “America” as “Conspiracy”

In terms of actual policy and lawmaking, the law-enforcement panel might have been the most signiﬁcant in the hearing, but it was also the least telegenic, lacking the quasi-celebrity status of the senators on the subcommittee and, as would become apparent in the hearing itself and later on the evening news, lacking the sparks and sound bites of the militia leaders. The members of this third panel attempted to reclaim for themselves the very notion of America that the previous two panels had

68

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

used to deﬁne the militias as an extremist Other. The militia members’ panel claimed that their America was also built on a foundation of abstract rights, social relationships, and normal and healthy behavior; and it was government and law-enforcement that represented the gravest threat to the nation and its citizens. At the same time, however, they attempted to challenge the limits of the bureaucratic discourse of authority presented by the senators and law-enforcement agents who had testiﬁed earlier. At different moments, then, the militia members would invoke certain inalienable rights (free speech, gun ownership) and claim that the corruption of political power (that is, elected representatives, the judiciary, and law enforcement) had led to the illegal curtailment of those rights and threatened the safety and sanctity of the nation. In this effort to challenge both the ofﬁcial description of their activities and beliefs and the previous panels’ prescriptive remedies to stop them, the militia panelists attempted to associate the American ideal of political practice to conspiracy theory. There were ﬁve members on this panel: two associated with the Militia of Montana, two with the Michigan Militia, and James Johnson of the Ohio Unorganized Militia, the only African-American participant in the entire hearing.36 First to speak was John Trochmann, the leader of the Militia of Montana, dressed in coat and tie and sporting the wellbrushed, bushy beard of the stereotypical backwoods biblical patriarch that so endeared him to news photographers and reporters. Trochmann quickly read a prepared statement that offered an image of the militias directly counter to that put forth by the other panels in which he claimed that the militias were quasi-fraternal organizations dedicated to protecting Americans. They were a “giant neighborhood watch,” he said, that represented a “cross-section of America” and acted with a “singular, public mandate” while following the dictates of the virtually sacred Declaration of Independence (The Militia Movement, 83). The spatial references that Trochmann used were especially appropriate, given the militias’ fetishization of the local as a sovereign entity under attack. Because the militias showed great concern with national and international geopolitics (in their conspiracy theories, “international” bankers and the United Nations were all-powerful bugaboos), the “neighborhood” must refer not only to locality but also to the United States as a sovereign nation, thus deﬁning the local in its relationship to powerful non-local forces. Hence, the importance of the

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

69

“cross-section” of America: In order to ﬁght the current infringement of local sovereignty and even greater future threats to personal freedom, militias must band together with other people in other localities. Once the corrupt federal government was ﬁnally cleansed, the local would thrive under the minimal authority of the nation. To “watch” this “neighborhood” required more than simply sitting on one’s front porch and confronting suspicious strangers; it required gathering information and creating paramilitary/vigilante organizations to patrol, protect, and cleanse. Trochmann then proceeded to list the reasons why the militias had formed and grown, and why the neighborhood needed watching. The list included allegations that under President Clinton, and speciﬁcally through his use of executive orders, the position of chief executive had assumed dictatorial, oppressive powers; state and local sovereignty was under threat from the federal government and the United Nations; federal taxation is unconstitutional and therefore illegal; the country was actually run by a “banking elite” and not through democratically elected representatives; and so on (84). Trochmann, and other panelists who followed, thus provided the typical militia mixture of libertarian views and conspiracy theories about power (and Bob Fletcher of the Militia of Montana and Norm Olson would each later offer copious documents to prove similar allegations, including “six pounds of evidence of corruption in government”). Yet, Trochmann also displayed concern for the unemployed and homeless, as well as with the fate of constitutional protections for the right to bear arms (under the Second Amendment), protections against illegal search and seizure (under the Fourth Amendment), and rights of free speech and peaceful assembly (under the First Amendment). Other than the expected militia invocation of the Second Amendment, these concerns for the poor and the Constitution have traditionally been associated with leftist civil libertarian and progressive causes. Discussion of them seemed out of place on the Capitol Hill of the 104th Congress, dominated as it was by representatives from both parties requesting federal agencies to be tougher on terrorism, suspected criminals, regulations on industry and the economy, welfare “cheats,” and the poor. Structural economic shifts, income disparity, abuses of law enforcement—these issues were not discussed in the two previous panels, which enabled Trochmann to position himself

70

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

and the militias as sole champions of the downtrodden. Eschewing the bureaucratic discourse of law enforcement and governance, Trochmann attempted to speak to and for those who can gain no purchase within the apparatus of the state, for whom rules of engagement, the delicate balance between free speech and societal suicide, and the bureaucratic structure of the federal government and administrative agencies have little relevance. This is not to say that either Trochmann or his fellow militia leaders were the least bit left-ish, or even especially libertarian regarding any issues except gun control and certain types of federal regulations (and certainly not regarding social issues such as sexuality and abortion rights). Although Trochmann’s ties to Christian Identity groups and the racist right were the subject of some debate, he had made visits to Identity compounds and associated with the group in the past.37 At the very least, Trochmann was what James Aho terms a “Christian Constitutionalist” and a reactionary on most issues who endorsed a patriarchal and heavily regulated social order alongside a radically decentralized government. Further, neither in his presentation at the Senate hearing nor in militia literature did he offer any proposal of a regulatory regime that he thought would lessen the powers of the banking elite and multinational corporations. It seems safe to assume that that he and other militia members would base their preferred economic program on xenophobic protectionism. It was signiﬁcant, nonetheless, that Trochmann was the only speaker at the hearing willing to articulate real social problems, even if he articulated them within a litany of unsubstantiated and unlikely claims about a looming totalitarian coup from within. None of the other panel members’ opening statements had quite the same force as Trochmann’s, except for that of James Johnson of Columbus, Ohio, who claimed afﬁliations with the Ohio Unorganized Militia and with his own organization, E Pluribus Unum. Although an anomaly, this African-American militia member was not unique; among militias in Arizona, for example, one reporter found a “small rainbow coalition” of blacks, Hispanics, and Jews.38 As an African-American male, Johnson not only could claim to disprove by his very existence that the militias were racist but he could also disprove to opponents that militia members were simply spoiled white males reacting irrationally to a loss of their position of status and privilege. When he complained

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

71

along with his fellow panelists of “animosity” between citizens and their oppressive government and of suspicion that the mass media was biased against him, he was much more difﬁcult to refute than were John Trochmann and Norm Olson. Later in the hearing, Johnson responded to a senator’s question with a series of broadcast news–friendly slogans that referenced a wide range of recent events and protest movements from American history. The militia movement, Johnson said, was “the civil rights movement of the nineties. There are people sitting there with ‘Don’t tread on me’ stamped on their foreheads. People drawing lines in the sand. . . . We’re not baby killers, we’re baby boomers. We’re not terrorists, we’re taxpayers.” Ultimately, he said, the militia movement represented and was for “everybody,” and was the nation’s “constitutional safety net” (The Militia Movement, 103). The references in this passage composed an astounding pastiche of American cultural and historical images pasted together in quick succession. The civil-rights reference at once resonated with the speaker’s race and attempts to refute charges of racism. The notion of a “constitutional safety net” employed an image used to describe federal government “social” programs such as unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and various welfare entitlements. Presumably, just as these programs would rescue individuals in economic distress, so the militias rescued individuals and the nation as a whole from those forces seeking to abridge rights granted in the Constitution. Johnson’s set of dualities (baby killer/baby boomer, terrorist/taxpayer) made similar reference to precedent and politics. “Baby killers” referred most clearly to the casualties in the Oklahoma City bombing, which included children in a day-care center in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building; to contrast that image with “baby boomers” was to transform militias into a lifestyle choice of a demographic group. The same was true for the next set of dualities, which attempted to transform the image of militias as “terrorists”—rare, extreme, dangerous—into the banal, a class (“taxpayers”) into which virtually all American adults fall. But the latter duality went further, not simply transforming militias into “normal” folks, but transforming the normal into militia members. Because one of the central tenets of Patriot and militia groups was resistance to big government and excessive taxes, Johnson invoked “taxpayer” not only to mean “normal” but also to mean unhappy and resistant—we all pay

72

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

taxes, but we all hate paying taxes, and militias, by implication, were at the forefront of those who were unhappy about paying taxes and were trying to do something about it. This subtle but crucial association of baby boomers and taxpayers in general to the protests of militias was even clearer in the references to both the earliest and the most recent American military victories. “Don’t tread on me” is a well-known slogan from the American Revolution, and the ﬂag with which it is associated, featuring a curled viper snake under the words, had become a symbol for some militias.39 The phrase “lines in the sand” also referred to an American war, President George H. W. Bush’s attempt to legitimate the ﬁrst Persian Gulf War (Desert Storm) by asserting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had crossed a hypothetical line in the desert, provoking war through an act of aggression.40 Ironically, many militia groups were at least skeptical about Bush’s motives in waging that war and considered it as simply a subterfuge in the larger consolidation of global power by a secret elite. During a speech to a joint session of Congress just prior to the war’s beginning, Bush had outlined his vision of a “New World Order” that most militia groups and individuals considered anathema, and many conspiracy theories to which militias subscribed cited this speech as a signiﬁcant moment in the rise of a secret global power. As Mark (“Mark from Michigan”) Koernke said in his widely circulated videotape America in Peril, “The primary mission of Operation Desert Dust, or what we call Desert Storm, was to see if the American people would eat the New World Order.” Of course, as with Trochmann’s claim for the normalcy of the militias, Johnson’s rhetoric was hollow and false. The civil-rights movement confronted and opposed the real, palpable oppression of segregation and racism, predominantly through nonviolent means, not by conducting paramilitary training. Further, the civil-rights movement called for and required the assistance of the federal government and judiciary in breaking local and state government institutions that legalized and enforced racism and segregation. In this sense, the basis of the militia movement’s political beliefs—that the powers of the federal government and judiciary must be extremely limited, and that states and especially municipal and county governments should hold basic, but also limited, governing authority—was diametrically opposed to that of the civilrights movement of the 1960s. Similarly, federal programs that made

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

73

up the safety net for the poor (under attack by Republicans and most Democrats) would probably be eradicated in militias’ vision of a limited government. This strained relationship between the militias and past and current American political movements and programs infused all of the images Johnson attempted to appropriate. Although militia memberships undoubtedly included baby boomers and taxpayers (except, of course, for those tax-resisting Freemen who refused to pay their taxes), militias’ beliefs and behavior in no way deﬁned such larger categories. “Don’t tread on me” is a sentiment that many Americans undoubtedly share, but most would be unwilling to have it stamped on their foreheads, either literally or metaphorically.41 At the end of the testimony, Ken Adams of the Michigan Militia adopted Senator Specter’s initial comments concerning the hearing’s role as augmenting the marketplace of ideas and enabling the militia threat to be ventilated and dissipate, but instead implied that the hearing’s result was to elevate the militias to a status equal to that of the Congress. “You have heard a lot of allegations from people here today,” Adams said. “Maybe they’re real, maybe they’re not. If they’re real, then let’s expose them. If they are not, then let’s expose them, and that is why I think this is a healthy forum that we have here today because we have started some communication” (The Militia Movement, 106). To the extent that the militia members could challenge prevailing governmental, law-enforcement, and media depictions of their movement as inherently pathological, the militia panel was successful in its attempt to present its members and their organization as “normal;” however, to the extent that they continued to appear a bit nutty (by claiming “six pounds” of evidence of such treachery and danger as Russian tanks running wild on American soil; by alleging conspiracy both to and about the relatively normal-looking senators sitting before them; by conﬂating claims of historical connections to the civil-rights movement with the desire for a minimalist federal government), the militia members merely demonstrated the deep contradictions and limitations of their political protest. Speaking from within the discourses of classical liberalism and pluralist consensus, the senators could neither communicate with nor suggest more than disciplinary solutions to the challenge of the militia movement, but the militias themselves were able at least to attempt to position liberalism and consensus within a politics based on conspiracy theory.

74

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

Weathering the Imminent Storm: Mainstream Activists Take on the Militias

Although writing worried accounts of the militias became something of a growth industry during the 1990s in the wake of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Oklahoma City, a number of activists and organizations had for years been tracking the militias and their far-right predecessors. Two of the most prominent of these organizations were the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Representatives of each wrote well-publicized books that were released soon after the Oklahoma City bombing: A Force upon the Plains, by Kenneth Stern, the AJC expert on hate and hate groups; and The Gathering Storm, co-authored by Morris Dees, co-founder and chief trial counsel of the SPLC, who is best known for his successful civil suits against the Ku Klux Klan.42 Both books warn of the imminent danger of the militias to American citizens and American democracy. Given these authors’ respective positions and their important role in describing militias to the mainstream media, policymakers, and potential donors to the non-governmental organizations for which they work, these books are signiﬁcant attempts to put forth a working explanation of the phenomenon. They also represent what their critics have called the “anti-cult movement”—a group of allied organizations and individuals warning of the extremist threat in the United States by producing written reports, appearing in the media as experts, and encouraging law enforcement agencies and legislators to target extremist and hate groups, all the while eliding any differences among right-wing groups.43 The books differed from the scholarly tone of Richard Hofstadter’s work: they not only discussed—in A Force upon the Plains at some length and with extensive documentation—the development of what they perceived to be a very alarming social movement but they also prophesied a violent political apocalypse that required immediate and forceful response, and they provided speciﬁc policy initiatives and community responses that could help the country avert the approaching peril. Neither academic nor bound by the disciplinary conventions of political science and history, and far more activist in approach and aims than Hofstadter and his contemporaries, both Dees and Stern mixed Hofstadter’s pathology analogy with the progressive critics’ concern that Hofstadter’s pathology could spread without sufﬁciently active intervention.

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

75

The two books also shared a structuring narrative. Both began with the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City, moved backward at least to the radical racist right of the 1980s (with brief stops in the history of the Klan and similar organizations), through the events of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and passage of the Brady Bill, to the current, post–Oklahoma City period, and then pointed toward a hazy and troubling future. This remains a powerful narrative, evoking people and incidents that dominated the media for short but intense periods of time. Importantly, each author placed himself within the story, not only describing where he was when he heard news of the Oklahoma City bombing but also demonstrating his special position with respect to the narrative’s development: Dees as a successful activist lawyer with strong community ties and informed sources that led him to recognize, long before April 1995, that there was a “gathering storm;” and Stern, an activist researcher who had ﬁrst heard of the militias in 1994 and who had been collecting information on them ever since. Indeed, both repeatedly quoted from documents they had written warning of the probability of a militia-related terrorist attack before the bomb exploded. Dees wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno in October 1994 (which he mentions ﬁve times throughout his book) (The Gathering Storm, 6, 104–6, 109, 201, 228); and Stern referred in his book’s foreword to an AJC report he published in early April 1995, Militias: A Growing Danger, which predicted that “people connected with militias were posed to attack government ofﬁcials, possibly on April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the ﬁery end of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco” (A Force upon the Plains, 13–15). As experts with personal histories and stakes in the militias, then, Dees and Stern presented themselves as uniquely qualiﬁed to decipher the militias’ actions, belief systems, and dangers. The two books’ titles and dust jackets also established a shared framework for understanding the militias. These elements, which constituted the clearest evidence of how books are conceived of and marketed by their major publishing houses, organized potential buyers’ and reviewers’ ﬁrst impressions of these timely recountings of major recent news events.44 The very metaphors at work in their titles suggest a superhuman power emanating either from nature (a storm) or from some unknown source (a force) and threatening the very structure of nation, community, and home. The hardcover dust jackets showed truncated

76

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

pictures of threatening white men: for Dees’s book, a masked, assault weapon-wielding ﬁgure in the foreground with a similar paramilitary ﬁgure wearing a gas mask in the background; for Stern’s book, a blurry close-up of part of a white man’s face whose mouth is open in a shout. Reﬂecting the explicit threat captured in its cover photo, Dees’s account was the more straightforward and uncomplicated explanation of the militia danger. Written in a breathless style, citing far fewer sources and statistics than Stern’s book, and focusing narrowly on the movement’s alleged leaders, The Gathering Storm was simple in much the way that conspiracies are “simple,” describing the militias as largely the product of the shadowy, sinister forces of violent white supremacists. Its very ﬁrst scene claimed that the militias began in a 1992 meeting in Colorado presided over by Louis Beam, leader of the Texas Klan. Beam was best known for his advocacy of “leaderless cells,” small, autonomous groups of warriors striking out on their own and who, if caught, would be unable to provide information about group structures or leaders. Dees asserted that at this conference, attended by 150 white supremacists, “plans were laid for a citizens’ militia movement like none this country has known” (The Gathering Storm, 2). Afterward, Dees argued, the movement changed from a disparate, fragmented group of pesky—and at times dangerous—gadﬂies to a serious, armed political challenge to the state itself. . . . During that weekend in the Rockies, a network of militant anti-government zealots was created. Alliances were formed from diverse factions: Identity, Posse Comitatus, the Klan, Aryan Nations, reconstructionists and other fundamentalist Christians, Neo-Nazis tax resisters, Second Amendment advocates, and antiabortion extremists (67).

Although “not every individual militia unit established had racist ties,” and although many who joined may have been trying just to express their sincere patriotism and frustration with their government and lot in life, the militias have been controlled by these shadowy, murdering racists ever since. The simile Dees used to describe this relationship is illustrative of his homespun, commonsensical, explanatory voice: “Much like a tick buried in the thick hair on a dog’s neck, [Louis] Beam, [Christian Identity leader Pete] Peters, and the others had embedded themselves into the militia movement and had helped set its agenda” (90). His tone belied the lack of proof to support his arguments, however.

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

77

The only evidence he cited as support for his claim that the extreme racist right secretly controlled the militias—evidence that came from his own organization—was that 137 of the 441 militia and 368 Patriot groups that existed between 1994 and 1996 had ties to the racist right, which represented less than 17 percent of all of these groups, even if one accepts Dees’s ﬁgures (200–201). This underwhelming claim served as the basis for the “storm” he prophesied. Individual militia members, he argued, were in thrall to shadowy white supremacist leaders. In one of the most telling passages of the book, he outlined a possible defense strategy for Timothy McVeigh that illustrates this well. The alleged bomber’s legal team should admit their client’s guilt, he argued, and should focus on presenting mitigating circumstances that might avert the death penalty. These mitigating circumstances would be precisely the theory of the militias Dees espoused: that a few shadowy ﬁgures, most notably white supremacist William Pierce (author of The Turner Diaries, a violent, apocalyptic adventure novel about a near-future race war), were the real perpetrators of the bombing because of their creation of McVeigh’s twisted sense of patriotism. Like so many of his fellow patriots and militia members, McVeigh had been hypnotized into the sick world of race war. For Dees, the high-proﬁle McVeigh trial could have best exposed these secret forces and enabled the American public to understand the power that the gathering storm has over the vulnerable populace. (In June 1997, McVeigh was found guilty and sentenced to death for planting the Oklahoma City bomb and was put to death four years later.) Stern also began his book by describing the militias as a pathological contagion, summarizing his pre–Oklahoma City bombing report for the AJC: If an individual went into a psychiatrist’s ofﬁce saying that he believed in black helicopters, that evil forces were changing the weather to harass him, that foreign troops were coming to take him away to a concentration camp, the doctor would diagnose the patient as clinically paranoid and prescribe treatment. The report warned that Americans could not ignore this same disease in the body politic: It was contagious, and those infected were well armed (A Force upon the Plains, 15).

Unlike Dees’s simpler conception of a shadowy, gathering storm, however, Stern presented this “infection” as a multistep process that

78

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

did not necessarily lead all militia members to become the equivalent of Klan members. Instead, throughout the book, Stern organized his discussion of the relationship between supremacists and militias around the metaphor of a funnel. First, the militias drew people in by using real political issues that concern those vulnerable to the militias’ siren song, such as gun control and the environment. From there, a smaller number of the new recruits were moved toward what Stern termed a particular “ideology,” opposition to what militias viewed as the “oppressive” federal government. The next step, to which fewer were susceptible, was indoctrination into a belief system based on understanding power and world events as a global, possibly satanic conspiracy. Stern argued that it is simply a small jump from conspiracy theory to virulent anti-Semitism—which was the real basis for the militias’ antigovernment sentiments, since far-right–wing conspiracy theories simply recast (and hide) the Protocols of the Elders of Zion within superﬁcially secular politics (79, 197). Finally, at the “narrowest end of the funnel, [the militias have] drawn in the hard core, where you get someone like Timothy McVeigh popping out. . . . The bigger the front end of the funnel is, the bigger the number that get to the core” (107). The indoctrination that moved recruits through the funnel took place through the sharing and selling of massive “documentation,” including books and videotapes, which made a novice militia member reconsider and question all that s/he knew about power and politics—a step that constituted “the ﬁrst leap of faith toward political delusion” (142). Like a tornado moving across Middle America, Stern suggested, this funnel sucked in the innocent, turning them into part of a growing, violent, almost inhuman force. Both books ended with strong suggestions about how to curb this movement, focusing on efforts to stop the funnel/gathering storm. As with the senators in their subcommittee hearing, Dees and Stern pointed to electoral politics as one of the most important solutions; Dees, for example, explicitly endorsed the ballot box as the key to political change, asserting that “true patriots are in voting lines, not militia columns, doing their part to ensure the continuation of our democratic way of life” (The Gathering Storm, 23, 233). On the one hand was a vulnerable body politic vulnerable, and perhaps even prone, to infection and the slippery slope of fascism or “anarchy”; on the other a robust body politic able to make ethical and pragmatic choices and affect change through the “marketplace” of electoral politics. Both authors, however, described

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

79

signiﬁcant sectors of the American electorate as being so much a part of or vulnerable to the infection of extremism that the ballot box seemed dubious as a solution. If the militias, and therefore white supremacists and other violent extremists, were having such success at recruiting eligible voters, then the militias as Stern and Dees described them might be expected either to have great success in electoral politics or to have enough paramilitary might to render electoral politics moot. Either way, the “storm” would take over, the “force” would sweep over and beyond the plains, and a triumphant horde of militiamen would end up in charge. This conﬂict between the rational politics of electoral, representative democracy and the irrational politics of the militias was especially difﬁcult for Stern to resolve. He described the crisis situation as analogous to Germany between the world wars, the American South during the heights of Klan violence and lynchings, and warlord-torn Somalia. Militia-related political goals such as states’ rights and county supremacy were not about honest, rational politics, but a cover for bigotry and a movement toward ﬁfty lawless, warring individual states that would not protect basic human rights equally and for all. This stark vision demonstrates the dangerous populist tendencies of “grassroots America,” where the militias threatened, intimidated, and found support (238). Stern seemed conﬁdent that those politicians who either explicitly or implicitly supported the militias and political extremism would have bloodstained hands when the militias became increasingly violent. This result would at least produce some beneﬁt, as militia-friendly representatives would face angry constituents who would vote them out of ofﬁce (219–20). Yet Stern, like Dees, was not entirely pleased with the results of electoral politics. Dees was more critical of Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and the Republican majority of the 104th Congress, whose success Dees traced back to and equated with George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign and whom Dees condemned for helping to create “a climate and culture in which invective and irresponsible rhetoric is [sic] routinely used to demonize an opponent, legitimize insensitive stereotypes, and promote prejudice” (The Gathering Storm, 112, 5). Stern offered a more general condemnation of politicians in general and conservative Republicans in particular for “weighing political considerations” over condemning or holding hearings on militias after the Oklahoma City bombing (A Force upon the Plains, 210–11).

80

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

Stern also spent an entire chapter on those elected politicians who served as “poster children” for the militias, such as U.S. Representatives Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) and Steve Stockman (R-Texas), and Charles Duke, state senator from Colorado (210–20). In the case of these elected representatives, the electoral process had not worked as a neutral, rational procedure that blunted the effects of the extremist margins; it was the very process by which the margins had come to the centers of power. Electoral politics, Stern feared, could prove to be as vulnerable to the powerful forces driving the rise of the militias as the electorate that had been so easily conned into the funnel. In addition to the ballot box, these authors also advocated the criminalization of paramilitary activity and heightened surveillance and policing actions against the militias. Both books included in their appendices model statutes outlawing the kinds of military exercises for which the militias were best known. Further, both encouraged granting the FBI increased authority to inﬁltrate groups (provided there was “a reasonable suspicion that the targets are violating or are about to violate federal law”), to gather intelligence on the Internet, and to open ﬁles and collect public information on militias who were obeying all applicable laws (230–38; The Gathering Storm, 182–94). Dees and Stern both called for state and federal legislators and law enforcement to declare a low-intensity war on the militias through the enforcement of existing laws and the passing of new, militia-speciﬁc statutes.45 In particular, Dees endorsed provisions of what ultimately became the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, although he was hesitant to call for a “complete overhaul” of the attorney general’s “Guidelines Concerning Domestic Security/Terrorist Activities” out of fear that such revisions could infringe First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceable assembly (The Gathering Storm, 183–84). Stern did not propose speciﬁc legislation, although he did argue at length for more empowered federal agencies to ﬁght the militias, asserting that even if increased surveillance, capture, and prosecution of paramilitary militias produced some violence and tragic consequences, “to do nothing would be worse” (A Force upon the Plains, 237). By portraying the militias as a grave threat and a powerful force, both authors concluded that only the most vigorous response by the federal government could

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

81

neutralize them. Civil liberties would have to be sacriﬁced to some degree; as Dees noted in an insipid analogy borrowed from Bill Clinton, people were initially opposed to the small nuisance of metal detectors at airports but now accept them as minor inconveniences for the greater good of safety (The Gathering Storm, 183). Stern called for an academic response to the militias and the hate groups with whom he equated the militias. He advocated a new discipline, “an overarching intellectual framework” for “a ﬁeld of study of hate” that would bring together the strands of political science, literature, sociology, history, anthropology, and other disciplines that have dealt with issues related to “hate.” This ﬁeld would develop “theories and a vocabulary and case studies to show what increases or diminishes hate inside and outside of politics, and why” (A Force upon the Plains, 249–50). Although admirable, Stern’s benign, utilitarian vision of and conﬁdence in the social sciences as the path to a cure for what he saw as a functional “outbreak” of “hate” seems misguided at best, and again implicitly relied on Hofstadter’s and pluralism’s notion of the pathologies of “extremist” politics. Stern assumed that “hate” and irrational politics were merely pathological responses to certain conditions that could be treated or contained through changed conditions and appeals to logic. Dees and Stern presented, in only slightly different ways, the center’s fear of a violent, irrational margin. Their practical, accessible books attempted to provide some tools—“rational” electoral politics within the two-party system, passage and enforcement of an “antiterrorism act” to strengthen law enforcement’s ability to track militia movements, and a new ﬁeld of social-scientiﬁc experts—for containing an existential, extremist threat to American society. Stern and Dees presented the militia threat as so basic, pervasive, and dangerous that at the time and even today, their proposed solutions seem ﬂawed and desperate at best, especially given the degree of the American electorate’s discontent with the two major parties, the dismaying provisions and misdirected nature of what became the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (and the even more invasive legislation and executive branch activities developed following the 9/11 attacks), and the long history of failed instrumental attempts in the United States to solve social problems through the work of social scientists.

82

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

The Dangers of “Pathology”

The antimilitia activists held many of the same assumptions about why and how populist conspiracy theories are created, circulated, and affect the behavior of militia members as Senator Specter and his colleagues. They also shared a ﬁrm belief in the remedy: stronger legislation and stricter law enforcement. In their view, the militias subscribed to a pathological ideology, one that required the state to employ disciplinary surveillance and suppression and to curtail their otherwise inalienable rights to speak and engage in social relations. Without denying that these groups threatened and, occasionally, engaged in violent activities, and thus required greater state oversight than less- and nonviolent political dissenters, I believe this approach is ﬂawed by its unwillingness to consider both what drives populist fears of conspiracy and how conspiracy theory works. Specter, Dees, and Stern described a “healthy” but vulnerable disciplinary apparatus that faced a “pathological” ideological challenge posed by armed conspiracy theorists who can ﬁnd neither common ground nor means by which to coexist in normal society. To conceptualize conspiracy theory and the alienation and disaffection from political institutions that it represents as a dangerous, paranoid force structures communication and social relations in such a way that the farce of the Senate hearing and the tragedy of Waco are equally likely, if not inevitable, results. Law enforcement confrontations against MOVE in Philadelphia and the Branch Davidians in Waco have shown that when confronting a group recognized only as a pathological Other, federal, state, and municipal ofﬁcials are predisposed to formulate strategies that seek to impose order—and often martial-like order. Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci argues, for example, that this strategy is likely to result in a “discursive breakdown” in which discourse “reaches some limit (acknowledged or unacknowledged) in appropriating the world representationally,” leading both sides either to silence or increasingly belligerent and uncommunicative contact—which in turn can lead more easily to complete withdrawal and violence.46 The parties’ inability to reposition themselves in relation to their opposition prevents them from resolving their stand-off, where violence—and especially the overwhelming violence of the state—hangs contingently in the balance.47 By tying the pathology metaphor and the assumptions it makes about the political self and the extremist Other to formal legal

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

83

doctrines and bureaucratic order, the Senate hearings and antimilitia activists like Dees and Stern failed to conceptualize adequately the complex populist challenge of militias. When seen as nothing more than pathologically violent, irrational groups that sweep like a force of nature across the nation’s midsection—that is, when seen as extreme manifestations of a “paranoid style”—then militias require a more empowered state disciplinary machinery engaged in quasi-military confrontations. Alas, this merely conﬁrms the fears of every conspiracy theorist. Reckoning with the political and cultural context within which conspiracy theories are formed and subscribed to, and attempting to converse with believers as concerned political subjects, are strategies that are more likely to enable law enforcement ofﬁcers and government ofﬁcials to avoid the kinds of conﬂicts that arose initially in Ruby Ridge and Waco.48 If the state’s conceptualization of a movement is shaped by oversimpliﬁed metaphors of pathology, it fears and inevitably seeks a violent confrontation. Hofstadter’s ideas have consequences. We need a better way to understand conspiracy theory’s politics than those we’ve seen thus far—the “realists” to the “symbolists” of chapter 1, as well as the senators and activists of this chapter. I sketch this out in the next section by contextualizing conspiracy theory’s populist logic. Conspiracy Theory and Populism

The two approaches to conspiracy theory introduced in the previous chapter view it as a speciﬁcally political practice that emanates from pathologically political demands and that results inevitably in harmful effects on political institutions (such as political parties) and government. Although the emphasis in their approaches differ—symbolists like Hofstadter criticize what they see as conspiracy theory’s fundamentally incorrect, “stylistic” approach to politics, while left-progressives warn of the very political nature of conspiracy theory’s slide toward fascism—they offer a similar description of conspiracy theory as an ideological rhetoric and worldview: It is a populist, frequently dangerous cry and rage from the margins. This conceptualization leads inexorably to a normative conclusion, seen most clearly in the Senate hearing on the militia movement, in which powerful state actors view conspiracy theory and the extremist populism it expresses as an uncontrollable Other requiring surveillance and, ultimately, discipline.

84

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

Both approaches thus fear the populist core of conspiracy theory. They see populism as subject to irrational passions and as expressing sentiments that are beyond the acceptable norm. It is dangerously majoritarian, ignores and threatens established political institutions, and as such can destroy liberal values. It will lead, inexorably, to an intolerant society. Their insight about the relationship between fears of conspiracy and populism is correct: Conspiracy theory is populist in its evocation of an unwitting and unwilling populace in thrall to the secretive machinations of power, and conspiracy theory indeed serves as a non-necessary element of populist ideology—which is to say that all conspiracy theory is by deﬁnition populist, but not all populist movements rely upon or even use conspiracy theories to build support. But their approaches condemn populism too quickly, and assume that basing their condemnatory description on its most troubling occurrences (troubling, that is, for centrist liberals or leftists) is sufﬁcient.49 It is not, and a better understanding of populism allows us to see not only conspiracy theory’s political complexity, but also why it should be studied as a cultural form and practice in order to understand its broader signiﬁcance and effects. Efforts to deﬁne populism, as Francisco Panizza explains, frequently rely on empirically derived categories of populist movements’ attributes or on historical case studies—tendencies that appear as well in social scientiﬁc and historical studies of conspiracy theory.50 The “paranoid style” concept more closely resembles a third approach Panizza isolates, one that proves most appropriate for understanding conspiracy theory: a symptomatic reading that seeks to isolate, describe, and analyze populism’s analytical and formal core.51 To this end, Ernesto Laclau’s more general and less normative understanding of populism helpfully recognizes both its ever-present vagueness in content and its contextspeciﬁc variation in history. Populism, he argues, “‘simpliﬁes’ the political space, replacing a complex set of differences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise” but whose symbolic division places “the people” on one pole and its Other, the power bloc in charge, on the other.52 It offers an appeal to the people and against the existing structure of power and that structure’s dominant ideas and values—at least as those ideas and values are constructed by the populist discourse that views them as dangerous and foreign.53 An extreme example of this is a millenarian movement that splits the

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

85

world into two distinct parts, recognizing itself as the embodiment of good and others as the absolute of evil; every element (beliefs, ways of life, etc.) linked to the movement is made equivalent and necessary and is part of that which is good, while every element linked to the Other is equivalent and wicked.54 Laclau calls the process by which this occurs a “logic of equivalence” in which numerous unfulﬁlled demands accumulate and become equivalent to each other as they are absorbed within a broader movement.55 A populist, Manichean movement—whether religious or secular— thus links together disparate elements in a chain that appears in its fullness to form a natural unity. Populism operates as a process; it cannot be reduced to its typical content (anti-intellectualism, for example, or mass mobilization by a charismatic leader) or its typical effects (scapegoating or conspiracy theorizing), all of which are historically contingent and dependent upon the particular political and social context in which any individual populist movement emerges. Viewed this way, populism has no necessary political valence within the institutionalized categories of left and right, or, in the contemporary American political context, the Democratic or Republican parties. As Michael Kazin has shown, linked appeals to self-reliance, communitarian ideals, and a producerist, worker ethic can appear at one moment to be conservative (in the anticommunism of the 1950s and early 1960s), liberal at another time (in the New Deal of the 1930s), and thoroughly independent at another (in the Populist campaigns of the late nineteenth century).56 I will return to this idea in part II, when I discuss how conspiracy theory’s interpretive and narrative practices interpret and link independent events within a uniﬁed narrative that can appear to connect with political movements from all over the political map. Populist discourse neither expresses a political identity in its collection of popular discontents and desired goals nor reﬂects a social or political reality—which is to say, contra Hofstadter and the leftprogressive critics of populists, populism does not ﬁnd its success solely as a group response to some external stimulus. Rather, populist discourse constructs and constitutes an identity, establishing a signiﬁer under which the movement can operate. This conception better understands populism’s productive nature. Rather than merely a response to a behavioral reﬂex, populist movements are the result of a linking together of otherwise disparate elements that form a new,

86

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

productive political framework—as in, for example, the New Right as it developed out of Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, through the 1994, Newt Gingrich–led “Contract for America” takeover of the House of Representatives, and including George Wallace’s piecing together segregationist fervor with a scornful anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism. These historical developments linked a libertarian distaste for government, a quasi-theocratic embrace of conservative morality, and a patriotic, militaristic patriotism within what became a successfully populist discourse.57 Any individual populist movement can dissipate or be subverted when a demand on which the movement is based is satisﬁed, or when the movement itself—its linked demands, as well as its broad, and largely empty, signiﬁers as a movement—are changed and reappropriated by a competing political movement, such as a swing from a left- to right-wing populism that reshapes speciﬁc social demands toward a different political end. Just as populism’s politics are not transhistorical and knowable in advance, so its role and effects in any particular political context are also historically contingent, and as such can take different shape at different times. As Benjamin Arditi has observed, populism emerges as an underlying logic in three possible modes. As part of mainstream, institutional political rhetoric, it may emerge as a “fellow traveler” of mass mediated politics. It surfaces as well in “the more turbulent modes of participation and political exchange lurking behind the normality of democratic procedures,” and as such both disturbs and renews democratic politics. Finally, it can threaten to interrupt democracy by attempting to impose a full-ﬂedged form of authoritarianism.58 Populism’s inﬂection of longstanding rhetoric about “the people” creates an abstract, unstable discourse present to varying degrees in all democratic political orders. Democratic politics relies on a gap between the public and its elected representatives that is mediated by established political institutions; populism emerges when this gap constitutes a problem, or even a crisis, and when a movement can plausibly offer some more direct or “authentic” means of representation in the name of the people.59 A populist challenge to an established political order, then, has neither a necessary content nor a necessary relationship to that order. It could be reformist or revolutionary; it could embrace a seemingly more participatory form of democracy; or it could reject democratic processes entirely.

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

87

Populism operates through the assembly of often-contradictory notions of “the people” and its opposition (“power”) that are infused with varying degrees of signiﬁcance at particular conjunctures. An ever-present element of political action and a rhetorical move available to mainstream and marginal political actors, populism challenges and subverts more institutionalized, seemingly “mature” political ideologies. Its ongoing and important role in politics demonstrates the failure of a “consensus” model of politics in which stable political parties solicit support from a rational, satisﬁed public, an economic free market satisﬁes all demands and preferences, and a technocratic state (whether in a minimal, “night watchman” form or in a social democratic form) corrects any market failures that arise. Unable to resolve all social tensions and political conﬂicts, and unable as well to respond to all of the public’s passions and to sound deﬁnitively in the moral register the public demands, major political parties and mainstream political institutions face continual challenges from populisms of the left, right, and independent sort.60 Populism offers up and then plays with what Bonnie Honig has called “remainders,” unmet demands that inspire the resistance “engendered by every settlement, even by those that are relatively enabling or empowering,” excesses left over from attempts to bring social and political order to human activity. Populist discourse operates in the “perpetual contest, even within an ordered setting” of democratic politics, and in the inevitable ﬁght over the institutional processes of democratic political and social order.61 In Hofstadter’s—and, at times, the left-progressives’—conceptualization of populism, the excess or remainder of consensus, whether of the margins or of leftist activists seduced into conspiracy theory, is a pathological refusal of normalcy and the result of economic, political, and cultural crises. Understanding populism as a democratic logic, however, reconceptualizes it as a production of the political itself, an aspect of the “perpetual contest” of democracy, rather than as a troubling, sick exception to the democratic ideal. Movements that rely upon this logic may do so to further left- or right-wing causes. Numerous conservative political movements (Honig identiﬁes antiabortion activists as one example) have refused to be incorporated within dominant political structures and practices and have waged constant, sometimes violent struggle for their cause; the same has been true on the left in its protests against racial segregation and discrimination, the Vietnam

88

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

War, nuclear war, and globalization. Populism operates as “a dimension of political culture in general, not simply as a particular kind of overall ideological system or type of organization.”62 In Arditi’s words, populism “plays the role of the awkward guest,” at once functioning as an element of liberal democracy by encouraging engagement in public participation and mobilization and expressing the popular will of a segment of the population, while it also disrupts the “gentriﬁed domain in which politics is enacted.” It operates through charisma, unfettered majorities and leadership, and an absolute sense of good and right; it eschews such institutional, republican virtues as checks and balances, representation, negotiation, countermajoritarian rights, and deferral of the public will.63 It promises redemption while it threatens disruption, unsettlement, even revolution. The most extensive use of Laclau’s conception of populism has been the work of Stuart Hall and others on the rise of Thatcherism in Britain in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Hall described Thatcherism as a successful articulation of “authoritarian populism,” in which popular consent was constructed by a historic bloc in order “to harness to its support some popular discontents, neutralize the opposing forces, disaggregate the opposition and really incorporate some strategic elements of popular opinion into its own hegemonic project.” A seeming paradox, the term “authoritarian populism” referred to Thatcherism’s simultaneous oppressive form of class politics and its containment and mobilization of populist disaffection within a statist, concentrated form of political rule.64 Margaret Thatcher used fears of immigrants, crime, bureaucracy, and cultural elites not only to secure electoral victories and exploit the forces of production for capital, but also to deﬁne “the people” in the most limited and repressive way, thereby absorbing “part of the ideological and political discourses of the dominated classes.”65 Ronald Reagan’s nearly concurrent success in the United States—arising, as Lawrence Grossberg notes, in a different economic and political context66—was the culmination of a similar winning of popular consent through the articulation of certain populist elements (especially in Reaganism’s description of the struggles between the “individual” and the federal bureaucracy and between the authentic American “people” and an “evil empire”) to a powerful, militaristic state and deregulated economy. Again, the success of Reagan and Thatcher does not mean that “authoritarian populism” is the only possible mode of populist

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

|

89

discourse; radical democratic movements of the left can oppose an authoritarian populist regime by articulating their own demands and their own opposition to what they understand as a corrupt power bloc. Conspiracy theory, based on the perceived secret elite domination over and manipulation of the entirety of economic, political, and social relations, has played a role of varied importance in many, but by no means all, populist movements. It remains an element with a long tradition in American politics and culture that has been appropriated for different causes at different times; hence, Berlet’s ﬁndings concerning the recent “seduction” of the left by right-wing theories are not especially surprising. Conspiracy theory is a particularly unstable element in populism based on such profound suspicion and fear that its successful and thorough-going incorporation within a large populist movement would most likely occur in authoritarian or fascist regimes. In these contexts, conspiracy theory’s ability to express fears of an omnipotent Other could play a central role in deﬁning “the people” through repression and ideological conformity. This is not a necessary result of conspiracy theory, however; it can also be merely one non-necessary, marginal element within populist movements. For example, assumed and at times explicit anti-Semitism has existed as a trace and, often, as a central element in some nineteenth- and twentieth-century populist rants against “European bankers.” During the latter part of his career as a prominent radio minister and political spokesman, Father Charles Coughlin associated “Jews” with bankers as a secret, omnipotent group, as did a minority of the late–nineteenth-century American Populist movement.67 By no means, however, does this provide a universal description of populist groups, and this tendency should lead one neither to equate populism with conspiracy theory nor to assume that all conspiracy theories, even those focusing especially on banking, are anti-Semitic; importantly, it should not lead one to consider all criticism of the role of ﬁnance capital in contemporary capitalism to be conspiracy theory.68 Conspiracy theory as a populist theory of power, then, is an ideological misrecognition of power relations, calling believers and audiences together and into being as “the people” opposed to a relatively secret, elite “power bloc.” Three important insights about conspiracy theory ﬂow from this conceptualization—insights that the remainder of the book develops. First, if populist movements and logic must produce political identities and movements rather than merely take advantage

90

|

W H E N T H E S E N AT O R M E T T H E C O M M A N D E R

of behavioral reﬂexes or social circumstances, then the communicative aspect of conspiracy theory—its form as well as its content, its reception as well as its texts—is fundamental to its political signiﬁcance and effects. Hofstadter saw this, of course, and that insight explains why his concept of “paranoid style” was and remains so inﬂuential. Second, if populist logic is an inevitable and necessary part of a democratic political order, a challenge produced by the democratic promise of popular sovereignty and self-rule, then conspiracy theory, as a mode of populist logic, is not foreign to democracy. It can in fact play the role of a productive challenge to an existing order—albeit one that can excessively simplify complex political and historical events. At the same time, like populism generally, conspiracy theory can play a destructive role by manipulating overly majoritarian, racist, or antidemocratic tendencies among the public. This neutral or ambivalent vision of populism and conspiracy theory, which cautions against a priori normative conclusions about the rationality and effects of a radical challenge to the political order, is one that Hofstadter and any “paranoid style”–inﬂected approach rejects. The third important insight that a reconceptualization of populism provides ﬂows from this unwillingness to reject conspiracy theory tout court. A populist movement may correctly or at least not inaccurately describe a political order in which power is concentrated and unaccountable. Similarly, overarching conspiracy theories may be wrong or overly simplistic, but they may sometimes be on to something. Speciﬁcally, they may well address real structural inequities, albeit ideologically, and they may well constitute a response, albeit in a simplistic and decidedly unpragmatic form, to an unjust political order, a barren or dysfunctional civil society, and/or an exploitative economic system. Understanding why conspiracy theory exists and what effects it has on politics and culture, then, requires a better understanding of how it works as a form of explaining power and as a practice of interpreting the world. The next part considers these issues.

PART II

Conspiracy as Cultural Practice

This page intentionally left blank

3 Finding the Plot Conspiracy Theory as Interpretation

I

n early 1994, when asked by CNN’s Larry King about rumors of foul play in the suicide of his friend and deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, President Bill Clinton responded by saying, “I don’t think we know any more than in the beginning because I just really don’t believe there is anything more to know.”1 On the surface, it seemed that Clinton just hoped to shut off the innuendos and accusations that had been circulating among some of his opponents. Various theories, spread by radio talk shows and partisan political periodicals, the editorial section of the Wall Street Journal, conspiracy-oriented publications, and computer networks, purported to link Foster with shady ﬁnancial transactions made by the Clintons and associated with the emerging Whitewater land development scandal, while other theories linked Foster sexually with Hillary Clinton. These rumors were false and there was nothing more to know, Clinton argued, so there was no reason to look for anything more to know. But Clinton’s statement also demonstrates the profound trouble that mainstream politicians and established political institutions have when confronted by the politics, interpretive practices, and narrative constructions of conspiracy theory. In particular, the statement “I just really don’t believe there is anything more to know” makes no sense within the hermeneutics of conspiracy. By assuming there are limits 93

94

|

FINDING THE PLOT

to interpretation, the statement ignores the fact that conspiracy theory respects no interpretive limits when it investigates the secret treachery of true political power. Conspiracy theory demands continual interpretation. There is always something more to know about an alleged conspiracy, the evidence of which is subjected to an investigative machine that depends on the perpetual motion of signiﬁcation. Further, the very attempt to shut interpretation down is itself a suspicious act that requires interpretation. Clinton’s declaration of a limit to interpretation thus signiﬁes excessively. For a conspiracy theorist, when a suspect political leader says that there is nothing more to know, he simultaneously circulates a profound error (there is always something more to know) and presents another statement, linked to previous ones that he and his associates have made, that demonstrates the devious and conspiratorial nature of his power (we know that he knows more). Conspiracy theory trapped Clinton in a circular, endless game in which every declaration of his innocence and every piece of evidence he put forward to exonerate himself served as further proof of his guilt. At still another level, however, Clinton’s statement does speak for the conspiracy theorist. There really is nothing more to know, as each detail or sign links with another in an endless chain of details within a singular narrative frame. One can and must continually collect and interpret evidence, but the explanation of that evidence is always already formed. Interpretation may be endless, but the conspiracy tightly limits its range of conclusions. For a conspiracy theorist focused on the Clinton presidency during the 1990s, numerous scandals and nefarious plots awaited disclosure, composed of various sorts of details that were already known, or were coming to light, or were still to be unearthed: the larger explanation behind these individual scandals. A popular one—and the basis for the militia movement’s dread of Clinton’s presidency— declared that Clinton was an agent of a “New World Order” seeking to impose a totalitarian regime. This theory merely required further proof of Clinton’s inherent insidiousness. The linkage between an event like Foster’s suicide to larger claims of conspiracy was contingent: competing theories utilized the same detail in different ways, while even the same theory could move in alternate directions as it developed. There may be more to learn—new details, even new developments as the Clinton conspiracy spread more widely—but there would be nothing more to know.

FINDING THE PLOT

|

95

This chapter concerns these intensely active interpretive practices of conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory works as a form of hyperactive semiosis in which history and politics serve as reservoirs of signs that demand (over)interpretation, and that signify, for the interpreter, far more than their conventional meaning. Again, Hofstadter’s powerful notion of the “paranoid style” of conspiracy theory is superﬁcially attractive as a framework for analysis. As I explained in part I, Hofstadter did not assert that conspiracy theorists were necessarily paranoid but that their way of interpreting the world was like that of the paranoid. His most important claim in this respect was that conspiracy theorists view current and historical events as a series of plots to undermine a rightful order by an enemy on whom they project their own anxieties and desires.2 Although understanding conspiracy theory as a paranoid form of interpretation provides some insight, it displaces the cultural and speciﬁcally semiotic challenge posed by conspiracy theory’s interpretive practices onto a relatively simplistic notion of pathology. Therefore, Hofstadter’s work can itself best be used analogically. The paradoxes of paranoia, for example, provide a useful way of thinking through conspiracy theory’s role as an interpretive framework.3 As with clinical paranoia, the interpretive practices of conspiracy theory are in many instances delusional but are structured in a manner that is internally consistent and logical. They engage in a logic that is at once tautological and Procrustean by associating disparate individual events and ﬁgures, drawing ﬁrm conclusions based on scant or nonexistent evidence, and asserting either too simplistic or too complicated explanations to account for historical or present-day events. As a kind of residual or regressive practice within a presumably “postmodern” era that marks the end of master narratives, conspiracy theorists posit highly and imaginatively integrative analyses of individual pieces of evidence into an all-encompassing framework that can describe the breadth of modern (and, in some theories, premodern and ancient) history and politics.4 It manifests a popular desire to reconstruct the master narrative as a mode of expression, thus serving as an excessively integrative interpretive practice that moves beyond the norms of inference. These interpretive practices are not per se pathological, however, and an approach that labels them as such limits itself both politically and analytically because it cannot explain and respond to the

96

|

FINDING THE PLOT

speciﬁcally hermeneutical aspects of conspiracy theory.5 This chapter proposes two alternative ways of conceiving of this interpretive practice, as desire and as production. Both concepts allows us to see conspiracy theory as an active, endless process that continually seeks, but can never fully arrive at, a ﬁnal interpretation. They take conspiracy theory’s marginality and hyperactivity as starting points to examine its explanatory power and attraction in contemporary popular politics. They thus enable a cultural analysis of, ﬁrst, conspiracy theory’s ideological, circular, and endless desire for a totalizing method of mapping and understanding a social and political order where power seems always elsewhere; and, second, conspiracy theory’s practice of producing meaningful and intense effects and an incessant chain of interpretation. As an interpretive practice, conspiracy theory represents an impossible, almost utopian drive to seize and fetishize individual signs in order to place them within vast interpretive structures that unsuccessfully attempt to stop the signs’ unlimited meaning production. This chapter and the next together assert that conspiracy theory displaces the citizen’s desire for political signiﬁcance onto a signifying regime in which interpretation and a narrative of conspiracy, and an obsessive desire for information, replace political engagement. In order to ground what will at times become a rather abstract description and analysis of conspiracy theory’s interpretive practices, this chapter utilizes some of the conspiracies concerning Bill Clinton as examples. Accordingly, I begin with some details about two sets of conspiratorial allegations that arose during Clinton’s two terms as president in order to use these allegations as illustrative examples of how conspiracy theory’s interpretive practices work. The Clinton Chronicles

The conspiracies ﬂowed freely during the Clinton presidency. According to an August 1994 U.S. News and World Report article titled “Whatever It Is, Bill Clinton Likely Did It,” Clinton’s ﬁrst term as president marked a “weird era” of American politics, punctuated by “intense, fecund and often bizarre charges” leveled against the president.6 Still well before the bizarre impeachment that deﬁned his second term, the period led White House counsel and longtime Washington politico Lloyd Cutler to complain about “a level of invective and viciousness that is unparalleled. . . . There are a great many people who would like to bring President Clinton

FINDING THE PLOT

|

97

down who will stop at practically nothing.”7 In fact, as the editor of one of the era’s most widely circulated conspiracy fanzines had noted in an op-ed column in the Washington Post earlier that year, although some of the Clinton era conspiracy theories had been produced and circulated by noted conservative Clinton-haters like Rush Limbaugh and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, many of the conspiracies to which Clinton was linked were initially identiﬁed with previous presidents and politicians, and particularly with his most recent predecessors—both Republicans.8 In other words, Cutler may well have been justiﬁed in complaining about the fact that Clinton had been the target of an abundance of conspiracy theories, but for longtime conspiracy theorists, the attacks were neither partisan nor personal. As a group, conspiracy theorists’ distrust and fears of power and secret plans are not necessarily connected to any one individual or political party; indeed, George H. W. Bush’s call for a “New World Order” in a 1991 speech and his membership in Yale’s infamous and secret Skull and Bones society made him just as much a target of conspiracy theories as Clinton. Conspiracy theorists’ suspicions exceed the particularities of established political conﬂicts (most clearly Republican versus Democrat) and seek more global and historical explanations of events. The Washington Post op-ed by fanzine editor Kenn Thomas discussed a number of theories, including two that I will describe here: the Vincent Foster suicide and Clinton’s connection to the deceased Georgetown University Professor Carroll Quigley. Among more committed and less partisan conspiracy theorists, Clinton’s relationship with the relatively obscure professor is one of the most telling and least-known proofs of Clinton’s role in a grand conspiracy. Quigley is best known in the conspiracy community for his book Tragedy and Hope, a relatively fawning, “insider’s” account of the plans by an Anglo-American political elite to oversee global geopolitics and economic development. Originally published in 1966 by Macmillan, the book became quite popular with the John Birch Society and other far-right-wing groups because they were convinced it conﬁrmed their belief in a conspiracy that placed the British Round Table groups, originally funded by the (Cecil) Rhodes Trust and composed of ﬁnancial and political elites in England and its colonies, and its American counterpart, identiﬁed as the “Eastern establishment,” at the top of a secretive pyramid of power.9 Nearly buried in the book’s discussion of the postwar period, Quigley makes the following startling

98

|

FINDING THE PLOT

aside, as though he was addressing the John Birch Society membership directly: There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims, and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies . . . but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is signiﬁcant enough to be known.10

You see, there really is a conspiracy—Professor Quigley said so! Their fears triumphantly realized, Birchers embraced Quigley as a scholarly whistleblower, the witting spiller of the conspiracy’s secrets. Candidate Bill Clinton placed himself in this narrative of disclosure when he explicitly connected his own personal trajectory to Quigley before a national television audience as he accepted the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. In his speech to the Democratic National Convention, Clinton singled out and praised Quigley’s class at Georgetown for teaching him about the greatness of America and his feeling of moral responsibility to contribute to its improvement.11 The speech set off alarm bells—excited, strangely pleased ones—among John Birch Society members and other conspiracy theorists who knew of Quigley’s work. John Edlam, the Birch Society’s research director, told the Washington Times, “[Quigley] is one of the few insiders who came out and exposed the Eastern establishment plan for world government. He detailed the plan, he’d seen the documents, he wanted it to work.” By citing Quigley, then, Clinton signaled to the “Eastern establishment” of ﬁnanciers, industrialists, and journalists—as well as to the John Birch Society—that he planned to promote this secret conspiracy’s efforts to impose a “new world order.”12 At the same time, a different organization, A-albionic Research of Ferndale, Michigan, saw Clinton’s speech as his effort to signal his allegiance to a “Jesuit/Vatican conspiracy for the Old World Order” with strong ties to Georgetown, the Jesuit university in

FINDING THE PLOT

|

99

the nation’s capital.13 Either way—whether he planned to promote the Eastern elite’s conspiracy or the Vatican’s—Clinton provided plenty of evidence that he was up to something. At the time of his death, Vince Foster was deputy White House counsel, and he had been a longtime friend of the president and former associate of the ﬁrst lady in the prominent Rose law ﬁrm in Little Rock. When Foster’s body was found in Fort Marcy Park outside of Washington, D.C., his demise was almost immediately considered suspicious by the ever-incredulous community of Clinton-conspiracy watchers. By the time of the 1995 Senate Whitewater hearings, a Time/CNN poll found that only 35 percent of the one thousand adults surveyed believed that Foster had committed suicide, despite the wellcirculated conclusions of the U.S. Park Police (in whose jurisdiction Foster’s body had been found), as well as of the FBI and an independent counsel.14 The ofﬁce of the White House counsel even issued an internal memorandum, later leaked to the press, alleging that Republican congressional staff members collected and disseminated information from the Internet on theories of a Foster murder and on Whitewater in general.15 From the circumstances of Foster’s death—including his body’s location in a relatively remote Washington park, shrouded details about the position of the body, and the antique gun supposedly found near it—to the ﬁles that were alleged to be missing from his ofﬁce after it had been thoroughly searched by White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, Foster’s death reeked of signs that gave reason for the suspicious at least to doubt the simple explanation of suicide. A videotape titled The Clinton Chronicles, produced by a California organization called Citizens for Honest Government and heavily promoted by the Reverend Jerry Falwell and others on the far-right, strongly suggested that Foster was murdered to cover up a number of the ﬁrst couple’s misdeeds, particularly the corrupt dealings surrounding the Whitewater scandal.16 The story remained in circulation at least partially through the efforts of right-wing groups such as the Western Journalism Center, an organization largely funded by conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife.17 In one of the wilder theories, purported by Chicago conspiracy theorist Sherman Skolnick, Foster was murdered for trying to stop a CIA-aided assassination of Saddam Hussein. Skolnick charged that Saddam’s killing would have led the Iraqi dictator’s half brother to release bank records linking Clinton (and George H. W. Bush)

100

|

FINDING THE PLOT

to the Italian state bank Banco Nazionale del Lavoro, which helped to fund the arming of Iraq and which also played a role in a number of other real and alleged scandals.18 Foster’s death placed his name alongside many others on the “Clinton Death List,” a roster of deceased individuals linked directly or remotely to Clinton whose deaths have been even the least bit “suspicious.” The death list circulated among far-right– wing groups and all over the Internet via electronic mail, World Wide Web pages, and USENET bulletin boards.19 Undoubtedly without really trying, Clinton successfully produced events that reverberated in the conspiracy community from the time of his candidacy and throughout his presidency. Looking back on the suicide toward the end of Clinton’s second term, the president’s friends and advisors conceded both that Foster’s death had a great, largely deleterious effect on Clinton’s presidency, and that the White House mishandled the suicide’s aftermath.20 Conspiracy Theory as Desire

Conspiracy theories prodigiously commit to learn and know the presumed secrets of power and domination. In their endless striving for more information, conspiracy theorists clearly want something— speciﬁcally the “truth,” as they would understand it, which entails a truly transparent state of relations with others as well as with the greater Other of power. This desire constitutes neither a basic human need nor a clear political demand. Although some who search for evidence of a conspiracy are impoverished, their search does not promise the fulﬁllment of their basic needs, and although some conspiracy theorists actively make political demands individually and collectively, their search seems only tangentially related to the fulﬁllment of speciﬁc demands concerning government programs and laws.21 Rather, it constitutes a desire. The practice of interpreting conspiracy is repetitive, endless, and faces continual frustration. As a result, conspiracy theory’s relationship to its seeming object of desire—the structure, order, and solution represented by conspiracy—is a complex one. INTERPRETIVE DESIRE

IN

PRACTICE

The conspiracy theorist interprets individual phenomena that indicate the existence of a conspiracy by linking them together within a larger interpretive frame. The practice requires enormous attention to the particularities of the distant and recent past, as well as to the present

FINDING THE PLOT

|

101

historical moment. Like Gnostics, conspiracy theorists interpret for individual and small-group enlightenment, ﬁnding mystery in the apparently explicable and experiencing wonderment from the seemingly mundane. Each act of interpretation is itself part of the larger project of locating the ﬁnal order behind the conspiracy. This reﬂects the theorist’s basic assumption that each act by the conspiracy is itself part of a larger conspiratorial project. In other words, each small revelation is to the larger interpretive project what each conspiratorial act is to the entire conspiracy. These parallel worlds—a conspiracy that hides, existing alongside interpretive practices that unmask—create both an opportunity and a problem for the conspiracy theorist. Plenty of evidence exists of the conspiracy, with more of it produced every day in the conspiracy’s efforts to further its goal. The existence of the conspiracy, the thing that must be located by interpretation, is discoverable. Assembling these pieces of evidence into the coherent whole of the conspiracy’s design, however, presents a greater challenge. The conspiracy’s ultimate motive, quite vaguely understood and deﬁned as a general wish for power or to achieve some great degree of evil, proves more elusive and contested. Because everything—the economy, political power, culture, and so on—connects in some way, the theorist develops a kind of reﬂex of seeking other orders behind the visible. Like the central characters in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, such as Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and V’s Herbert Stencil (1963), conspiracy theorists’ seemingly paranoid instinct is not any more pathological than the world in which they perceive themselves to be operating, which constantly places before them connections and other orders that they must try to understand and to which they must respond.22 Although not pathological, conspiracy theory’s interpretive practice is paradoxical. It actively and creatively responds to a speciﬁc historical, political, and social context. Entrepreneurial and energetically innovative, conspiracy theorists burrow through minutiae to uncover hidden truths and connections. Their conclusions, however, are invariably formulaic. Every historical event they investigate and every piece of evidence they identify inevitably means the exact same thing. When confronted with anomalous phenomena (the death of a politician, a scandal, an unexplained natural or human occurrence), the theorist immediately employs the same interpretive tools to ﬁnd conspiracy and to uncover connections that already

102

|

FINDING THE PLOT

existed in coded form in the phenomena themselves.23 Conspiracy not only focuses interpretation, then, it also regulates and determines it. The conspiracy theorist does not arrive alone at a conclusion concerning a speciﬁc piece of evidence of a conspiracy; the conclusion comes with the theorist to the evidence, arriving at the instant of interpretation. The speciﬁc path of the interpretive chain is never fully determined ahead of time, as the numerous mutations of conspiracy theory demonstrate. A conspiratorial motive or action may change as developments occur that change, somewhat, the conspiracy’s composition. Nevertheless, conspiracy locks in the direction that the interpretive path will take in understanding the basic facts that constitute the conspiracy. And so, Bill Clinton had already been Carroll Quigley’s student long before the presidential nominee stepped to the podium at Madison Square Garden. The fact that Clinton cited the dead Georgetown professor in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president was not, in and of itself, signiﬁcant; countless Americans ignored the rising politician’s praise for an obscure mentor buried in the midst of an otherwise generic (if important within the context of the presidential campaign) political speech. But for the conspiracy theorist who had followed Clinton, or for the person who would later, after the fact, adopt a conspiratorial interpretation of Clinton’s presidency, the speech became or would become far more signiﬁcant. It initiated an interpretive process that sought the unmasking of the “real” meaning of Clinton—ﬁrst, in his performative role as presidential candidate (what does he mean?) and then, more urgently, as an epiphenomenon of a broader conspiracy (what does he mean?). Of course, the framework within which such interpretive acts take place is fairly secure, as demonstrated by the distinct but, of course, quite similar theories of the Quigley connection described earlier. Sure, it could signify an Eastern establishment plot or a Jesuit/Vatican plot, but these are different paths and connections moving in the same direction. Similarly, one could imagine an identical process occurring as the ﬁrst President Bush described the “New World Order” that would emerge from the Persian Gulf War. Here is George Herbert Walker Bush, former director of Central Intelligence and member of Skull and Bones, signaling his plans for the one-world government for all the world to see! The connections are available for those who seek to make connections; the order of the Other is there for those who know of such orders.

FINDING THE PLOT

INTERPRETIVE DESIRE NEVER COMES

IN

TIME: THE PAST ARRIVES,

BUT THE

|

103

FUTURE

Making connections and seeking conspiratorial orders assumes an important temporal sequence. In the past, conspiratorial acts have taken place; these acts have produced the present, in which such acts continue to take place. Past and present acts alike leave traces that the active, properly interpretive mind can identify. The past produces the present, and the interpreter must scour the past and the present for the “answer” that can best explain this relationship. In understanding the past and the present, the interpreter draws conclusions that can affect the future, under the assumption that once the ﬁnal connection is made, the ultimate secret order will ﬁnally be uncovered. The practice appears to be simple. The history of twentieth-century conspiracy theories, however, demonstrates that interpretation does not in fact end but continues to engage in the search for more connections in the present and the past. Totalizing conspiracy theories notoriously “fail;” they do not, and cannot, adequately ﬁnd a ﬁnal order. The future, the moment when the secret will be revealed, never arrives. Interpretation, then, is not merely active, it is endlessly active in ﬁnding and linking details to the larger conspiracy. Unfortunately, if the chain is endless, the layers of deception are inﬁnite, and if the connections are never completed, then the base truth remains out of reach (as in the ﬁnal moment of The Crying of Lot 49, when both Oedipa Maas and the reader are left in suspended animation awaiting some answer to the novel’s central mystery). The Clinton Chronicles and the “Clinton Death List,” for instance, were inﬁnitely expansive, built initially on a conception of the president’s unfolding and lethal perﬁdy and the inevitability that individuals with close or imagined ties to the president will die. New revelations merely add to an existing framework, and the act of ﬁnding those new revelations was repeated over the course of Clinton’s career as an epiphenomenon of the broader conspiracy that theorists sought to uncover. Based on a circular drive to ﬁnd the “truth”—a kind of manic will to seek rather than to know—such interpretation becomes akin to the Lacanian notion of desire which requires that its ultimate fulﬁllment be continually deferred. Given this ongoing deferral of satisfaction, the demand of this desire is not simply to expose the secret. The conspiracy is an enormous structure always on the horizon of interpretation, always the cause of

104

|

FINDING THE PLOT

everything, always the point toward which interpretation moves but which it never fully reaches.24 If satisfaction would come from public recognition of the conspiracy’s existence and an effective end to the crisis the conspiracy created, then conspiracy theory, ironically, desires dissatisfaction.25 It is, after all, a speculative approach that assumes its own marginality. By deﬁnition, conspiracy theory perceives itself to be continually dominated and manipulated by its more powerful conspiratorial adversary. This holds true even when conspiracy theorists have amassed enormous resources or the power of the state—even then, the conspiracy is always on the verge of complete victory. Thus, in government regimes based on the fear of a secret group, such as the Third Reich and the U.S. Congress in the throes of McCarthyism, the fear of a Jewish or communist conspiracy was based on the fear of a group considered more powerful than the nation in peril. In contemporary liberal democracies, individual conspiracies may be exposed and condemned by society on a regular basis (for example, Watergate, Iran–Contra). By contrast, conspiracy theory as a totalizing phenomenon, as a whole way of life, continually ﬁnds itself frustrated by its inability to persuade and affect the political order. Ultimately, the conspiracy theorist’s efforts to identify and connect evidence of a deeper order represents a desire to seek further connections and deeper orders—to scour the fecund informational universe for the heretofore unrevealed secret on the assumption that it will contain a ﬁnal answer, while in the meantime deferring any deﬁnitive activity until such answer arrives.26 But no ﬁnal connection, no deepest order, appears. The interpretive search must continue. Nevertheless, a conspiracy’s end is thinkable—indeed, it’s even predicted, even if it cannot occur. After all, the defeat of Clinton and his ilk (however deﬁned) is the prescriptive end of The Clinton Chronicles, and that is always possible. For Republican partisans, it appeared to occur with the defeat of his vice president in the ultimate result of the 2000 election. For partisan conspiracy theorists, George W. Bush’s victory exorcised Clinton’s conspiracy. But for others—remember Bush’s father!—and even for partisans—here comes Hillary!—the struggle continues. When the commitment is to conspiracy, rather than partisan politics, the end of interpretation is unthinkable—indeed, the practice is based on the impossibility of its own completion. There can be only two explanations for a conspiracy theory’s end (assuming, of course, it is not

FINDING THE PLOT

|

105

abandoned because it has been disproven): the conspiracy has become so prevalent that it no longer requires secrecy (clearly an unhappy result in which the threatened apocalypse has come to pass) or the conspiracy has proven too inept to avoid full detection (in which case it was not much of a conspiracy to begin with). The latter represents a different but similarly feared kind of end, in which an enthralling practice reaches a ﬁnal closure.27 Although the accomplishment of this “goal” of conspiracy would be disappointing by deﬁnition, it is impossible. Slavoj Žižek describes this impossibility well: “When we encounter in reality an object which has all the properties of the fantasized object of desire, we are nevertheless necessarily somewhat disappointed; we experience a certain ‘this is not it’; it becomes evident that the ﬁnally found real object is not the reference of desire even though it possesses all the required properties.”28 The desire that manifests itself in interpreting conspiracy cannot simply end; should it approach such an end, the interpretive framework would be reconstructed with new details. Closure, reached by the satisfaction of this desire, cannot be found. There is always another conspiracy to track, and the new political and social order that replaces conspiracy would by deﬁnition constitute a new relation of power, which would by deﬁnition require the deepest of suspicions. The “Clinton Death List” grows, or changes name, or changes shape to include new, different events and ﬁgures. There is always another Clinton, just as, both before and after Bill, there is always another Bush. DOCUMENTING DESIRE

IN

DETAIL

To locate evidence of a conspiracy is to see evidence that is invisible for those who do not believe in the conspiracy. For example, in The Clinton Chronicles and the “Clinton Death List,” and especially in speculations about Vince Foster’s suicide, the individual detail serves as an object produced by interpretive desire. “Clinton” is constructed from a multiplicity of details strung together: Quigley, Foster’s body, and the like. The detail articulated as “conspiracy” does not exist except as it is produced by the interpretation that “ﬁnds” it. The detail is, to borrow from Jacques Lacan the notion of the objet petit a, the “object cause of desire: an object that is, in a way, posited by desire itself.”29 The detail cannot be seen by the “naked eye,” by someone unfamiliar with the evidence and the implications of it; and, for critics of such theories, the “signiﬁcant” detail (such

106

|

FINDING THE PLOT

as the antique gun and the amount of blood found along with Foster’s corpse in Fort Marcy Park) is entirely insigniﬁcant: unimportant, unable to signify anything beyond itself, merely something that would occur naturally (as part of a suicide by gunshot). The object, seen and cherished by the one who desires it, does not exist for the person whose desire does not produce it. By identifying and naming the object evidence of a conspiracy, the theorist produces the referent after the fact. That is, the very act of naming something as evidence of conspiracy results in a transformed object, a referent with new meaning.30 Clinton’s reference to Quigley was merely one part of a longer speech, itself the culmination of an extended presidential primary campaign and political career. “Quigley” gained historical signiﬁcance only after his identiﬁcation and labeling as “conspiracy” by the theorist. This process is radically transformative. “Conspiracy” arrives from the future, constructed retroactively through the analysis of the speech’s details within an interpretive frame that ultimately gives “Clinton” its name and meaning: conspiracy. Clinton cites Quigley; magically, Clinton becomes retroactively linked to an entire historical chain, the conspiracy of global elites that Quigley has innocently and comprehensively described. The detail is the object desired, produced by desire; as such, it signiﬁes a singular meaning “conspiracy” and, in the degree of control that the interpretive desire wields in linking the detail within a larger framework, it is generic, devoid of speciﬁcity, radically contingent on this process.31 “Man thinks with his object,” Lacan wrote, invoking the game that Freud observed his grandson playing in absence of the child’s mother, fort-da, an endlessly repetitive sequence in which the reel itself, the ball that the boy threw and the string by which he drew the ball back, serves as the object produced by the child’s desire.32 Like the child’s reel, the single detail and the succession of details linked within an interpretive frame are sites of interpretive control for the conspiracy theorist. This is most clearly the case in the incredible attention to detail of the Kennedy assassination literature, where the physics of bullet trajectory and the traces of evidence (“accepted” or controversial) become the objects of fetishization. The same is true of the Foster “suicide,” in which details (the gun, the body, the “suicide note,” and so on) must be found, investigated, and massaged to produce their meanings—and, as we will see in chapter 7, the same is true of the fascination with which

FINDING THE PLOT

|

107

the “9/11 truth movement” pores over the details of the World Trade Center towers’ collapse. Each new detail leads to the need for more details. In describing the process of interpretation among believers in UFOs, Keith Thompson describes a process of “masking, unmasking, displaying, concealing, always in the context of getting closer to the hidden truth” in which each step toward revelation signiﬁes a new mask, a new disguise to reveal.33 Paradoxically, although the detail is produced by the conspiracy theorist’s interpretive desire, desire also makes the detail disappear. Once “unmasked,” the detail becomes merely part of the conspiracy. Once Vince Foster is a suicide, the individual details enabling that conclusion lose texture and focus, becoming objects only suitable for occasional debate with nonbelievers. Vince Foster’s antique gun becomes an object of desire once it is named as a lie and a red herring; the theorist is able to see its signiﬁcance only when s/he does not see it, when it becomes a layer of meaning that must be peeled away in search of another, better one. “Conspiracy” transcends everything in this interpretive process. It has produced the past and present, and it will produce the likely future. It produced the details under interpretation. It even produced the interpretive act itself—the conspiracy theorist’s will to interpret follows the discovery of the conspiracy and organizes the conspiracy theorist’s narrative of history.34 What began as a textual effect, the way in which a single detail’s signiﬁcance was understood, has become a transcendent organizing principle; what began as that which is presumptively searched for, the traces of conspiracy, has become that transcendent thing which drives the search itself. Interpretation may be endless, but it is organized—indeed, controlled—by the very particular logic of conspiracy. INTERPRETIVE DESIRE’S IDEOLOGY

The endless, circular search (the connections) and the thing that never arrives (the ﬁnal order that is never revealed) represent a desire to ﬁnd, understand, and represent the totality of social relations. Conspiracy theory clearly wants something: it is a never-ending practice that combs the past and the present for evidence of some transcendent, all-explanatory thing. Denying the ambiguities of the past, and the complexities and contingencies of the present, conspiracy theory wants to enjoy the pleasure of control, of ﬁnding the correct answer to the riddle of power, of

108

|

FINDING THE PLOT

mastering its desire of political order.35 If the subject does not know what it wants, is this because of some ideological misrecognition by the conspiracy theorist, or is it the result of some top-down manipulation by a state apparatus? If conspiracy theory is a symptom of an ideological desire, then how is this conception of “desire” any different from Hostadter’s notion of paranoia? A body of Marxist cultural theory considers the problem of ideology in this context. Carl Freedman, for example, argues that interpretive and narrative paranoia, as exempliﬁed in the work of Philip K. Dick, is “the normative subjectivity of capitalist society.” Freedman identiﬁes commodity fetishism, the ongoing overinterpretation of the surplus value of objects, and monopoly capitalism, the historical agent that must continue to hide itself behind seemingly fair and open political and economic structures, as ideological apparatuses that interpellate us as paranoid subjects. In other words, paranoiac desire, rather than a pathological disposition toward seeing things that are not there, is a “normal” desire within the highly structured economic and cultural regime of capitalism.36 Fredric Jameson further characterizes this “normal” desire as a utopian (albeit ideological) drive to undertake a “cognitive mapping” of totality, an interpretive practice that can represent the articulation of local experience to the global system of “late” capitalism. Cinematic conspiracy narratives such as The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, he argues, are an “unconscious, collective effort at trying to ﬁgure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality.”37 Similarly, the “inexhaustible production” of political conspiracy theories (the Kennedy assassination, the secret power of Jewish bankers, etc.) is “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded ﬁgure of the total logic of late capitalism, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.”38 Jameson and Freedman would invert the order assumed by Hofstadter and others by asserting that the seemingly “pathological” is in fact a structured, “normal” response to postmodern bureaucratic and late capitalist order, and a conspiratorial framework represents a subject’s ideological, but (at least for Jameson) utopian, desire to understand and place itself within a vast and destructive system.

FINDING THE PLOT

|

109

Conspiracy theory does fetishize and totalize, but these are only parts of its interpretive practices, aspects of its desire to ﬁnd the evidence and meaning of the conspiracy it tracks. If fantasy, as Žižek writes, “is a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance,” conspiracy theory masks the impossibility of the perfectly transparent, legitimate state it longs for in its study of the opaque, corrupt state it ﬁnds.39 Displacing the fears of this impossibility onto fears of conspiracy, condensing these fears into notions of murderous, licentious presidents and secretive cabals, the conspiracy theorist enjoys his symptom, indulging in its practice, reveling in its excess, never fully reaching the fulﬁllment of desire lest he be confronted with the realization that the notion of a willful, secretive conspiracy by an elite cabal is not quite right. But to say something is wrong, or ideological, is not to label it pathological—indeed, Žižek identiﬁes fantasy as a social phenomenon as well as a psychoanalytical one, while Jameson’s argument, too, rests on the notion that conspiracy theorists’ cognitive mapping is an ideological strategy for understanding the social world in which the subject ﬁnds himself rather than a pathological response to it. The conspiracy theorist may be no closer to interpreting political phenomena correctly by connecting them within a rigid framework than the average citizen who views such phenomena as a series of unconnected events or who willfully remains ignorant of the political world in which she lives. This does not mean, however, that the conspiracy theorist’s interpretative efforts are necessarily pathological—or that they don’t yield important insights unavailable to the “normal” political subjects who are fully invested in the current social and political order. Indeed, domination, manipulation, and corruption are integral to the history of the modern state, and the simple dismissal of conspiratorial fears as pathological and paranoid erases the human, economic, and environmental disasters that go unrecognized and unremembered. The goal should be not to label the symptom a pathology but to recognize and identify the utopian desires bound within it and, to the extent possible, move “semiosic discovery toward the public good.”40 Vilifying Clinton as a monster or as the public representative of an elite cabal masks his role within systems of power and governance that are the grounds for real, not fantastic, political contest. Only by recognizing the semiotic excess and lack of political signiﬁcance represented in conspiracy theory can we begin to understand its implications.

110

|

FINDING THE PLOT

Conspiracy Theory as Production

Conspiracy theory’s interpretive desire produces more than meaning. Conspiracy theorists’ interpretation moves—back in time, around and through events, collecting details, surrounding the conspiracy and leashing it to a long and growing signifying chain. Conspiracy theory may not know what it ultimately wants, but it knows what it wants for the moment: to keep moving, to keep desiring. This movement— ideological and symptomatic though it may be—is productive, producing not only a circular, seemingly endless desire and a proliferation of conspiracy-related texts, but also affective intensities and ﬂows, selfgenerating and forever ﬂying through space and time. It produces what one observer has called the “conspiracy rush,” the affective engagement that comes from sensing conspiracy’s existence.41 Conspiracy’s affective production is distinct from and in addition to its desire. Lawrence Grossberg distinguishes between affect and desire: “Libidinal affect (or desire in psychoanalytic terms) is always focused on an object (whether real or imaginary), while nonlibidinal affect (affect for short) is always dispersed into the entire context of daily life. Desire can be satisﬁed, if only temporarily and mistakenly, while affect can only be realized.”42 The realization of conspiracy theory’s affect occurs in its assemblage of ideas, elements, and practices. Clinton was more than simply a president to chronicle in The Clinton Chronicles; for the committed conspiracy theorist, he was a part of daily life, of the affective chronicle of the conspiracy theorist who found “Clinton” everywhere. “Clinton” produced a multiplicity of texts and practices; the theorist merely found and assembled the conspiratorial Clinton into lists, chronicles, narratives, and ﬁling cabinets. The conspiracy theorist’s interpretive practices thus seem reﬂexive and machine-like, an endless and circular process of interpretation and textual production. In this sense, the process resembles the “regime of signs” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus: All signs are signs of signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signiﬁes but to which other signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network without beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmospheric continuum. It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment plays the role of the ‘signiﬁed,’ but it continually glides beneath the signiﬁer, for which it serves only as a medium or wall: the speciﬁc forms of all contents dissolve in it.43

FINDING THE PLOT

|

111

Tearing signs away from the seemingly secure chains of dominant historical and news accounts, conspiracy theory re-chains them to a new signiﬁer, while conspiracy reigns as the master signiﬁer. Professor Quigley of Georgetown becomes “Quigley,” court scribe of the conspiracy; he is transformed in the process, produced as something different, something of greater signiﬁcance in his relation to world-historical, conspiratorial signs than an obscure, deceased professor. Clinton’s actions as president appeared scattered, largely concerned with managing a fractious country and fragile plurality of supporters; viewed as conspiracy, however, his actions take on a unitary cast, and the engaged conspiracy theorist can decode what might otherwise appear to be a complex historical moment by recoding Clinton’s presidential efforts within the superpower of conspiracy.44 Imagine this process, with Deleuze and Guattari, as an all-in investment strategy—the regime of signs is “inﬁnite debt, to which one is simultaneously debtor and creditor.”45 To engage in this practice is to leverage the entirety of one’s energy and affect in the hopes that it will pay back more in meaning than the original investment. “Clinton,” and the forces he represented, produced an embarrassment of riches; like the conspiracy that drives any such theory, Clinton was the impossible cause of so many things. In this way, conspiracy theory is like capital, creatively destroying the world of political signs, identifying new and depleting old resources (from one Bush to another; from one Clinton to another), and building new signs and chains in an endless process of interpretation.46 Interpretive desire, then, is matched by the production in which this desire engages. Deleuze and Guattari link the despot-god regime of signs to their distinctive notion of desire, which they describe as a machine, a “desiring-production,” an immanent factory of ﬂows and intensities.47 When he interprets, the conspiracy theorist produces the desire for more interpretation, for the further connection of more connections; like the briocleur, he shows “an indifference toward the act of producing and toward the product, toward the set of instruments to be used and toward the over-all result to be achieved.” His drive is toward “continually producing production.”48 As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “desire is an actualization, a series of practices, bringing things together and separating them, making machines, making reality.”49 Lloyd Cutler was right to be concerned about the conspiracy industry surrounding Clinton. With its semilegitimate mouthpieces (Rush Limbaugh, the

112

|

FINDING THE PLOT

Washington Times, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal) and foundation funding, The Clinton Chronicles showed no sign of abating (and among some will never abate) during Bill’s presidency and more recently during Hillary’s political career, spinning new theories and revelations almost daily.50 Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum wonderfully represents the effects of conspiracy theory’s affective engagement and interpretation, which in his work on semiotic theory Eco has called “overinterpretation.” The novel relates the story of three friends in present-day Milan who create a ﬁctional metaphysical conspiracy concerning a mélange of “secret societies” (including Rosicrucians, Knights Templar, and the Freemasons), which is in turn found, believed in, and made real by a secret group of occultists (“the diabolicals”). What begins as a clever intellectual game of using analogies, similarities, and ﬁctional associations between historical ﬁgures in order to make “paranoid” connections—but making them “knowingly,” deliberately misreading details in creating the transcendent “truth” of spiritual secrets and powerful hidden orders—becomes through the diabolical’s efforts a fully assembled “plan” that exceeds its creators, that becomes something more than a game.51 Here, conspiracy theory has real effects, not only in terms of the “fun” of cleverly devising texts open and suggestive enough to be interpreted in particular ways, but in the very real violence perpetrated by the diabolicals as a result of these games. Interpretation is dangerous: as the narrator Casaubon declares, “Now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth” (Foucault’s Pendulum, 81). Like the Tristero postal conspiracy that seems ready to consume Oedipa Maas at the end of The Crying of Lot 49, the interpretive effects of Foucault’s Pendulum are at once humorous and frightening, enervating and deadly. Casaubon and friends create the terms and conditions of their own “paranoia,” which seems ready, as the novel closes, to claim them all as victims. Constructing the “Plan”—or, more generally, interpreting conspiracy—is, as C. W. Spinks argues, an example of what Charles Sanders Peirce called “abduction,” or “hypothesis:”52 Hypothesis substitutes, for a complicated tangle of predicates attached to one subject, a single conception. Now, there is a

FINDING THE PLOT

|

113

particular sensation belonging to the act of thinking that each of these predicates inheres in the subject. In hypothetic inference this complicated feeling so produced is replaced by a single feeling of greater intensity, that belonging to the act of thinking the hypothetic conclusion. . . . Thus, the various sounds made by the instruments of an orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion, quite distinct from the sounds themselves.53

Reducing the complex to a singularity creates a new text (“a single conception” different from “the sounds themselves”) and affective sensations (“a single feeling of greater intensity,” “a peculiar musical emotion”) from a set of physical stimuli (the “various sounds” that “strike upon the ear”). In A Theory of Semiotics, Eco explains that Peirce’s concept of abduction is “the idea that the hearer, hearing music, grasps something more than the single ‘meaning’ of each sound. . . . The hypothetical movement is fulﬁlled when a new sense (a new combinational quality) is assigned to every sound, inasmuch as they compose the new contextual meaning of the musical piece.”54 Abduction is the process of interpreting unexplained events or results by ﬁguring out a law that can explain them, a process of ﬁguring out that often, in the case of great scientiﬁc discoveries, requires imaginative or analogical steps. In the process of abduction, the text to be interpreted contains a “secret code” of the law but requires an inventive or at least quite dynamic and productive interpretive act to identify and decipher the explanatory law.55 On ﬁrst glance, the production of “conspiracy” from a set of speculations about the connections between historical facts and current events is a form of abduction: the assemblage of fragments of signs into a new piece, a semiotic process producing a feeling of “greater intensity” in its discovery of meaning. Yet, conspiracy theory would seem to differ from these deﬁnitions and descriptions—if not in kind, then in degree. Casaubon et al.’s “Plan” is a production of disparate elements elegantly and intelligently articulated to compose a “new sense,” but it is more a literal abduction or kidnapping of a series of historical signs and relatively open texts than the more polite “borrowing” for analogical purposes or “ﬁnding” of a law that Peirce describes.56 Conspiracy theory’s interpretation, in other words, physically wrests the sign, tearing it from its context and squeezing it into a new, apparently secure meaning. This more closely resembles the Hermetic tradition of interpretation,

114

|

FINDING THE PLOT

where, Eco writes elsewhere, “As long as some kind of relationship can be established, the criterion does not matter. Once the mechanism of analogy has been set in motion there is no guarantee it will stop.”57 Overwhelmed by an “excess of wonder,”58 the Hermetic tradition is based on the principles of universal analogy and sympathy, according to which every item of the furniture of the world is linked to every other element (or to many) of this sublunar world and to every element (or to many) of the superior world by means of similitudes or resemblances. It is through similitudes that the otherwise occult parenthood between things is manifested and every sublunar body bears the traces of that parenthood impressed on it as a signature.59

In place of the worldly or “sublunar,” the conspiracy theorist ponders the seemingly superﬁcial or semantic meaning of everyday news accounts and of the connections between them; in place of the “superior” world, the conspiracy of power places its signature on these everyday events, and the conspiracy theorist’s interpretation unmasks these meanings and connections. Thus, the “Clinton Death List,” composed from thorough scourings of obituaries (reported and unreported), articulates a “new” recognition of its object, conspiracy, kidnapping individual pieces and integrating them within a new, startlingly full composition. The conspiracy grows, it expands, it transforms from a list into a complex diagram, a monstrous, multilayered being threatening to devour the nation. The “superior” threatens to overcome the “sublunar,” to eradicate its identity in a perverse reversal of the basis of the Hermetic interpretive drive. More than this insight, reading Foucault’s Pendulum yields a thoroughly pleasurable experience. The reader recognizes both the intense and dangerous attachment of the “diabolicals” to their hermeneutical practice and the great fun of Casaubon and his friends in “creating” the analogies and mysteries on which the diabolicals obsess. I will return to this sense of pleasure in chapter 5’s discussion of conspiracy theory as play, but for now consider the game-like quality of this engagement. As opposed to a mystery that would gradually pare down the list of suspects and motives as it progresses, Foucault’s Pendulum and the “Plan” engage in vast proliferations of ideas and connections that themselves produce more ideas and connections. Similarly, the process of abduction is at once frightening to the conspiracy theorist (something must

FINDING THE PLOT

|

115

be done!) and a source of enjoyment (there is much to do!). Interpreting conspiracy constantly requires attention and effort while it rewards its practitioner with provisional and incomplete answers but excitement that builds with each deferral. In Georg Simmel’s lovely phrase, the fascination of the secret works “to intensify the unknown through imagination.”60 Interpreting the world to unveil conspiracy’s secrets, the theorist gains a sense of exception and privilege. This regime of signs offers a truly great deal to its subjects. A Property Right in Conspiracy’s Products?

If conspiracy theory desires and produces something, what becomes of its products? What does the producer of conspiracy theory actually get? If recent events are any indication, it gets a property right, albeit a very limited one, in not only the products of his interpretation but in the status of theorist itself. Consider, for instance, the book Report from Iron Mountain, whose current status seems to resemble nothing less than the “Plan” come to life.61 Originally conceived by a small group of leftists in the 1960s as a satire of the dreary reports of establishment, Vietnam War–era think tanks and government commissions, the “report” purported to be a secret document by a “Special Study Group” arguing that war was a necessary part of modern societies and must be continued no matter the possibility of establishing peace. Accordingly, the report asserted, the maintenance of American and international order required continual military engagement, an aggressive, global police force, and the possible substitution of false threats such as pollution and extraterrestrials during occasional lulls in conﬂict. Although a hoax, the document was published by Dial Press in 1967 without the name of its author, Leonard C. Lewin. It proved oddly successful, aided by a pseudonymous book review in the Washington Post by economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who knew of the report’s actual origins. As numerous news reports and book reviews noted upon the book’s 1996 rerelease, Patriots and militia members as well as less aligned conspiracy theorists had identiﬁed the book as evidence of the emergence of the New World Order, presuming that its commercial publication was a mistake or intended—perhaps like Carroll Quigley’s work—to inform the public of the benign nature of the conspiratorial project.62 The book’s re-release had in fact been prompted by its wide dissemination on the Internet, where the assumption that it was an actual government

116

|

FINDING THE PLOT

document that had somehow been leaked led to the mistaken belief that it was in the public domain. It was, after all, putatively a government document, and such works are not generally subject to copyright laws. Stripped of its historical context and physical anchoring on the page, it had been distributed via e-mail and was available on the World Wide Web to any curious party; stripped of its status as private property, it became part of the domain of a particular “public.” The report was no longer an implausible hoax intended to send up insipid and immoral bureaucratic discourse; it had instead become evidence of conspiracy and an element of numerous conspiracy theories, thus productive of new texts and practices. In an attempt to stop this process, Lewin imposed both authorship and ownership by telling the world of the document’s origins, and by contracting with the commercial publisher Simon and Schuster to re-publish the book and stop all unauthorized distribution of it. As Lewin told the New York Times, “The nutties out there are told by their leaders—who claim to have special knowledge— that this is a real government document because it ﬁts how they view the Government: wicked. . . . What this is is a copyright violation.”63 Alas for Levin, who has since passed away, violations continue on webpages that are easily accessible through a Google search, and Iron Mountain continues to be viewed as evidence of a real conspiracy.64 If, as this chapter has argued, interpretation is one of the key practices in conspiracy theory, then conspiracy theory considers control over political information’s meaning and circulation to be at the core of the ongoing contest over power. The details that Lewin and his coauthors “created” were precisely the details that conspiracy theorists seek and fetishize, and on which their interpretive frameworks depend. Lewin objected to the transformation of his ﬁctional, satirical text into a nonﬁctional, serious one that signiﬁes in ways he intended to mock. Conspiracy theorists “stole” these ﬁctional signs of power and placed them in the new contexts of their interpretive chains, in the process rewriting Lewin’s ﬁction into fact and repositioning his details into the broader conspiracy narratives that they construct. Lewin hoped in vain for the impossible—to retain control over the information he put in circulation and keep it from the interpretive desire and machinery of conspiracy theorists. Then ﬁrst lady Hillary Clinton’s claims about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” also demonstrate the contest over conspiracy, although

FINDING THE PLOT

|

117

rather than a struggle over the ownership of information, she was concerned with her status as both the object of conspiracy theory and as a conspiracy theorist herself. She leveled her conspiracy charge against Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation into President Clinton’s then-alleged relationship and dealings with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, alleging that the cabal intended to destroy her husband’s presidency.65 Those demonizing the president were crazed, secretive political operatives who saw conspiracy everywhere—and, in their positions of power within Starr’s putatively legal investigation, constituted a conspiracy that the Clintons were able to uncover. Mrs. Clinton’s exchange with an interviewer for The Today Show is illustrative of this strange world of counterconspiracies: Q.

You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle and that one side or the other is going down here.

A.

Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this. They have popped up in other settings. . . . The great story here for anybody willing to ﬁnd it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband.66

The ﬁrst lady had uncovered the plot, ﬁnding the details of collaboration and thereby turning the investigation around from The Clinton Chronicles to the chronicles of the individuals and groups producing them. If Iron Mountain demonstrates the tenuous property right in the detail, then Mrs. Clinton’s argument demonstrates the equally tenuous right in the status of conspiracy theorist. In this regime of political signs, the status of interpreter and interpreted is never secure. “Clinton” the conspiracy begets Hillary Clinton the conspiracy theorist. For the unafﬁliated viewer at home, they are all conspiracy theorists now; for anyone involved in partisan politics during the Clinton era, there was evidence of conspiracy everywhere you looked. Placing herself and her husband at the center of a narrative in which they are victimized by a conservative cabal (“the great story here for anybody willing to ﬁnd it”), Clinton nicely invoked the fact that interpreting conspiracy is inextricably bound to story-telling, to the dramatic and cinematic sweep that the specter of a vast conspiracy seems to conjure. This narrative core of conspiracy is the subject of the next chapter.

4 Uncovering the Plot Conspiracy Theory as Narrative

Mr. Stone defended himself on grounds of narrative efﬁciency and dramatic coherence. —From a report of a public panel discussion of the ﬁlm JFK, March 1992.1

F

ew recent ﬁlms have faced the voluminous and vituperative criticism that met the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK in 1991. If a conspiracy theory concerning the assassination of an American president can become a top-grossing ﬁlm produced by a major Hollywood studio, ﬁlm reviewers, op-ed columnists, and former and current government ofﬁcials explicitly asked, what troubled future lies ahead for the political education and beliefs of American citizens? The ﬁlm’s commercial success was worrying enough, but what does that success say about Americans’ ability to distinguish the real from ﬁction? For some commentators, JFK ’s popular appeal and the confusion it created over the relationship between representation and the real was the fault of the contemporary news industry, which, seen through the lens of their own misplaced nostalgia for a mythical golden age of the American press, had lately become too little attached to truth and too much attached to commerce.2 For others, the ﬁlm’s success was the fault of the “video age,” wherein people, and particularly children and adolescents, “believe uncritically what they see” (as opposed, presumably, to other ages, other technologies, and the enhanced critical faculties of other senses).3 Common to all of the criticism was its censure of Stone, the technically talented auteur with the politics and historical sense of a drugaddled 1960s throwback. It was Stone, after all, who had the Hollywood 118

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

119

reputation and ﬁnancial backing to get such a ﬁlm made, and it was Stone who could shape the shaggy-dog tale of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation into a stirring Capra-esque story that tapped into public cynicism and doubts about the conclusions of the Warren Commission.4 Indeed, it is the narrative that Stone called “efﬁcient” and seemingly “coherent” that helps both to explain JFK ’s success and its perceived threat to American political stability and cultural sanity, and to illustrate a central aspect of conspiracy theory’s place in contemporary American culture. All of JFK ’s re-creations, fancy editing techniques, leaps of faith, and conjectures presented as accepted facts would have been meaningless (indeed, they are common fare in the virtually countless written and visual texts that constitute the corpus of Kennedy assassination literature) had the ﬁlm not presented a gripping, dramatic story.5 Such a story is, ultimately, at the heart of conspiracy theory, whether the narrative appears in mainstream Hollywood ﬁlms such as JFK, the novels of latter-day pulp novelists such as Robert Ludlum, or the putatively nonﬁction accounts of conspiracy theorists describing “real” conspiracies. The conspiracy narrative is compelling in its rapid, global movement, its focus on the actions of both the perpetrators of the evil conspiracy and the defenders of the moral order, and its attempt to explain a wide range of seemingly disparate past and present events and structures within a relatively coherent framework. “Conspiracy” is not a convention of Hollywood ﬁlm production because of ﬁlmmakers’ antiestablishment bias or commercial cynicism (for which New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal condemned both JFK and Tim Robbins’s ﬁctional political biography Bob Roberts [1992]);6 rather, it is a generic, stock narrative whose dynamic and trajectory allow it to be both a shorthand and a culturally and politically compelling framework for ﬁlmmakers, conspiracy theorists, and audiences alike.7 Hollywood is drawn to its form while cultural and political commentators condemn its content. As a narrative form, conspiracy circulates in contemporary culture in both history and ﬁction. Numerous conspiracy-based novels, feature ﬁlms, and television series include in their ﬁctional thrillers real people, places, and events, while putatively nonﬁction work of actual conspiracy theorists typically conjures up unproven, often quite fanciful narratives

120

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

to explain real historical developments. JFK exempliﬁes this linkage by presenting a speculative and, in some respects, clearly ﬁctional account of the assassination. Similarly, the television drama series The X-Files, which during its run on the Fox network featured an ongoing narrative concerning the efforts of a multinational alliance of governments to keep secret the history of human contact with extraterrestrial creatures, often included episodic story lines that were patterned after actual events. In this sense, the conspiracy narrative is a melding of fact and ﬁction, and attempts to tell a particular kind of story about the injustice of present conditions through reference to an historical wrong turn initiated by a grand, conspiratorial crime that is ongoing. Thus, most conspiracy narratives by deﬁnition oppose, or at least question, the current distribution of power. Although I use a single term, “narrative,” to analyze both ﬁctional and putatively nonﬁctional texts, I don’t intend to assert that history is the formal and epistemological equivalent to ﬁction, that history is simply text or discourse, or that conspiracy theory is merely one narrative interpretation of history among a multitude of other, equally valid ones. On the other hand, neither am I arguing that an absolute, objective, historical truth exists, whose clear light only illuminates the work of careful, “rational” scholars, and that this truth necessarily eludes those who employ the illegitimate explanations and methodologies of conspiracy theory. Instead, following Fredric Jameson, I begin with the assertion that the past “is not a text, for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational; what can be added, however, is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization.”8 What Jameson calls “retextualization” is a narrative telling, an articulation in a contradictory, allegorical fashion of “our collective thinking and fantasies about history and reality.”9 Narratives at their core are an organization of data, and composing, reading, or watching them is a perceptual activity—a “way of organizing spatial and temporal data into a cause–effect chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end that embodies a judgment about the nature of the events as well as demonstrates how it is possible to know, and hence to narrate, the events.”10 In addition, narratives are themselves bound by the context in which they are produced and received—we understand the past differently at different times, in the changing relationship

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

121

between the past as it recedes and our ever-changing present (which is itself becoming past as we experience it). Conspiracy theory, then, tells stories about the past, present, and future, and it presents an argument in narrative form for a contemporary audience about how power works. This chapter describes and analyzes conspiracy theory’s narrative process and the framework that conspiracy narratives share. Stone’s “efﬁciencies” and “coherence” appear throughout conspiracy literature, alongside, paradoxically, that literature’s tendency to excess and incoherence. Conspiracy’s incessant integrative operations, upon which Stone relies to defend himself, are both necessary and continually threatened by conspiracy’s complexity.11 Conspiracy theory’s interpretive practices, as we saw in the previous chapter, perform a similar double movement, at once overproducing meaning and attempting to ﬁt its products within a coherent frame. In this chapter, I focus on three of the most important aspects of what I call the “classical” conspiracy narrative: the role of individual agency within a particular historical situation, as embodied in the protagonist who ﬁnds, resists, and destroys (or leads the way to destroying) a conspiracy; the dynamic, or what I will term the speed and velocity, of the conspiracy narrative, its tendency toward a spiraling and dazzling ﬂow of information about a global array of people, institutions, and events; and the attempt to contain the narrative’s troubling historical situation and incessant movement within a difﬁcult and often disturbing resolution. To illustrate these characteristics, I use numerous examples but provide more extensive analyses of three conspiracy narratives, each produced in a different medium: the ﬁlm JFK, to which I refer throughout the ﬁrst part of the chapter; the television series The X-Files; and the popular nonﬁction conspiracy tract A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File. The ﬁnal section discusses those texts that seek selfconsciously to subvert the structures and tensions of the conspiracy narrative, and uses as an example Craig Baldwin’s experimental ﬁlm Tribulation 99 (1991). My argument is that conspiracy attempts to map, in narrative form, the trajectories and effects of power; yet, it not only does so in a simplistic, limited way, but also continually threatens to unravel and leave unsettled the resolution to the question of power that it attempts to answer. In attempting to uncover the plot, the conspiracy narrative reveals a longing for closure and resolution that its formal resources cannot satisfy.

122

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

The Classical Conspiracy Narrative

In this chapter, I describe and analyze what I call the classical conspiracy narrative, in which the particular conventions of the conspiracy narrative are put to use in the act of popular storytelling.12 I am using “classical” in this context to refer to the formal structures and system of production and distribution that constitute the framework within which conventional conspiracy narratives are produced. The classical narrative attempts to unify the seemingly disparate, globally signiﬁcant elements and events on which conspiracy theory focuses within a singular plot, doing so through the traditional logic of conventional popular narratives. These conventions include “causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered—that is, personal or psychological—causality is the armature of the classical story.”13 The classical narrative’s central point of identiﬁcation is a character who is able to effect change in himself/herself and in the world, and who, in so doing, brings about a narrative resolution that appears to be a reasonably happy ending. The narrative’s resolution returns that which had been either threatened or captured by the conspiracy (often the nation or all of humanity) to a relatively secure, stable position free from the centralized power of the conspiracy. It also enables the protagonist to resolve whatever personal crises established the original motivations that led to or were caused by his or her ﬁnding the conspiracy. I will delaying discussing those experimental and parodic narratives that actively seek to subvert these conventions until the end of this chapter, but as the examples in this section illustrate, even seemingly conventional narratives problematize the structures of the conspiracy narrative in their tendency to careen toward incoherence and in the difﬁculty they face in resolving the excesses of their narrative elements. I will use the term “classical” interchangeably for both ﬁction and putatively non-ﬁctional accounts of conspiracy. With respect to ﬁctional narratives, conspiracy does not, at present, constitute a distinct genre or style. It is neither a developed marketing category nor a cultural construct that circulates among producers and audiences of either ﬁlm or popular novels in the same way that the thriller, mystery, and spy genres (themselves having fairly ﬂuid boundaries) constitute organizing labels under which written and visual texts are produced, advertised, bought, and sold. Fictional narratives that feature real or imagined conspiracies

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

123

tend to be more prevalent in certain existing genres (especially thrillers), but they are not essential to them.14 Instead, conspiracy emerges across a limited number of related ﬁction genres as a recurring explanatory and organizational logic, playing an integral role in the cause and effect that propel a narrative forward, and enabling a text to develop a particular set of challenges for the central protagonist.15 Like the genres of which it is a non-necessary element, “conspiracy” works within what Stephen Neale has called a system of “regulated difference” in which individual texts, and the conspiracies represented in those texts, share basic narrative structures and stylistic elements even though they differ in detail.16 Nonﬁctional narratives employ a conventional narrative and causal structure for their description of the “real” of history, organizing the past to produce what Roland Barthes called the “reality effect,” sheltering the interpretive and narrative work of composition—the very integration of disparate elements that ﬁctional conspiracy narratives perform—behind the declaration that this conspiracy happened—and is happening still.17 Conspiracy constitutes a model of historical storytelling that allows a narrative assemblage of details from the past to be comprehensible and to appear real and true, notwithstanding the resistance posed by other competing narratives of the same past, and even by the details themselves.18 If “classical” describes the general contours of the typical conspiracy narrative, Hayden White’s schematic discussion of modes of historical interpretation provides a more speciﬁc, “tropological” description of the type of narrative historical interpretation that conspiracy theory employs. Conspiracy theory is an explicitly historical argument asserting that some individual or group in the recent or remote past has secretly seized power by illicit means. One of the four different tropes of historical interpretation that White delineates is the “mechanistic” explanation, which reduces historical data “to the status of general functions of general laws of cause and effect that are universally operative throughout all of history.” The key illustrative example White uses is Marx’s interpretation of history, which attempts to delineate an ultimate cause for the effects of human history and to explain individual events with respect to their ultimate cause.19 The signiﬁcance of this explanation for Marxism is explicitly political—having derived the cause of human misery, Marx’s historical interpretation is intended to lead to a radical transformation of present conditions. But Marx’s historiography

124

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

also offers an explicit narrative: its mechanistic movement presents a tragic emplotment in which humanity’s attempts “to construct a viable human community are continually frustrated by the laws that govern history.” At the same time—and this is clearly its radical political component—Marxism implies the hope for a comic resolution in which the current exploitative structure of social relations “will be dissolved and a genuine community . . . will be constituted as [humanity’s] true historic destiny.”20 A tragic present, coupled with the possibility for a comic future resolution, is central to conspiracy theory’s mode of interpretation and politics, and is especially salient in its delineation of humanity’s continual frustration by one or a series of ongoing, all-powerful conspiracies.21 Classical conspiracy narratives, ﬁctional and nonﬁctional alike, ultimately attempt to resolve this frustration in a different way from Marxism’s call for a mass revolutionary movement to overthrow the ruling political and economic order. In the accounts of “real” conspiracies, resolution occurs through the prospect and process of illumination (that is, ﬁnding evidence and containing the conspiracy within an explanation), whereas in conspiracy ﬁction, the hero or heroes arise triumphant through the ultimate defeat of the conspiracy. The resolution that individual narratives represent or imply enables the imaginary resolution of the conspiratorial crisis through a comic restoration of political order. AGENCY

AND

CONSPIRACY

Virtually every conspiracy narrative turns on a particular moment in which the central character, through investigative skill or by sheer luck, uncovers convincing evidence of a conspiracy. This discovery and the realization that comes with it transform how the character perceives the world, and tend equally to affect the pace and tone of the narrative. I will describe the effect of this “narrative pivot” on the plot’s trajectory and velocity more fully in a later section, but it is sufﬁcient to note here that this is a complete transition for the character. The uncovering of this evidence initiates nothing less than a totalizing conversion, affecting the character’s engagement in the social world and his private life. He becomes alienated from an increasingly defamiliarized political and social order, and his everyday life is suddenly vulnerable to extreme danger and violence. Information has forced on the

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

125

character a cognitive crisis, and every current and past event becomes subject to reinterpretation in light of a changed world. The character must recognize what had been secret to him/her and what remains secret to most of the world: the “truth” of the social world in which he lives. Having glimpsed this essential truth, the protagonist begins the long and arduous task of successfully effecting change on the increasingly vulnerable political and social structures that ﬁnally are visible to him. This is equally true for ﬁctional and non-ﬁctional narratives: in the latter, the narrative pivot occurs at the moment in the writer’s life when the conspiracy reveals itself to him/her, which the author typically describes in what Barthes called the “preformatory opening,” most frequently in a book or article’s introductory comments.22 Just as the pivot allows the ﬁctional character ﬁnally to know and act upon the secret truth, so the pivot allows the historical narrator to begin research and take up the project that results in the narrative he or she is about to present. While demanding effective physical action of the individual (gathering evidence, engaging the conspiratorial enemy in mortal struggle, etc.), this relationship of character to history is largely cognitive. The protagonist collects, sorts, and interprets information, and can only begin to act by identifying and correctly unraveling the pieces of information that remain hidden. Through the interpretive act of conceiving a “proper” history that constitutes an acceptable ﬁnal outcome (that is, the way things were and/or ought to be), the hero inserts himself into the real social and political order presented in the conspiracy narrative. Many central characters in ﬁctional conspiracy narratives are professionals in some kind of knowledge industry: in the conspiracy ﬁlms of the 1970s, the innocent Joe Turner in Three Days of the Condor (1975) played by Robert Redford is a low-level member of the intelligence services, whereas Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men (1976) and Warren Beatty’s character in The Parallax View (1974) are reporters; JFK ’s Jim Garrison is a district attorney who plays the role of detective throughout the ﬁlm; and many of Robert Ludlum’s heroes are current or retired spies or, in The Chancellor Manuscript (1977), a frustrated historian turned novelist. The same is true of famous “real” conspiracy investigators, such as journalist Danny Casolaro (see chapter 5), who claimed to have stumbled onto a secret, “octopus”-like cabal that allegedly murdered him, and Bruce Roberts, author of “The Gemstone

126

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

File” (to be discussed shortly), who allegedly assumed the role of spy in order to research Aristotle Onassis’s supposed takeover of organized crime and the U.S. government. Faced with imposing, omnipotent mysteries, these characters turn their professional or well-developed amateur cognitive expertise toward ﬁnding, exposing, and, ﬁnally, physically challenging conspiracy. In this respect, their typicality distinguishes them from both the spectacular spy (for example, James Bond) and the fetishistically military heroics of “New War” movies and novels of the post–Vietnam War era (ranging from Tom Clancy’s best-sellers to the Rambo ﬁlms and militaristic pulp ﬁction series).23 Their motivation in popular conspiracy narratives tends to be a straightforward, unconﬂicted combination of revenge (often to right a private wrong), nationalism (restoring public order and a nation’s “honor”), and an abstract desire for “truth.” Often, their physical capabilities are inadequate or at least incommensurate with their cognitive abilities and with the forces that their opponents can marshal. Accordingly, the conspiracy narrative foregrounds the cognitive act of interpretation as performed by both protagonist and audience and suggests that the protagonist is able to reestablish his agency—which, like that of everyone else, has been lost to the conspiracy—through cognition.24 Fredric Jameson argues that this representativeness of character demonstrates a breakdown and subsequent “absolute collectivization” of the traditional functions of characters and roles in contemporary cultural forms in general and conspiracy narrative in particular. For Jameson, in the conspiracy narrative there is “no longer an individual victim, but everybody; no longer an individual villain, but an omnipresent network; no longer an individual detective with a speciﬁc brief, but rather someone who blunders into all of this just as anyone might have done.”25 JFK ’s Jim Garrison, patriarchal protector of political and domestic order against an undeﬁned, expansive conspiracy, is exemplary in this regard. He begins investigating the assassination almost by accident, as part of his generalized civic duty to impose justice, to protect “the people” from the patricidal conspirators responsible for the president’s murder. His legal jurisdiction and professional duties as district attorney are similarly heroic, having virtually no limits. He benevolently rules a home ﬁlled with wife, devoted children, and domestic servant, keeping them safe from the homosexual contagion of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) and David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), as well as from the general threats

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

127

posed by the other leading ﬁgures of the New Orleans component of the Kennedy assassination.26 As the ﬁlm progresses, the conspiracy grows and demonstrates an increasing power and ability to kill (adding the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.), and it attempts to bribe its challengers (Garrison is offered a position as a federal judge if he ends his investigation). Meanwhile, as husband, father, and district attorney, Garrison is similarly expansive and fertile, with an ofﬁce swelling with recruits and, as he ﬁnds success in his investigation, a newly passionate relationship with his wife. At once blandly typical and wildly exceptional in these roles, Garrison comes to represent not simply one of the “children of a slain father-leader whose killers still possess the throne,” as he says his climactic closing statement during the Clay Shaw trial, but the singular Son of JFK, a representative of both the crisis and potential of post–Vietnam America. The conspiracy, on the other hand, remains an invisible network, a great collective—the “military-industrial complex,” as a retiring President Eisenhower says in the ﬁlm’s opening credits—that constitutes a parallel order to the one Garrison wishes to uphold. Once the conspiracy is revealed and he is able to perceive the totality of social relations, the conspiracy protagonist’s role is precisely to restore a properly liberal democratic order. The conspiracy has allowed Garrison to glimpse its omniscience and omnipotence. Not incidentally, it has also challenged the separation between public (the law, assassination, political order, his “family” collective at work) and private (biological family, sexuality, home) spheres, and between economic and political order.27 Garrison’s goal, however, is both to restore patriarchal order in his own home after his wife complains that he has abandoned his family, and to smash the dreaded, looming, but invisible “military-industrial complex” sufﬁciently that the individual components of the social order will all resume their proper autonomy. JFK ﬁnds order restored in Garrison’s ﬁnal courtroom explanation of the assassination—but not in the successful conviction of conspirator Clay Shaw, who is acquitted in the ﬁlm’s concession to the historical real. At ﬁlm’s end, Garrison has reestablished control over the public realm of law and in the public space of the courtroom by proving the validity of his theory, as well as in the domestic sphere by reestablishing his position as patriarch. Garrison’s victory, to the extent he achieves one, comes through individual revelation and heroic effort (notwithstanding the assistance of his

128

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

ofﬁce team). The only true collective or movement in conspiracy theory, however, is that of the conspiracy itself, which has secretly appropriated the political and social order.28 The conspiracy narrative thus challenges classical liberal conceptions of the individual political subject. Because conspiracy controls and causes the current state of society and power, conspiracy narratives offer a totalizing representation—everything, they suggest, can be explained and therefore recognized in the protagonist’s struggle against unseen forces, which reveal the entirety of the social and political order normally hidden in classical liberal thought’s understanding of the individual’s relationship to society. This willingness to reveal all, Jameson argues, represents a “utopian” impulse by encouraging the practice of “cognitive mapping,” in which the individual subject attempts to “span or coordinate, to map, by means of conscious and unconscious representation,” the “gap” between his/her own local subject position and the totality of class structures.29 The relationship between the individual and history within the conspiracy narrative is allegorical, Jameson argues, and may “be taken to constitute an unconscious, collective effort at trying to ﬁgure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality.”30 The conspiracy narrative, in other words, is one of the few socially symbolic attempts in contemporary culture to confront and represent the totality of social relations, to reject the ideological divisions among social, economic, and political realms on which a liberal democracy exists. This attempt may be simplistic and wrong—Jameson calls it “the poor person’s mapping in the postmodern age,” and Michael Denning, in an analysis of the British spy novel that utilizes Jameson’s notion of the “political unconscious,” notes that “[i]f [spy novels’] plots often provide mystiﬁed and mendacious maps to the international order, it is perhaps less the fault of the genre than of the culture and society which can only imagine the relations between nations and peoples through the conspiracies of secret agents and spies.”31 But in its attempt to reveal a hidden truth that challenges the alienated social conceptualized within classical liberal thought, the conspiracy represents a utopian desire to reﬂect upon and confront the contradictions and conﬂicts of the contemporary democratic state and capitalism.

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

129

History through a Gemstone: Bruce Roberts and the Gemstone File

In its wide, international circulation over the past three decades, A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File has proved the resilience and continual appeal of its narrative of individual agency and the totality of an international conspiracy. Initially dispersed in 1975 as a photocopy by mail and hand, Skeleton Key has appeared in slightly revised form as an article in the pornographic magazine Hustler, as well as in its original form in books, on the Internet, and as the “Kiwi Gemstone,” a version augmented with speciﬁcs relating the American-focused conspiracy described in Skeleton Key to the political and economic elites of New Zealand. The document is a purported synopsis of more than a thousand pages of handwritten notes attributed to a shadowy ﬁgure named Bruce Roberts, notes that make up the “Gemstone File”; however, a woman named Stephanie Caruana is generally recognized as its “author,” having written and initially distributed the much shorter Skeleton Key as a means of circulating the Gemstone File’s basic thesis as widely as possible after Roberts’s death.32 Further complicating matters is the fact that no one other than Caruana and the renowned, deceased conspiracy theorist Mae Brussell claim to have known Roberts and to have seen the actual thousand pages of the Gemstone File itself.33 Roberts purportedly began gathering the “information” contained in the ﬁle when Howard Hughes’s Hughes Corporation stole his invention of a process for creating synthetic rubies—hence, the title “Gemstone.” According to Roberts/Caruana, Hughes Corporation used the process extensively in the development of its laser-beam research. A victim of the global conspiracy he would uncover, Roberts’s motive in developing the ﬁle was revenge, and he used the gemstones that he could create as a combination totem/payment in trade for information. The basic conspiracy that Roberts describes in the “Gemstone File” and that Caruana summarizes in Skeleton Key is a postwar world controlled by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and an international alliance of organized crime factions. In the complicated, fortythree–year (1932–75) scenario that it covers, Skeleton Key provides the supposedly real story behind favorite topics of conspiracy and nonconspiracy historians alike: the disappearance of Howard Hughes (Onassis had taken over Hughes’s growing U.S. power and inﬂuence by kidnapping him, shooting him full of heroin, and covertly running his businesses); the John F. Kennedy assassination (after father Joseph Kennedy

130

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

arranged for the Maﬁa to play a vital role in his election, Kennedy had begun to adopt policies that went against Onassis’s wishes); Watergate (it was the result of internecine warfare between Richard Nixon, who sought to protect his secret alliance with the mob, and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, a longtime Kennedy friend who wanted information to protect herself against Onassis); the CIA, Fidel Castro, and the Bay of Pigs (Onassis attempted to retake control of the Maﬁarun island and casinos); Chappaquiddick (Ted Kennedy, blackmailed into working with Onassis, murdered Mary Jo Kopechne because she knew too much); and Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (a faked diversion from both the real purpose of the Vietnam War, which was the control of Southeast Asian heroin production, and the public’s questions surrounding the Kennedy and King assassinations). The conspiracy that Skeleton Key presents is thus extraordinarily comprehensive, presenting a uniﬁed picture of mid-1970s conspiracy theories about postwar geopolitics and a horrifyingly complete domination of the world’s political and economic system. A brief but detailed document, Skeleton Key requires careful reading and background knowledge if a reader hopes to understand and follow the trail of often obscure references to names, places, and events. Skeleton Key’s narration emanates from two sources, the original ﬁle of Roberts’s correspondence and Caruana’s summary of them.34 It presents Roberts both as an archetypal conspiracy theorist and a conspiracy narrative protagonist—at once creator, central narrative agent, researcher, and historical interpreter. As Caruana has described him, Roberts was not a passive collector of data from newspapers and other secondhand accounts (she compares him favorably to Mae Brussell and other conspiracy researchers who conduct their research primarily through the collection of documents), but obtained his information “direct from the source, and from his own experience.”35 Roberts was a participant-observer, Caruana argues, part of the milieu of shadowy ﬁgures and secret power in which he purportedly circulated and traded information. For instance, Skeleton Key describes the bar where Roberts apparently spent many evenings, the Drift Inn in San Francisco, as “a CIA–FBI safe-house hangout bar, where Roberts conducted a nightly Gemstone rap, for the beneﬁt of any CIA or FBI [agent] or anyone who wandered in for a beer.”36 Roberts’s work and great heroic acts concern information exclusively; he participates by trading in intelligence,

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

131

and besides his performances in the Drift Inn, his only production is his legendary collection of letters. Although he seems constantly in danger—his car is the victim of a Maﬁa hit-and-run attack, and at the end of Skeleton Key he is dying from the “Brezhnev ﬂu” (a “secret” biological weapon originally introduced by American agents into Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s lymph system)—his only actions are cognitive and communicative: learn more, interpret, circulate the information through letters. Besides his bravery and intelligence, Roberts is one of us—that is, an otherwise ordinary person who learns of, and becomes obsessed by, the trail of conspiracy. That Skeleton Key is written in the form of a chronicle, an unﬁnished arrangement of events by year rather than a more conventional narrative form, adds to the seeming immediacy and authenticity of the information that Roberts has collected. Skeleton Key’s chronicle is made up of informative entries placed next to a year or speciﬁc date, with entries varying in length from one sentence to a multipage, thorough description of the JFK assassination. The selection, arrangement, and descriptive prose, however, project a clear narrative arc and voice. The narrative begins in media res, as Onassis, already a “drug pusher” who “made his ﬁrst million selling Turkish Tobacco (opium) in Argentina,” strikes a deal with Joe Kennedy to ship booze during Prohibition.37 Rife with misspellings, some wrong dates, and breathless, sweeping prose (e.g., “1936–1940: Eugene Meyer buys the Washington Post, to get control of news media. Other Maﬁa buy other papers, broadcasting, T.V., etc. News censorship of all major news goes into effect”),38 Skeleton Key feels as though its author is pausing to write while on the lam from the mob. But its tabloid-like, hard-boiled style (reminiscent of Mickey Spillane and foreshadowing the more recent work of James Ellroy) draws the reader in to its comprehensive narrative through its matter-of-fact revelation of gruesome hidden “truths” and its occasional ﬂash of sarcasm, as well as through its secret, indecipherable code (for example, the inexplicable January 1973 entry “The Yellow Race is not in China—the Yellow Race Dead-Fucks Mary Jo Kopechne”).39 Caruana’s description of the style of the File, and its inﬂuence on Skeleton Key, are signiﬁcant in this regard: Roberts was not only a mental giant and powerful writer, but also a sort of poet. Reading his letters was like reading a history written by James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake period. All of historic time (that is, the threads that Roberts was interested in) tended to be jumbled

132

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

together in paragraph-long sentences. Some of my “chronologizing” consisted of bits and phrases out of these sentences, and putting them under appropriate dates—sometimes years apart. I stuck to Roberts’s own words and phrases as much as I could, since I felt that any interpretation I might make of what might be a “poetic” expression on his part, might well be wrong.40

Unfortunately for Roberts, his great but unseen modernist historical account has been stripped to its barest narrative essentials in Skeleton Key, with mere hints at the style, scope, and detail of the promised mother lode of the mythical thousand-page ﬁle.41 Ultimately, what emerges from Skeleton Key is the forced insertion of Roberts, as representative of the betrayed America citizenry, into the political and social order controlled by Aristotle Onassis and all of the other “thieves at the top”42 that Skeleton Key breathlessly describes. Gathering and interpreting information, the Roberts described in Skeleton Key is able to glimpse the totality of his historical moment. Although Skeleton Key’s narrative already seems comprehensive, it is inﬁnitely expandable: there is no event in the postwar world that is not already, or cannot be, included in this story. But Roberts, in his secret “File,” and Caruana, in her well-circulated Skeleton Key, can do little more than describe and circulate this description as best they can. The only measure of revenge that Roberts has gained, and the only resolution Skeleton Key’s narrative seems to reach, is in naming and encompassing the conspiracy. The very glimpse that Roberts claims to have gotten of the conspiracy, and the description that he made of it and that Caruana then edited and transmitted, constitute him as a tragic but heroic ﬁgure spreading his revelatory gemstones to an ignorant world. CONSPIRACY

AND

NARRATIVE MOVEMENT

A condensed chronicle of twentieth-century geopolitics, Skeleton Key moves at a bewildering pace across historical events and an international theater of action. As with most conspiracy theories, reading Skeleton Key requires a map and a cast of characters in order to follow Caruana’s (and Roberts’s) frequent leaps in location and among elite ﬁgures the document claims to encompass. Fictional and nonﬁctional conspiracy narratives present the secret order they expose at a disconcerting, often incoherent pace, disrupting conventional notions of both time and space through their rapid movement.

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

133

The narrative’s dynamic progress emanates from a central paradox at its core. Conspiracy is at once explicable as a conﬂict between a central but secret power and an unsuspecting public, and an incredibly complex phenomenon that requires great skill and expertise to ﬁnd and explain. Indeed, this paradox is at work in the name itself: as a conspiracy theory, it is a simpliﬁcation of a presumptively “complex” reality; but as a conspiracy theory, it is a labyrinthine explanation of that which could be, and often is, more easily explained another way. Hence, JFK is dismissed both for its simplistic depiction of an all-powerful “military-industrial complex” and for its convoluted attempt to disprove the “simpler” and more “logical” explanation of the lone killer Lee Harvey Oswald. The conspiracy Garrison uncovers appears to be the result of random causes, but it is in fact the result of a quite simple explanation that begins to surface as the narrative progresses from bewildering, frightening incoherence to even more frightening unity. This movement is itself bound to the interpretive desire discussed in the previous chapter. Like the conspiracy theorist, the protagonist and reader/viewer of the conspiracy narrative are propelled forward by the desire to make sense of the historical agent behind the events. Peter Brooks has described the process of “reading for the plot” as a form of desire “that carries us forward, onward, through the text. Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signiﬁcation.”43 The narrative movement that I describe here shares with conspiracy theory’s interpretive desire a dynamic of signiﬁcation that progresses by integrating within a singular plot disparate events that occur across vast temporal and geographic horizons. Speed and Velocity in Conspiracy Narratives

One aspect of the conspiracy narrative’s representation of this movement is what Gérard Genette has termed the “speed” of narrative, “the relationship between a duration (that of a story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years) and a length (that of the text, measured in lines and in pages).”44 A narrative that moves at a fast speed will use quick depictions of a multiplicity of events in brief scenes encompassing a few pages or terse scenes, while long descriptions of places and characters, dense dialogue, and extended cinematic tracking shots that set a mood or depict a location in great detail exemplify

134

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

a slower narrative pace. In ﬁctional and nonﬁctional conspiracy narratives, presented in both written and visual form, variations in speed establish a certain rhythm, and the narrative typically moves faster as the protagonist approaches, exposes, and foils the conspiracy. In addition to narrative “speed,” I will use the term narrative “velocity” to refer to the geographic, geopolitical, and cognitive aspects of the conspiracy narrative’s movement. The narrative’s dazzling representation of and in time is matched by its representation of the conspiracy’s and the protagonist’s physical and cognitive movement through historical space. An all-encompassing conspiracy is always already (almost) everywhere, always already knows (almost) everything, and has effects everywhere while appearing nowhere. The protagonist, on the other hand, must continually move in order to collect necessary information or rely on numerous, scattered sources about the conspiracy and its effects. The ﬁctional conspiracy narrative maps the protagonist’s trajectory across the political, spatial, and social order of conspiracy, while the nonﬁctional narrative plots the points of conspiracy’s power and appearances.45 The physical and cognitive movement of the protagonist’s progress and the conspiracy theorist’s work, necessarily both global and increasingly rapid as the narrative progresses and increases in speed, is what I mean by “velocity.” The conspiracy narrative’s velocity is further complicated by the degree to which the conspiracy has achieved what Paul Virilio has called a “state of emergency” by negating space and reducing distance. In a state run by conspiracy, the conspiracy is deﬁned not by its singular position but by its ability to move across space, immediately and virtually unnoticed; in Virilio’s words, “the strategic value of the non-place of speed has deﬁnitively supplanted that of place.”46 To the extent that the conspiracy has penetrated political, social, and moral order, constitutes an omnipresent threat of total apocalyptic destruction, and is able to communicate and move quickly without being noticed, the narrative that represents it must be global and systematic. It must capture the conspiracy’s immediacy, omnipresence, and near omnipotence. In its pages, images, and/or sound, the conspiracy narrative must represent the complexity of near-total, secret control. The narrative that represents conspiracy, in other words, must be able to encompass the world, to posit a new world order, to cover narrative time through its speed and global space and power through it velocity.

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

135

Consider, for example, the dynamic and amorphous properties of the Onassis/mob-related Gemstone File theory, which has been malleable enough to explain recent events as well as events on a different continent (for example, in Caruana’s annotated updates in her memoir) without losing its general shape and thrust. Its chronicle form facilitates this by allowing dates to be added in the beginning, middle, and end and ﬁlled in to the preexisting structure without requiring any substantial changes. Roberts and his narrative move incessantly, wasting no time in covering a global conspiracy. Skeleton Key, like the conspiracy it describes, is narrative as machinic assemblage, devouring all that comes in its path, subsuming all new, seemingly random, and often contradictory elements within its expansive framework, doing so at remarkable speed and velocity across time as well as geographic and cognitive maps of meaning and power. In Skeleton Key, the very act of identifying and chronicling this conspiracy provides a map of power; in ﬁctional narratives or docudramas, such as JFK, the protagonist must follow this map with his own cognitive and physical trajectory by tracking, resisting, and defeating conspiracy as the narrative moves headlong toward its resolution. Narrative Pivot

Speed and velocity move to the fore at signiﬁcant narrative turning points. This trope deﬁnes the archetypal moment in virtually every mainstream conspiracy-based ﬁlm and novel when the protagonist gleans the single piece of information that enables him to realize the real nature of the forces that oppose him. It is also present in many accounts of real and alleged conspiracies when prefatory comments provide the “personal” story of the author who describes the moment at which the conspiracy became clear to him. This point, a device suggestively called the “narrative pivot” by narratologists A. J. Greimas and Joseph Courtès, condenses the structures and dynamic of the conspiracy narrative within one moment, when opposing forces come into clear focus and the narrative speed and velocity begin to change pace and direction.47 They illustrate this notion by referring to the shift in narrative sequences that occurs in the story of Oedipus when he discovers knowledge about himself and his previous acts. This moment transforms both the actions that follow and the meaning of the acts that have already taken place.48 Greimas and Courtès describe the protagonist’s passing from erroneous

136

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

to “true” knowledge as a process of cognitive doing, an acting upon knowledge that consists of an operation that would establish the true or reveal the secret (for example, pivotal moments in a conspiracy narrative when a source provides the protagonist with crucial information) or an interpretive act that establishes a state of knowledge (the protagonist’s discovery of conspiracy), that in either case provokes a series of both cognitive and what they call “pragmatic” events.49 At the narrative pivot, information emerges and converges as the protagonist (and, in many narratives, the audience as well) ﬁnally makes the correct interpretive conclusions necessary to integrate the overwhelming amount of relatively incomprehensible data about seemingly disparate events that has previously confounded him. At this moment, the momentum shifts (though it does not abate), and the hero can ﬁnally move toward resolving the violence and deception that caused the narrative’s central conﬂicts. Although the fast pace of cognitive and physical activity (again, coupled and dependent on each other) and the narrative’s dizzying, global scope remain, the narrative changes qualitatively from the incoherent to the integrative. To be sure, such blockages are conventional in the mystery and suspense genres, which rely on delay and cycles of frustration and satisfaction of curiosity. The conspiracy narrative’s speed and velocity, however, move more rapidly both toward the moment of uncovering—given the conspiracy’s threatening complexity—and then toward the narrative’s resolution. The narrative pivot marks a peculiarly liminal point in the conspiracy narrative that condenses the narrative’s dynamic of movement and cognition. Narrative Movement in JFK

For a ﬁlm whose director claims narrative coherence and efﬁciency as guiding principles, JFK boasts a remarkably disorienting style and set of formal and narrative strategies. The ﬁlm attempts to map the complex conspiracy of the “military-industrial complex” through an equally complex aesthetic composed of the intricate editing of archival footage and re-creations, varied ﬁlm stocks, and a layered sound track of voice-over and sound effects. It restlessly presents its intricate historical argument, often bombarding the viewer with an incomprehensible stream of data. Structured as a classical detective story, JFK presents so much historical information and speculation, and moves so quickly and so far across an expanse of American political history, that it threatens

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

137

to overpower the narrative and the argument that it makes about the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Two important narrative pivots break through this clutter, illustrating conspiracy theory’s characteristic movement. At both points in the narrative, Garrison’s investigation had been stuck; at each point he suspects that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole perpetrator of the Kennedy assassination, but he has neither concrete evidence to prove his suspicions nor a satisfactory counterexplanation to displace the dominant one. But pivots initiate cognitive shifts of momentum that allow Garrison’s investigation and the narrative’s speed and velocity to move in new, more efﬁcacious directions toward coherence and resolution. The ﬁrst such pivot occurs three years after Kennedy’s assassination and Garrison’s brief, initial interest in the time that Oswald had spent in New Orleans. Garrison’s ﬁrst interview with the suspicious David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) had raised doubts about the allegation that Oswald had acted alone, but at that time he had no proof of any larger conspiracy, and the FBI had rejected the notion of a Ferrie–Oswald connection. Following a title card reading “Three Years Later,” Garrison appears on a plane, seated next to Louisiana senator Russell Long (Walter Matthau), who humorously and cynically questions the Warren Commission’s ﬁndings on the assassination. Reminded of his earlier suspicions, Garrison returns home and voraciously consumes all twenty-six volumes of the report (against the protests of his concerned wife) and imagines the testimony contained therein—visually represented through disjointed ﬂashbacks and dream sequences that re-create both the witnesses’ testimony and the actual events to which they are testifying. Oliver Stone’s commentary on this sequence reveals his ideas about formal and narrative representation of a conspiracy investigation: “I wanted to do the ﬁlm on two or three levels—sound and picture would take us back, and we’d go from one ﬂashback to another, and then that ﬂashback would go inside another ﬂashback, like the [testimony of witness] Lee Bowers. . . . We’d go to Lee Bowers at the Warren Commission and then Lee Bowers at the railroad yard [on the day of the assassination], all seen from Jim’s point of view in his study. I wanted multiple layers because reading the Warren Commission report is like drowning.”50 His meeting with Long redirects Garrison and the narrative, shifting it from stasis to the thrashing about of an investigator “drowning” in a sea of data and disembodied voices of witnesses (who are often dead, as in the

138

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

case of Lee Bowers) reliving and describing their experiences at different moments in different places. As his investigation develops, the narrative often changes speed, especially as Garrison comes closer to evidence of a conspiracy. As he gathers information, Garrison and his staff obtain the testimony of witnesses, each of whom relives his or her experience of the assassination through ﬂashback. The relentlessness of this evidence is at times overwhelming—it is difﬁcult to recall a mainstream Hollywood ﬁlm that grants ﬂashbacks to so many ancillary characters. JFK signals these ﬂashbacks with quick edits and different visual styles and ﬁlm stocks (for example, from color to black and white, and from high to grainy resolution), fracturing the ﬁlm’s visual ﬂow and disrupting the relationship between the duration of the ﬁlm’s story (Garrison’s investigation), its narrative form (the logic and sequence of the ﬁlm’s representation of Garrison’s investigation), and the ﬁlm’s act of “narrating” (that is, the ﬁlm itself and the time that it takes to present the narrative). Mapping an enormous amount of space across not only a wide range of time but also within a compressed period, the ﬁlm attempts to show where the main conspirators were and what they were doing before the assassination, as well as the precise location of everyone at every moment along the presidential motorcade and in Dealey Plaza at the time of assassination. The ﬁlm’s second narrative pivot reveals the master narrative of conspiracy that can explain the information Garrison collects. It occurs during Garrison’s meeting with “X” (Donald Sutherland), the ﬁctional “inside” source that Garrison consults when his investigation seems to be reaching an end and is increasingly threatened by shadowy, powerful forces. In previous scenes, Garrison has been offered an appointment in the federal judiciary if he drops the case, and he has witnessed David Ferrie’s crazed, incomprehensible monologue hinting at the broader outlines of the conspiracy. The scene with Ferrie is visually disconcerting, shot from a bizarre array of angles, with varying ﬁlm stocks, and edited at a rapid, dizzying pace. Ferrie spits out quick, confusing explanations about Jack Ruby and the CIA’s role in the assassination, shouting at Garrison, “Oh man, why don’t you stop? This is too fuckin’ big for you! Who did Kennedy? It’s a mystery, wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. Even the shooters don’t fuckin’ know! Don’t you get it yet? I can’t be talking like this. They’re gonna kill me. I’m gonna die!” Ferrie’s paranoia

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

139

is irrational, beyond even the complex explanation Garrison will deliver in the ﬁlm’s ﬁnal act, yet his prediction of his own demise soon proves true. Ferrie ultimately proves to be more informative and persuasive for the viewer than even Garrison, and the character’s impenetrable explanations and Pesci’s exuberant performance undercuts the seemingly neat explanation that the ﬁlm’s conclusion attempts to provide.51 X, by contrast, provides precisely the grand plot that Garrison lacked and Ferrie could not coherently explain, enabling the district attorney to integrate the evidence he had previously collected. X’s explanation is interspersed with both archival footage and reenactments of secret meetings implicating Lyndon Johnson in the assassination. This montage stands in contrast to Ferrie’s monologue, which receives no visual corroboration and is especially difﬁcult to follow because of the pace of Ferrie’s delivery and the disorienting, quick edits.52 X arrives from outside the narrative, unexplained and virtually without introduction, to redirect the chaos that the ﬁlm’s narrative and formal strategies have incited and that Ferrie’s monologue has intensiﬁed. After the interview with X, Garrison’s cognitive and material (or what Greimas and Courtès call “pragmatic”) acts begin to have greater effect: he arrests Clay Shaw (the menacing gay leader of the New Orleans part of the assassination) and in an extended courtroom sequence ﬁnally begins to uncover and place before the public “the truth” behind the Kennedy assassination. The narrative’s direction has been altered from Ferrie’s (freakish homosexual) chaos toward the authoritative, coherent voice of X. JFK’s valiant effort to map its unwieldy conspiracy through narrative form threatens to move so quickly, at such speed and velocity, as to resist integration and coherence. As Art Simon notes, “the montages that structure so much of JFK resist linearity, pivoting on so many conﬂicts of scale and texture, color and temporality as to form any investigator’s worst nightmare.”53 David Ferrie’s paranoid affect seems a more rational response to the social and political order he attempts to reveal than does X’s detached, calm, and omniscient narration. X’s status as ultimate insider distances him from Garrison’s and the ﬁlm’s narrative, which is told from the perspective of an investigator who is forever alienated from the full and real truth. JFK’s relentless movement through the evidentiary minutiae of the assassination both authenticates and undercuts its attempt to assume an authoritative historical voice—it is exhaustive and exhausting, integrative and incoherent.54 This dynamic between

140

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

narrative hypermovement and resolution, so prevalent in JFK but always at work in the conspiracy narrative, is the topic of the next section. CONSPIRACY

AND

CLOSURE: RESISTING

AN

ENDING

The classical conspiracy narrative attempts to provide closure to the complex and multifarious conﬂicts and crises it presents.55 The ﬁctional narrative typically provides an ending which implies that the narrative’s movement has stopped, if only temporarily. Yet, the more that the conspiracy has been able to consolidate power and hide its existence, and the more it threatens those who attempt to discern it, the more difﬁcult it is for the conspiracy text to contain the narrative’s conﬂicts and resolve its complex plot. In some texts, the impossibility of complete convergence and closure is the result of generic and industrial constraints; The X-Files, for example (analyzed in the next section), can only resolve individual, episodic stories, but cannot fully disclose and overthrow the larger government conspiracy. In other narratives, however, an otherwise “successful” resolution of the narrative’s central conﬂicts may remain implicitly disquieting—depending on the enormity of the conspiracy that has been uncovered and exposed—or explicitly open-ended, if the narrative hints that new conspiracies may arise in the future. In putatively nonﬁctional conspiracy narratives, the very act of narrating, of bringing theoretical coherence to discrete events, is itself an act of closure in its attempt to resolve the question of power. Put another way, the conspiracy provides closure in its control over the social and political order. Everything that follows the author’s act of identifying the conspiracy is merely evidence of conspiracy. Like the closure in conspiracy ﬁction, however, any resolution a non-ﬁctional account of a conspiracy provides is often incomplete and disquieting. Certain explanations may be unsatisfactory, contradictory, or incoherent, and the ﬁnal call to resist the conspiracy can seem hollow and pointless if the conspiracy appears too complete, too powerful. This explanation, from the introduction to A. Ralph Epperson’s The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History (1985), is illustrative: It will be the position of this book that a conspiracy does indeed exist, and that it is extremely large, deeply entrenched, and therefore extremely powerful. It is working to achieve absolute and brutal rule

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

141

over the entire human race by using wars, depressions, inﬂations and revolutions to further its aims. The Conspiracy’s one unchanging purpose has been to destroy all religion, all existing governments, and all traditional human institutions, and to build a new world order (this phrase will be deﬁned later) upon the wreckage they have created.56

Chapters in The Unseen Hand discuss individual agents of the conspiracy in roughly chronological order—from secret societies such as the Illuminati (chap. 8) to communism (chap. 9)—particularly important conspiratorial events—such as the Russian Revolution (chap. 10) and the Korean War (chap. 28)—and institutions of conspiratorial power such as the Federal Reserve (chap. 16) and “world government” (for example, the United Nations) (chap. 33). To the extent that the book’s ﬁnal chapters call for active resistance to the conspiracy, The Unseen Hand resists a complete resolution, which could only be in the form either of a fatalistic recognition of the conspiracy’s victory or of a complete defeat of a less than all-powerful conspiracy. By its very existence and its goal of educating true Americans to the evils of communism and the “New World Order,” the book challenges the historical narrative that it so fully describes in its ﬁrst four hundred pages. Yet—and this is a trait it shares with ﬁctional conspiracy narratives—the book’s detailed and grandiose description of an all-powerful conspiracy seems to make effective resistance seem improbable, if not impossible. As a narrative resolution to the formal problem of a seemingly meaningless history, the “unseen hand” of conspiracy is a satisfactory explanation; as an historical actor, however, it must be revealed, resisted, and unraveled in the future that would follow the reading of the ﬁnal page. The more complete the formal closure of conspiracy, the more difﬁcult and depressing it would be as a satisfactory narrative conclusion. Formal and ideological constraints dictate this containment and resolution of the conspiracy narrative for ﬁction and nonﬁction alike. The thriller genre, of which the ﬁctional conspiracy narrative is a subset, demands some form of resolution that reafﬁrms the protagonist’s agency, whereas the integrative historical narrative to which nonﬁction conspiracy narratives aspire demands some form of coherence, an emplotment of discrete events such that they make some sense. Moreover, the larger historical structures placed in danger by the conspiracy (including capitalism and the democratic system of the Western

142

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

nation-state in most contemporary American conspiracy theories) must be made safe and reafﬁrmed by the narrative’s end. Thus, narrative velocity must be directed toward integration and coherence, and must lead to resolution. The coupling of velocity and the demands for closure, however, often leaves an affective residue of suspicious unease and fear in the narrative that the narrative’s resolution cannot fully dissipate. The conspiracy, in other words, can and generally does survive the happy ending despite the narrative’s, and the protagonist’s, best work. This kind of contradiction—simultaneously moving toward and away from closure and coherence—is at the heart of the conspiracy narrative’s progression. The “desire” of the narrative—that is, the cultural assumptions shared by authors and audience, and developed by generic conventions—is contradictory: in Peter Brooks’s words, narrative moves “toward . . . [an] end which would be both its destruction and its meaning, suspended on the metonymic rails which tend toward that end without ever being able quite to stay the terminus.”57 The conspiracy narrative’s excessive momentum—a trajectory intended to plot, reveal, and resist conspiracy in narrative form—makes this dynamic of movement and end especially difﬁcult. For the ﬁctional narrative, the end often cannot resolve, much less destroy, the conspiracy described; for the historical narrative, events resist explanatory closure, which itself comes to resist the promise of redemption toward which the narrative itself is intended to lead. Closure always comes, but an entirely satisfactory resolution rarely arrives. Even conventional Hollywood fare such as the Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts vehicle Conspiracy Theory (1997) cannot resist hinting at ﬁlm’s end that the conspiracy the protagonists had presumably defeated still pursues them in black helicopters (heard and then seen over the closing credits) and might still have the ability to create earthquakes in Turkey that endanger a visiting U.S. president.58 Closure that would otherwise seem to lead toward a repudiation of the Gibson character’s wild theories and his integration into the properly heterosexual, social and political order, in other words, cannot be satisfactorily achieved without a winking signal that perhaps Gibson’s “paranoia,” created through a mind-control experiment performed perhaps by a secret part of the U.S. government, is well founded. It is as difﬁcult to keep the enigma closed as it is to keep it open.

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

143

The X-Files and the Problem of Serial Conspiracy

The X-Files (1993–2002) situates this dynamic of moving ineluctably toward closure while continually forestalling it within the formalistic and institutional framework of the hour-long television series drama. Instead of the relatively contained classical cinematic narrative form, in which the ﬁlm’s end effects some form of resolution, the weekly television series presents a continuing serial narrative developed via smaller episodic narratives that are resolved by the end of the show’s ﬁnal act. Probably the best-known example of this form is the police procedural series, in which a speciﬁc investigation may come to an end by the episode’s closing credits, but certain narrative strains—ranging from small personality quirks to melodramatic personal elements central to the show’s main characters—are kept alive, to be picked up and developed the following week. The X-Files was not the only show of its era that complicated this structure—Homicide: Life on the Streets (1993–99), for example, stretched murder investigations into multiple episodes—but its willingness to tie the entire series to a conspiratorial metanarrative differentiated it from others and grafted the additional narrative element of governmental conspiracy to the police procedural. And indeed, the series exempliﬁes the formal characteristics and problems of the classical conspiracy narrative: its protagonists process bewildering information gathered quickly from around the world and outer space, and are thereby able to catch a glimpse of the secret truths lurking beneath the social and political order; meanwhile, in any particular episode, the quickening pace of events and the ﬁnal act’s mounting tension must be contained so that the resolution required of the episodic dramatic form can reafﬁrm the motivations and effectiveness of its protagonists—while at the same time leaving a disquieting sense of dread at the expansive power of conspiracy. The X-Files focuses on FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, who are assigned to investigate those cases, known as “X-Files,” that cannot be adequately explained through conventional investigative work. Mulder is the character most interested and immersed in the highly specialized epistemology and lore associated with the ﬁeld of the “X-Files,” which includes cases that seem to indicate the existence of extraterrestrials and a governmental conspiracy to cover up their existence, as well as crimes and unexplained occurrences related to occult practices and the paranormal. Scully, on the other hand, begins the series as the skeptical

144

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

empiricist who rejects Mulder’s theories so long as they lack sufﬁcient scientiﬁc proof (she is a medical doctor) and logic. Most episodes spend the ﬁrst three of their four acts establishing and almost fetishizing some bizarre phenomenon, and, in their ﬁnal act, barely resolve—or, quite often, deliberately leave unresolved—the phenomenon’s seemingly inexplicable cause with ambiguous or complicated explanations. Few threats are entirely dispelled by the closing credits, whether or not the episode’s story is continued the following week. Open-ended, darker, and more foreboding even than JFK—which also fails to destroy the conspiracy by its closing credits, but which at least conﬁdently proposes and presents some explanation that captures “truth” within a master narrative—The X-Files exempliﬁes the ambivalent resolution of the conspiracy narrative. Episodes often recycle unexplained stories from the mainstream and tabloid news, as well as from the subcultures surrounding tales of alien abduction and the like.59 In this continual reference to well-circulated events both real and imagined, The X-Files owes as much to the longrunning television anthology series Unsolved Mysteries (as well as to the 1970s television series The Night Stalker) as it does to the police procedural/mystery series it might otherwise more formally resemble. Indeed, in transposing the marginal worlds explored in such shows, The X-Files celebrates the unexplained and suspicious within a more conventional, mainstream format, with bigger budgets and better production values, playfully legitimating and asserting the need for the seemingly “illogical” fears of nondominant explanations for phenomena such as crop circles that the show puts forth. This is most apparent in the recurring and popular characters known as the “Lone Gunmen,” three men who publish a magazine by that name that focuses on government conspiracies. The show pokes gentle fun at conspiracy- and UFO-related subcultures through these paranoid bit players, whose roles are both ironically and affectionately performed. Signiﬁcantly, however, the Lone Gunmen and their sources of information often supply Mulder with crucial knowledge that enables him to begin or advance his investigation of governmental and extraterrestrial secrets. One integral aspect of the ongoing series narrative is Mulder and Scully’s gradual recognition of the degree to which mysterious forces at work within the federal government are involved in various types of suspect activities, such as secretly capturing alien life-forms, using

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

145

alien technology for military uses, and aiding aliens in their program of abducting humans for research. The book The Truth Is Out There: The Ofﬁcial Guide to the X-Files, part of the merchandising juggernaut orchestrated by the Fox network and its fellow subsidiaries of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, describes this series narrative of conspiracy as the show’s “mythology,” and asserts that it has come to “deﬁne the series as much as [The X-Files’s] trademark creepiness.”60 In episodes that include such conspiratorial elements, the narrative progression is formulaic: Mulder and Scully begin to investigate a phenomenon; they stumble upon or learn of some impediment put forth by governmental forces, in the process often ascertaining knowledge through informants who are themselves part of the government; then, when the agents ﬁnally seem close to both an explanation of the phenomenon and incriminating evidence of the government’s duplicity, their quest is thwarted and they must begin again in the next episode with little to show for their investigation and adventures. One important recurring character, a member of the governmental conspiracy known as the “Cigarette-Smoking Man” (or “Cancer Man”) for his ever-present cigarette, began to assume a more visible role in the lead-up to the second season’s cliff-hanger ﬁnale in which he left Mulder to die in a burning boxcar ﬁlled with dead alien bodies.61 In the second and third seasons, he became Mulder’s most important adversary and was able to stop each of Mulder’s investigations into the conspiracy before the agent was able to reach the cognitive epiphany of knowledge and proof of the “truth.” The individual episodic resolution of the particular “X-File” case, in short, cannot resolve the ongoing series-long narrative of the larger conspiracy. The truth, as the opening credits in the show’s ﬁrst season assured viewers, may be “out there,” but Mulder and Scully can only catch a brief glimpse of it before it once again melts away before them. As series creator and executive producer Chris Carter has remarked concerning the tensions between the series narrative’s need for openness and the commercial demands for the classical narrative of the hour-long drama: “We have long, tedious arguments about the network’s desire for ‘closure.’ But it’s hard to put handcuffs on aliens every week and throw them in the slammer.”62 The episode “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” the ﬁrst season’s ﬁnale, exempliﬁes the ongoing narrative tension between mystery and resolution that is critical not only to The X-Files but also to the larger conspiracy

146

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

narrative of which the television series often makes use.63 In this episode, Mulder and Scully come the closest that they had throughout the ﬁrst season (and, arguably, through the fourth season of the show) to irrefutable evidence of a government cover-up when they discover—after a tip from Deep Throat, Mulder’s secret government informant—an almost ﬁfty-year-old secret program alters the genes of human subjects by injecting them with tissue and bacteria from extraterrestrials whose spacecraft have crashed on Earth. Following Deep Throat’s cryptic leads, Mulder and Scully ﬁnd Dr. Terrance Berube, a genetic specialist who has successfully saved six terminally ill human subjects in this way. One of these subjects, Berube’s friend and former colleague Dr. William Secare, is at large, and the secret “black organizations” within the military that initiated Berube’s work attempt to kill Secare before the experiment is made public. Secare’s alien genes enable him to elude capture by allowing him to breathe underwater and emit toxic fumes from his blood when shot. By following Mulder, a government team, led by an ominous character named “Crew-Cut Man,” ﬁnally apprehends and kills Secare. When Mulder himself is captured after becoming sick from his exposure to the toxic fumes produced by Dr. Secare’s body, Deep Throat’s intervention enables Scully to steal “the wellspring,” the original alien body from which the experimental tissue had been taken, and use it to barter for Mulder’s life. However, government/conspiracy agents kill Deep Throat during the trade for Mulder. In the episode’s epilogue, Mulder calls Scully late at night to tell her that the FBI is shutting down the X-Files team because, Mulder suspects, powerful government ﬁgures fear that he and Scully are coming too close to the truth. This uncertain future serves as the cliff-hanger with which the ﬁrst season ends. “Erlenmeyer” exempliﬁes a number of ongoing conﬂicts between the larger series narrative of conspiracy and the demands of the episodic television drama. For the series narrative to continue, no single episode can resolve it; thus, for the protagonists to remain as such, they can never fully succeed. Mulder and Scully cannot right the course of the larger order to which they have been exposed, and any triumphs they achieve can be at best cognitive—they cannot stop the course of events, but they can at least learn their causes. If the truth is out there, they can ﬁnd some part of it, but they cannot ﬁnally learn the totality of “truth,” and they certainly cannot expose it. This constitutes a crisis not only for the survival and legitimacy of the protagonists—Mulder and Scully can

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

147

never crack their biggest case—but also for the legitimacy of the moral order that they are supposed to uphold, which remains unrestored after every episode and every season. Mulder’s relationship with Deep Throat (whose name alludes to Woodward and Bernstein’s source for their Watergate stories in the Washington Post) in this episode and throughout the ﬁrst season illustrates this quite well. Deep Throat had often given Mulder intentionally deceptive information—the end of the episode “Fallen Angel,” for example, shows Deep Throat working for the government’s conspiracy: he tells another government agent that by allowing Mulder to remain an FBI investigator, the government could better monitor and suppress what he learns.64 In “Erlenmeyer,” however, Deep Throat seems to have switched sides. Mulder would have no inkling of the secret government program without his direct intervention. Neither Mulder nor Scully achieve very much by themselves, and Deep Throat’s information and direct assistance lie behind virtually every individual clue they ﬁnd and every conclusion they make in their investigation. His role in the episode demonstrates the very limited agency that Mulder and Scully have in their attempts to ﬁght and expose conspiracy; by the end of the episode, Mulder, the one who perceives conspiracy, has been rendered helpless, his chief informant presumed dead, and, in the epilogue, his position within the FBI, crucial to his access to information and the FBI’s incomparable resources, is uncertain. Indeed, even Deep Throat admits to Mulder and Scully that “there are limits to my knowledge,” and that some covert operations are even “unknown at the highest levels of power.” The agents could not have begun to investigate without someone else’s initiation; they were unable to retain vital evidence they had gathered; and are left with seemingly little chance of gaining more information in the future. Yet The X-Files and “The Erlenmeyer Flask” do successfully resolve the series-long narrative concerning knowledge and how the agents interpret evidence. For Mulder, the believer, knowledge is experiential: through his investigations, he follows clues that lead him ﬁrst to the computer-controlled tanks that hold the subjects of Dr. Berube’s experiment and then to Dr. Secare, even if Mulder is unable to save the evidence to prove his suspicions. The more skeptical, disciplined Scully obtains her evidence in hard, scientiﬁc form, through a scientist at Georgetown University’s Microbiology Department who performs

148

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

computer analyses that ﬁnd alien DNA in blood from Berube’s lab. The ultimate story line to which the larger narrative arc of the show’s ﬁrst season has led reaches its dénouement when the skeptical Scully ﬁnally concedes to Mulder that “I’ve always held science as sacred. I’ve always put my trust in the accepted facts. . . . For the ﬁrst time in my life, I don’t know what to believe.” In lieu of the impossible resolution of the conspiracy, Scully’s epistemological crisis comes because of this “hard” evidence, and her exposure to the interpretive practices of “Spooky” (his nickname within the FBI) Mulder, allows the series to resolve the previous duality it had posed in their temperaments and methodologies. Scully now believes, and Deep Throat whispered his dying words to her: “Trust no one.” Deep Throat and the series interpellate her as a paranoid investigator of conspiracy. The conspiracy cannot be defeated within the narrative; instead, the narrative can be resolved only through the characters’ gradual realization of conspiracy’s existence. It is signiﬁcant, then, that the ﬁrst season’s “cliff-hanger” concerns whether the agents will continue to be able to gain more knowledge though their work investigating the X-Files. Of course, the serial nature of the network television schedule required an ongoing narrative—accordingly, the success of The X-Files required the reopening of the “X-Files,” while the Mulder-believer/ Scully-skeptic dynamic requires the latter to renounce, or at least suspend, her acceptance of Mulder’s interpretive practices in the second season (although in later seasons, she becomes a full-ﬂedged believer). In addition, by the next season’s second episode, the series introduced a new source (named “X”) to replace Deep Throat.65 Unlike JFK, whose narration ends at the ﬁlm’s close and whose narrative ends with the verdict in the Clay Shaw trial, the trajectory of The X-Files’s serial narrative was dependent during its run only on the institutional structures of network television (such as audience ratings and the decisions of network programmers and producers). The show’s “mythology” could expand across television seasons, onto new continents and perhaps into outer space—not to mention into a ﬁlm, books, music, magazines, comic books, spin-off shows, and trading cards, and “ofﬁcial” conventions and merchandise—and, ultimately, to anywhere the Fox television network (which broadcast the show), Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation (which produced and distributed it), and their bosses at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation could sell or license it.66 The X-Files was

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

149

an ongoing narrative of secret government perﬁdy that by design could not reach closure, put forth through the ever-expanding channels of one of the most powerful private ﬁgures and media conglomerates of the contemporary era. The series’ resistance to disclosure continued even in its ﬁnal episode, suggestively titled “The Truth.”67 During the episode’s opening sequence, Mulder learns what at least for that episode is the ultimate piece of information, the real “truth:” the date of the ﬁnal alien invasion and elimination of the human race, to take place a decade hence in December 2012. Captured, tried on the trumped-up charge that he murdered a soldier at the secret military installation where he learned of the coming invasion, Mulder is ultimately sentenced to death for a career of knowing and investigating too much. The trial enables the series to review the entirety of its now nine-season mythology, including its multiple conspiracies, competing contingents of aliens, and shocking familial revelations (Mulder’s actual biological father was the evil Cigarette-Smoking Man; Mulder’s long-lost sister had been abducted, with his family’s consent, as part of an alien experimentation and cloning program; and Mulder and Scully’s child, itself the result of an alien program to create a slave race, had been put up for anonymous adoption in order to protect it). With the help of his colleagues and a disgruntled ofﬁcial who had previously worked on behalf of the conspiracy, Mulder escapes from the military prison where he was being held. The ﬁnal episode thus offers at least some degree of coherence, depending upon the extent to which the viewer has already followed and can make sense of the blizzard of characters and plot points covered by the various trial witnesses. More important, “The Truth” seems to offer a ﬁnal revelation and a sense of closure as it self-consciously brings the characters back, full-circle, to a motel room that is similar to the one in the pilot episode where Mulder, the believer, tells Scully, at the time a skeptic of the paranormal, alien, and conspiratorial, about his sister’s abduction. Now, both characters believe; now, the audience knows; now, there is nothing left to reveal. But The X-Files, whether for commercial, formal, or ideological reasons (or, more likely, some combination thereof), cannot end here. Instead, Mulder and Scully make a pact with each other to keep the investigation, and by implication the “X-Files,” alive. Notwithstanding their many past defeats, and notwithstanding the seeming inevitability

150

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

that the conspiracy will win and our heroes will be unable even to procure evidence of its existence, they agree not to accept the fate that is seemingly dictated by the alien invaders. Before a dramatic cuddle closes the series forever, they express their commitment: MULDER:

“I want to believe that the dead are not lost to us. That they speak to us as part of something greater than us—greater than any alien force. And if you and I are powerless now, I want to believe that if we listen to what’s speaking, it can give us the power to save ourselves.”

SCULLY:

“Then we believe the same thing.”

MULDER:

“Maybe there’s hope.”

“Hope” suggests a renewed ﬁght against the alien and human conspiracies. It suggests more X-Files and a new effort to collect and interpret information. It also suggests more X-Files, a paradigmatic example of the unending and inexhaustible text of conspiracy.68 Unraveling the Plot: Conspiracy Theory and the Subversion of Narrative Form

In its serial structure, The X-Files foregrounded the problematic closure of the classical conspiracy narrative, demonstrating, on a weekly basis, the difﬁcult task of moving forward toward its protagonists’ ultimate uncovering of the “truth” of history while also delaying this revelation for another week (or, while still successful, for another television season). The X-Files is a dramatic example of the ways in which the formal structures of the classical conspiracy narrative are vulnerable to continual unraveling. Even the most seemingly generic texts such as A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File and JFK offer complex narrative representations of history and power. The formal narrative structures of conspiracy might explain power in an ordered, seemingly coherent way, but the excesses they produce continually subvert the order that they create. Conspiracy theory represents the desire for, and the possibility of, a knowable political order; yet, in its disturbing revelations and uncertain resolution it also implicitly recognizes the difﬁculty of achieving transparent, equitable power relations in a capitalist democracy. Despite its professed intentions of uncovering the plot, the classical conspiracy narrative is inherently ambivalent about uncovering the “truth” of power and the possibilities of a different future.

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

151

This dynamic is even more prominent in those conspiracy narratives that seek to subvert the formal structures that distinguish the classical narrative, including “postmodern” novels such as Don DeLillo’s Libra (on Oswald) and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; experimental ﬁlms such as Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America (1991); and mainstream popular novels and Hollywood ﬁlms that undermine generic expectations through satire (as in, for example, the work of author Richard Condon, and especially his novel Winter Kills [1974] and its ﬁlm adaptation [1979]) or by adopting some of the mannerisms of the European art ﬁlm (for example, The Parallax View [1974]).69 Whereas the classical conspiracy narrative attempts to retain coherence and structure in spite of its crises of agency, incessant movement, and ambivalent closure, these experimental and/or parodic texts seek explicitly to challenge the heroic agency of the protagonist that the conspiracy narrative posits, to splinter structure and coherence, and ultimately to refuse the limitations of formal convention by offering multiple perspectives and withholding a master narrative with which to explain and restore order. DeLillo’s dismissal of JFK is illustrative of this distinction: “Regardless of [Stone’s] imagination I don’t think [JFK] was anything but an example of a particular type of nostalgia: the nostalgia for a master plan, the conspiracy which explains absolutely everything.”70 Libra and other postmodern, experimental, and satirical works provide a “respiritualization” of the conspiracy narrative, constructing “a world in which dark, unnameable psychic forces are in play, forces which, like those of magic and divinity, are not subject to the physical law we think we are bound to obey.”71 By putting such forces into play, experimental conspiracy narratives refuse the attempt to enclose such forces within the classical, “nostalgic” conventions of individual human agency, comprehensible historic forces, and closure. Tribulation 99, a faux documentary by Craig Baldwin purporting to reveal the truth about a conspiracy of space aliens who had arrived on earth three millennia ago from the planet Quetzalcoatl, demonstrates this refusal quite well. The ﬁlm includes ninety-nine brief sequences (“tribulations”) with explanatory voice-over narration that together purport to “expose” various aspects of this conspiracy. The tribulations, composed of quick cuts of bizarre images and ﬁlmed sequences, are pieced together in a rough and jumbled editing style, separated by title

152

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

cards written in the tabloid style of Weekly World News, such as “Earth’s Creatures Flee in Terror,” “1972: Watergate Martyrs,” and “E.S.P.: El Salvador’s Poltergeist.” The ﬁlm’s visual imagery relies on “found” footage from nature and science ﬁlms, documentaries of natural disasters, science-ﬁction and monster movies (especially from the 1950s, but also from later ﬁlms such as Westworld [1973]), cheap Mexican pulp movies, James Bond ﬁlms, and footage of the Kennedy assassination. The musical sources also include “found” material such as the theme from the television series Mission Impossible, as well as a spooky, slowed-down rockabilly version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” The ﬁlm’s narration, which ties these scattered sources into something that seems to resemble narrative coherence, brings together numerous pieces of conspiracy and ufology lore. At various moments, the description of the Quetzalcoatl plot refers to the Skull and Bones society at Yale, the CIA, the United Fruit Company, Central American politics, the Bermuda Triangle, legends of Atlantis, Easter Island, and the depletion of the ozone layer. After brieﬂy noting the alien origins of the Quetzalcoatls, the narrative focuses on the post–World War II period, where it displays an exuberant anticommunist mania in its descriptions of Quetzalcoatl-led revolutions throughout the Americas during the 1950s. According to the narration, these uprisings enabled the aliens to appease their alien gods by offering human sacriﬁce; thus, any counterrevolutionary or colonialist undertakings performed by the American military and intelligence agencies were a righteous attempt to ﬁght these pagans from another planet. Patching together Cold War rhetoric with a psychotic ﬁxation on satanists, werewolves, aliens, and androids, the ﬁlm claims, among other things, that: Fidel Castro was an alien (look at how many assassination attempts against him failed!); virtually all indigenous peoples’ movements against American and corporate exploitation were caused by the Mayan Indians’ secret pact with the Quetzalcoatls; the assassination of Salvador Allende was necessary to stop him from rotating Earth’s alignment; Grenada was invaded because it had been taken over by vampires (illustrated through footage lifted from the Blacula ﬁlms); Eugene Hasenfus, whose plane was shot down over Nicaragua as part of a mission to aid the contra rebels, was delivering Bibles, not guns; and the United States invaded Panama because former CIA asset Manuel Noriega had been abducted by the Quetzalcoatls and replaced with a werewolf.

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

|

153

As a formal exercise, Tribulation 99 demonstrates not only that both the detritus of popular culture and of geopolitical reality can serve equally well as the material of conspiracy, but also that virtually any strange material can relatively easily be assembled into an overarching theory thanks to the narrative machinery conspiracy offers. As easy as it is to construct such a narrative, this construction is always already relatively incoherent, moving forward with the continual threat of falling apart. Even with the aid of the book based on the ﬁlm, Tribulation 99 makes no sense as a whole, the ninety-nine “tribulations” scattering in hundreds of different directions.72 Although individual tribulations might make some sense—especially in their parody of the ofﬁcial explanations for CIA activity or American atrocities in Central America—attempting to understand the entirety of the Quetzalcoatl plot is futile. Its formal exercise, in other words, is its point: Tribulation 99 lays bare the narrative and interpretive machinery of conspiracy theory and its propensity to ﬂy apart into incoherence. Both the classical conspiracy narrative, which fetishizes its vulnerable and problematic structures, and experimental conspiracy narratives, which subvert those same structures, ﬁxate on and manipulate the conspiracy narrative’s distinctive shape and characteristics. Comparing the popular thrillers of Robert Ludlum with Don DeLillo’s novel Running Dogs, John Frow has noted that the formal characteristics of the conspiracy narrative offer “a material that can be worked against the grain of the [thriller] genre. It is the material itself which in part determines the possibility and the limits of its textual working.”73 This material enables coherence and incoherence, closure and its absence, hero and cabal. In conspiracy’s narrative structure and possibilities lie its most powerful promise: to map and explain the power that lies elsewhere. The structures of the classical conspiracy narrative may offer a utopian promise of knowledge and resistance, a cognitive map of power, but they also contain within them the undoing of that promise, the unraveling of that map.74 Their narrative telos might be to make some order out of the chaos of history and to provide some answer to the riddle of power, but the conspiracy narrative itself offers no programmatic response or emergent politics to replace the conspiracy it so intricately uncovers and explains. Conspiracy theory’s resistance is limited to interpretation

154

|

UNCOVERING THE PLOT

and narrative, relegating its opposition to the problems of the dominant political order to the realm of a limited hermeneutical resistance to a prevailing semiotic order.75 Conspiracy theory may emplot power on a narrative trajectory, but in so doing it fails to contradict its own assumptions about the coherence of conspiracy and the possibilities of resistance.

5 Plotting the Rush Conspiracy, Community, and Play This award-winning game reveals what you’ve always suspected. Secret conspiracies are everywhere! THEY really are out to get you . . . so you’d better get them ﬁrst. — From the box of Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy1 This was only the beginning of the suspicions that spread out like ripples behind an octopus swimming off after an attack. — Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, The Octopus2

A

somewhat oddball collection of predominantly young (ﬁfteen to thirty years old), predominantly white, and predominantly male convention-goers, most of them afﬁliated with a number of different but overlapping “underground” interests, wandered the halls and gathered in the ballrooms of a relatively small, mid-priced Atlanta hotel in September 1992. They were attending “Phenomicon: America’s Most Dangerous Convention,” a weekend gathering of cyberpunks, hackers, conspiracy theorists, members of the Church of the Sub-Genius, book and fanzine publishers, role-playing game players, and fans of science ﬁction and underground comic books. This was one of the world’s largest gatherings of hip–nerd subcultures in one building—a mix of alienated youth, mildly subversive adults, and the cottage industries that they have developed to serve themselves. Among the honored guests invited to speak and participate in the convention’s panels were widely known individuals in one or more of those subcultures, including Bruce Sterling, noted cyberpunk novelist and spokesperson for the science-ﬁction subgenre’s movement; Jonathan Vankin, whose proﬁle of conspiracy theorists, Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes, had recently been published in a paperback edition;3 Adam Parfrey, owner of Feral House Press and editor of Apocalypse Culture, an inﬂuential collection of essays and rants on “the fear-inspired upsurge of irrationalism and 155

156

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

faith, the clash of irreconcilable forces, and the ever-looming specter of ﬁn de race” in contemporary culture;4 and the Reverend Ivan Stang and Kerry Thornley, founders of, respectively, the Church of the Sub-Genius and Discordianism, two farcical antireligions. As with similar gatherings (such as comic book, record, and sports card conventions), enthusiasts with different interests represented in a single event (for example, Star Trek and Star Wars fans at a sci-ﬁ convention, or collectors of cards for different sports or from different eras) were at once separate and mixed. Although the role-playing game enthusiasts tended not to hang out with the hackers, and the Sub-Genius “followers” at times disrupted the proceedings of conspiracy theory panels, there was a remarkable ﬂuidity to the interests and an eclectic variety of offerings on display. Televisions and VCRs in two meeting rooms played nearly around the clock during the weekend, showing tapes such as a documentary on Wilhelm Reich, the legendary camp ﬁlms Robot Monster (1953) and Unidentiﬁed Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Objects (1956), and an anthology of television and ﬁlm clips on the Kennedy assassination. Well-known experts, unknown obsessives, and neophytes met to exchange theories and practical advice on everything from publishing fanzines to ﬁghting censorship, and convened in panels on the topics “Vampires: Myth or Reality,” “Introduction to S&M,” “Atlanta’s Position in the New World Order,” and “Conspiracy-a-Go-Go.” One commonality among the groups and meetings at Phenomicon was a sense of knowing, bemused detachment from the “apocalypse culture” to which the convention participants ostensibly belong. Parfrey’s description of the second edition of the collection he edited best summarizes the approach much of the conference seemed to take to their everyday lives: “It was my recurring childhood game to believe that I could avert disaster (car crashes, atomic bombs, etc.) by imagining the calamity while holding my breath. It is entirely possible that Apocalypse Culture is the outgrowth of this kind of puerile superstition.”5 Conspiracy, weird science, weird sex, hacking through the privatized data world of cyberspace—each assumes a profoundly dystopian time in which the hip seek fun and pleasure in the center of the apocalypse. Of the conspiracy theorists in attendance at Phenomicon, many (but certainly not all) were as much fascinated by and removed from the “paranoia” that they practiced as they were a part of it. By imagining

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

157

conspiracy and holding their breath, they could feel the excitement of playing paranoia while keeping the disaster it assumes in abeyance outside the convention hotel. Conference participant Jonathan Vankin has described this game as the “conspiracy rush:” “a zap of adrenaline that hits when you apprehend a higher truth; the revelation sensation, I call it. Your mind expands, or so you believe. Everyone else now appears slower, plodding through life a little stupider than you thought they were before.”6 The “rush” may be a form of individual revelation, but it is not, Vankin wants to maintain, a revelation that discloses a necessary truth. Like Parfrey, Vankin attempts to retain some critical distance from “puerile superstition” and an illusory experience of knowledge, and both writers observe rather than identify with the lives of those who interpret and enter into the narratives of apocalypse and conspiracy. This distance is important; neither Vankin, nor Parfrey, nor Robert Anton Wilson (whose inﬂuential writings are discussed in the next section) would claim a committed politics of conspiracy. Instead, they seek to describe and engage with Americans’ fascination with the aesthetics and pleasures of conspiracy theory, approaching it with playful irony. The ability—and desire—to see conspiracy theory as a source of pleasure and play, as these writers and related texts and practices do, further complicates the notion that it represents little more than a pathology that arises functionally from some lack or condition afﬂicting the individual theorist. It suggests both the attractions of conspiracy theory as an interpretive and narrative practice and how individuals affectively engage with conspiracy at the individual and group level. The previous two chapters identiﬁed particular interpretive practices and narrative strategies that produce conspiracy theories, focusing especially on the semiotic and formal aspects of conspiracy theory as a popular political and cultural practice. This chapter turns to the individual and social reception of conspiracy texts, bringing together two distinct but related modes of reception: the pleasure and sense of play that conspiracy theory engenders in individual conspiracy theorists—the conspiracy rush, the excitement that interpretation and the conspiracy narrative offer—and the collective enterprise of conspiracy theory— the group dynamics at a setting like Phenomicon and more serious conspiracy-related conferences that focus on famous assassinations or the 9/11 attacks. Examining how conspiracy theorists and their audiences circulate, understand, and make use of conspiracy texts reveals

158

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

aspects of these texts’ social and political effects, and provides at least part of an explanation for why conspiracy theories appeal not only to committed adherents but also, in different ways, to a wide swath of the American public. This chapter considers the interrelations between the individual practitioner’s engagement with conspiracy—which I explain through the play and pleasure that conspiracy theory offer—and the collective enterprise of conspiracy theorizing. It offers three general insights. First, conspiracy theory operates initially at the level of the individual producer and audience of texts. The conspiracy rush, the gateway to a world of interpretation and narrative, is a personal revelation and an intellectually and affectively disorienting, individual experience, even if it occurs as the result of a social interaction (such as in a conversation or after reading a book or visiting a Web site). Conspiracy theory presumes, and in fact fetishizes, the notion that the revelation ﬁnds the individual, and that the real unveiling occurs only through research and contemplation. The innocent comes to ﬁgure out the conspiracy by herself; the lone researcher bravely gathers information and puts pieces together to tell the true story of power. For both amateur and adept, the interpretive and narrative practice also offers play and pleasure—the play involved in uncovering secrets and imagining conspiracy and the strange, frightening pleasure in ﬁnding conspiracy and telling or hearing its story. Second, and paradoxically, although the individual is the basic unit of revelation, conspiracy theories develop and circulate as much by social interaction and collective action, and they can function—albeit with some difﬁculty—both as an adjunct to and an organizing principle for a social or political movement. No conspiracy theory exists in isolation from others, and although conspiracy theorists frequently act as loners seeking individual revelation of the truth that escapes others, they share information with each other and a wider audience by communicating their theories interpersonally, in group settings, and through mass communication (such as books, magazines, radio shows, the Internet, etc.). New conspiracy theories build upon or strike against existing theories, and their authors typically intend for them to compete for attention and opinion with other theories. Conspiracy theories thus presuppose the existence of a research community, even if that community constitutes a group against which any particular author reacts.

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

159

Third, because conspiracy theorists view the existing political order as odious and venal, they either belong to an oppositional political movement or hope to join or create a new one. Whether a conspiracy theory addresses a small band of esoteric believers or a mass audience, it suggests and offers social interaction, both intellectually and politically. In short, conspiracy theories beget conspiracy communities (albeit, as I explain below, tenuous ones). This chapter begins with a discussion of the conspiracy media, the alternative channels and spaces through which conspiracy theories circulate and proliferate, and then it considers the pleasures, play, and community that conspiracy theory offers its constituents. Communicating Community

In its circulation through the prevailing media of communication, conspiracy theory constitutes a community composed of participants and audience members, both the knowledgeable and the uninitiated, who produce, consume, and share theories and evidence. Live and mediated interpersonal communication can play signiﬁcant roles in the creation of community, as friends and acquaintances pass theories along, and as organized conferences and political rallies offer opportunities in which researchers can present their work. More signiﬁcantly, however, mass mediated communication allows the broadcast of conspiracy across wide distances. This has been true for the entirety of American history. Broadsides and political tracts alleging secret subversive movements spread throughout the country during the pre- and postrevolutionary eras, while anti-Catholic screeds alleging papist plots dominated the conspiracy literature during the nineteenth century.7 In the early twentieth century, Henry Ford republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract that originated in Europe, in his Dearborn Independent newspaper,8 while the John Birch Society widely distributed its anticommunist publications during the 1950s and 1960s.9 Mechanical printing technology and the mails thus allowed relatively wide distribution of conspiracy theories and evidence, both ﬁnding and helping to expand an audience for conspiracy and a community of those who researched and developed related theories. This process of reproduction and distribution continued to enable the circulation of conspiracy theories through the fanzine culture of the 1980s and 1990s and the militia movement of the 1990s, as well as via the vibrant independent

160

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

book publishing market for conspiracy books that has developed over the past two decades, seen most recently in the large sales of 9/11 conspiracy books.10 Since the Depression-era broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, electronic media have also long carried conspiracy theories on commercial, shortwave, community, and public radio, as well as on the public access channels of local cable television systems. More recently, however, computer mediated communication, including especially the Internet as well as more private bulletin board systems, has proven to be the most popular and efﬁcient electronic technology for conspiracy enthusiasts. Web sites focus on particular conspiracies— such as, for example, the hundreds of sites related to 9/11—as well as more broadly on conspiracy as a pervasive phenomenon of the present and past.11 In the latter category are general sites named “Conspiracy Nation” and “Conspiracy Planet,”12 those that present organization which propose particular theories, such as the John Birch Society, Lyndon LaRouche organization, and the A-albionic Research organization,13 and those that promote the theories of particular individuals such as David Icke and J. Orlin Grabbe.14 Private and publicly available e-mail lists, too, allow for intragroup communication. One such list, the Conspiracy Theory Research List (or CTRL) summarizes its purpose in this way: “CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance— not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and ‘conspiracy theory ’—with its many half-truths, mis-directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.”15 The older media have not entirely perished, although fanzines have withered as printing and mailing costs have increased, and print publishers have reconstituted themselves on the World Wide Web in order to survive.16 Other conspiracy media have survived alongside and in tandem with the Internet, as radio broadcasters and videographers stream their content on Web sites and authors link from their Web sites to Amazon and other Web-based booksellers. Signiﬁcantly, the ability of Web pages to link to one another has enabled the emergence of a never-ending hypertext network through which the interested can endlessly track theories about historical or recent events from site to site, ﬁnding duplicative and often conﬂicting information from one place to the next. Conspiracy on the Web serves as a virtual representation

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

161

and experience of the endless interpretive process of conspiracy theory, forever suggesting new links to follow and information to appropriate. Although there is no evidence that more people believe in conspiracy theories today as a result of computer mediated communications—an issue I consider by comparing belief in a 9/11 conspiracy to historical data on belief in a JFK assassination conspiracy in chapter 7—there can be no question that the Web has enabled wider, faster, and cheaper distribution of and improved access to theories and information among a wide variety of individuals and groups interested in and open to conspiracy theory. Conspiracy conferences play much the same role in a more unmediated format. Wide-ranging conferences, such as the annual “Conspiracycon” held in the San Jose area (a current, more conspiracyfocused version of the Phenomicon conference described earlier), offer a diverse selection of speakers discussing conspiracies that range beyond assassinations (and the currently dominant topic of 9/11) and delve into UFOs, mind control, and more obscure and esoteric conspiracy-related themes and events.17 Conspiracy organizations devoted to the JFK assassination, most notably COPA (Coalition on Political Assassination) and JFK Lancer, have each organized conferences for more than a decade, usually meet in Dallas, and feature prominent writers and speakers. The assassination conferences in particular bring researchers and enthusiasts together and allow them to exchange information, compare competing theories, view evidence, purchase books, share a meal, and discuss such common foes as uninformed Warren Commission apologists and the mainstream media that fail to take such conferences seriously. These meetings foster a collaborative spirit among a group of individual researchers by providing a public space for interaction and support. Collaboration in the assassination or the general conspiracy conferences, however, neither guarantees agreement nor ensures the absence of vocal and bitter disputes during question-and-answer periods following panel presentations, or in the conference hallways.18 In the assassination conspiracy community, the combination of collaboration, competition, and dissent challenges and channels any efforts at political organization. Assassination researchers have established and organized efforts to petition the federal government and other bodies to open sealed records, and this work, aided by public interest in the assassinations following Stone’s JFK, helped persuade

162

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

congress to pass the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which “established a neutral and independent body—the [Assassination] Review Board—that could ensure maximum disclosure of federal government records on the Kennedy assassination and, in the process, restore the public’s conﬁdence that their government was not keeping secret any relevant information.”19 Given this legislative success and the ongoing interest and widespread belief in assassination-related conspiracy theories, the assassination community appears to have achieved a modest degree of acceptance as a social movement.20 Collaboration has not, however, made universal endorsement of a single theory or culprit any easier, which of course makes the researchers’ ultimate goal—coming to agreement with one another and persuading the American public—that much more difﬁcult to attain. Together, media and face-to-face gatherings help to consolidate a loosely knit organization of researchers—one that resembles, and operates as a shadow of, an ideal academic community. Conspiracy scholars publish books, establish and edit journals, attend conferences, and occasionally collaborate, while they pledge themselves to a common intellectual goal. At the same time, this community includes the same expansive egos that professional, credentialed intellectuals in the academy boast, all of them engaged in intense competition to capture prevailing community opinion. Linking to each other, citing each other’s books, meeting at conferences—all of these practices seem to stitch together an organization of scholars. But without well-funded institutions, journals, and publishers, and rife with rivalry and suspicion, conspiracy scholars have as yet been unable to build the kind of solid if contingent Kuhnian paradigm that an academic discipline requires.21 Accordingly, I employ the term “community” in this context with some irony. The conspiracy researcher is by deﬁnition a loner who exists in continual fear of contamination by the conspiratorial other. The popular conception of the conspiracy investigator is of a solitary ﬁgure with a well-earned sense of distrust: Robert Ludlum’s characters work alone, as did Joseph Turner, Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor (1975); JFK assassination conspiracy researchers are known for their vituperative condemnation of one another’s work; and investigative journalist Danny Casolaro (discussed later in this chapter), a tragic hero for some in the conspiracy community, died the archetypal conspiracy researcher’s death—alone in a West Virginia hotel room, under

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

163

suspicious circumstances, while tracking down sources. Researchers and dabblers are notoriously cranky, wary of outside interest and help, and difﬁcult to get along with. This is true both for those who merely follow conspiracy theories and those who produce original research. The ideal of a conspiracy community is thus aspirational, given the difﬁculty of collective action among deeply suspicious individuals. To believe in conspiracy is to distrust the masses who are blind to the truth, and to be wary of those who appear to believe in a conspiracy’s existence but might also be the conspiracy’s agents. Researchers and their audiences are inevitably drawn together, insofar as a collective identity around conspiracy theory helps to bind individuals together, conﬁrming to each other that their shared opposition to the political and social order is correct.22 At the same time, however, they disagree about the precise nature of that order and the correct form of their opposition. The ability to form a collective enterprise—which would include such basic elements as forming alliances among differing groups, creating common goals and statements of goals, attempting to win converts, and the like—is essential to any political movement. Frequently, however, the conspiracy community can hardly imagine a collective, or even much more than a small, self-contained cell. Any group of conspiracy theorists also faces real external pressures from state authority, especially if the community is composed of members on the margins of society, or it is targeted for surveillance and inﬁltration—a pressure that helped bring about the bitter divisions and demise of the militia movement in the late-1990s.23 The conspiracy community is thus at any particular moment a rickety contraption, subject to moments of intense cooperation and ferment as well as periods of bitter competition and acrimony. I use the term “community,” then, not to denote an idealized collective but to suggest the existence of a group of individuals with a shared set of assumptions and identity who engage in ongoing communication and some limited form of collective action. With this general context of how conspiracy theory circulates and the dynamics of its community, I want to focus next on how texts that either describe conspiracy theory or simulate it in game form imagine its practice as a revelatory, invigorating, and playful experience. Illuminatus! and Conspiracy Initiation

Few writers have captured the revelatory experience of ﬁnding a conspiracy, and all of the affective and cognitive effects of that discovery, as

164

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

Robert Anton Wilson, a novelist and essayist best known for Illuminatus!, a trilogy of novels written with Robert Shea and originally published in 1975.24 The epigram of book 1 of the trilogy’s ﬁrst novel, taken from Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo-Jumbo (1972), boldly proclaims: “The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies.” Shea and Wilson’s work attempts to present such a history, albeit a particularly knowing, parodic, ﬁctional vision of it. Together, the three novels (The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, currently packaged in one large volume) include their own myth of human creation, an explanation of everything from the lost island of Atlantis to cryptography, goddess worship, and the I Ching, a review of the trilogy itself (“The authors are utterly incompetent—no sense of style or structure at all” [Illuminatus!, 238]), as well as sex, drugs, and an apocalyptic form of rock and roll, the latter of which is itself an integral part of the conspiracy. Although it holds some high literary pretensions in its disruption of conventional notions of narrative, perspective, time, and space, the trilogy works within the conventions of science ﬁction and fantasy, and it is generally stocked with those genres in bookstores. In the years since the trilogy was published, both Illuminatus! and Wilson, who before his death in 2007 had become far more associated with the trilogy than Robert Shea (who had died in 1994), have reached cult status among many readers, while the trilogy’s story, characters, and spirit have moved far beyond the printed text: Illuminatus! has been adapted into a ﬁve-part dramatic cycle produced in Liverpool in 1976, and it heavily inﬂuenced the successful Illuminati role playing and board games (discussed later in this chapter). It has helped to draw new members into the Discordian and Sub-Genius “religions,” and it has found a large audience among computer enthusiasts.25 Capitalizing on and adding to their popularity, Wilson’s writings in the years between Illuminatus! and his death included ﬁctional “prequels” to the trilogy (the “Historical Illuminatus Chronicles,” which includes three novels, The Earth Will Shake [1981], The Widow’s Son [1985], and Nature’s God [1991]) as well as collections of nonﬁction essays and aphorisms that return to many of the trilogy themes.26 Illuminatus! concerns a coordinated effort by a number of central characters to thwart an apocalyptic conspiracy by a group calling itself the Illuminati. The Illuminati’s plan is to rule the Earth and achieve immortality by slaughtering a huge audience at a rock festival held in

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

165

Ingolstadt, Bavaria. Since long before the trilogy was published, actual countersubversives have warned the world about a secret society called the Illuminati that had worked throughout history to seize power and/or foment revolutionary discontent among intellectuals and the masses, purportedly through conspiratorial, occult means. Founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of religious law at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, the Illuminati actually did exist in late– eighteenth-century Europe as a secret group within the already secretive society of Masons. Promoting revolutionary ideas, speciﬁcally against both church and state, the Illuminati were outlawed ten years later as a “secret society” of subversives.27 The Illuminati’s reputation continued to grow throughout Europe, however, particularly among monarchists and other conservatives in the aftermath of the French Revolution, who perceived them to be the secret element behind all revolutionary movements in Europe. The lengthy list of such countersubversives includes John Robison and the Abbé Augustin Barruel in nineteenthcentury Europe, Nesta Webster in early twentieth-century Britain, and even contemporary American evangelist Pat Robertson, all of whom have warned of the manipulation of politics by a small, secret group of powerful occultists. The conspiracy in Illuminatus! is more than just a secret society, however; it involves supernaturally evil elements, such as an attempt to revive a battalion of Nazi soldiers held in suspended animation beneath a lake outside Ingolstadt, and, on the side of “good,” the benign power of Eris, the goddess of discord, who helps to save the world from the evil group’s plans. Shea and Wilson were by no means conventional conspiracy theorists. In fact, their trilogy is an extensive parody of the fear of conspiracy, and through continual reference to alleged secret societies and various well-known and obscure theories about them, Illuminatus! aims to subvert conspiracy theory through parodic humor and excess. As conspiracy folds into conspiracy and it becomes increasingly difﬁcult to identify the political orientations and goals of groups and individual characters (not to mention the convoluted relationships among them), the trilogy emerges as an anarchic treatise about a world in which conspiracies have run amok. Indeed, the trilogy explicitly advocates anarchism, criticizing and parodying both right- and, to a lesser extent, left-wing conspiracy theories and politics, and promoting instead a composite of left anarchism and economic libertarianism. In the trilogy, two main characters

166

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

embody this alliance: Simon Moon, a young hippie anarchist associated with the student movements of the 1960s and practitioner of Tantric sex and hallucinogenic experimentation; and Hagbard Celine, an older libertarian capitalist entrepreneur who travels the world in ﬁrst-class accommodations, including a large nuclear-powered submarine. These two seemingly disparate positions are relatively complementary in their shared opposition to mainstream dualities of “left” and “right,” and in their disdain for monopoly state and/or private control over power, property, and human behavior. While working relatively independently throughout the trilogy, Simon and Hagbard ultimately act together in the climactic scene to foil the Illuminati’s attempts to cause mass destruction and seize material and metaphysical power. Illuminatus! associates “conspiracy” with the manipulation of mainstream politics and supernatural powers by unseen forces, and ultimately with any form of power and control by political forces of the left or right. Resistance, on the other hand, is the struggle against any such “politics” and form of power, and for freedom from coercion by the state, religion, and particularly conspiratorial groups. Five characters dominate the three novels: Celine and Moon, the two “adepts” in the ways of political resistance to conspiratorial groups and of the supernatural; and three “innocents,” Saul Goodman, a New York City policeman, Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation, a left-wing magazine based in New York, and George Dorn, a reporter for Confrontation. As the novels progress, the three “innocents” learn various versions of the history of the struggle for power, as well as how to recognize, interpret, and resist conspiracies that seek to control humanity. The narrative begins with an investigation of the disappearance of Joe Malik and the bombing of the Confrontation ofﬁces (located, signiﬁcantly, near the Council on Foreign Relations, an elite international policy group often feared in right-wing conspiracy theories). Investigating the bombing, Saul ﬁnds on the premises of Confrontation a series of memos that refer to an “Illuminati Project.” The memos document references to the Illuminati in a wide variety of publications, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Playboy, from radical social theorist Jacques Ellul to the John Birch Society. Because these individual pieces of evidence make little sense on their own, they require some sort of deduction; Saul’s method of sorting through them is to use his “intuition,” a process of “thinking beyond and between the facts, a way of sensing wholes, of seeing

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

167

that there must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two even if no such relationship is visible yet” (Illuminatus!, 23). Saul’s interpretive process, we learn, has developed out of his “dissatisfaction” with a wide range of “ofﬁcial explanations” of American foreign policy and political assassinations (51). For him, the progression from an interpretive method that “senses wholes” toward a conspiratorial imagination is logical: if there are reasons to be suspicious of an “accidental” theory of history and “ofﬁcial” historical explanations, and if one senses wholes and relationships among historical facts, then conspiracy becomes a possible explanatory framework. Saul’s “intuition” quickly becomes the shared mode of understanding for a host of other characters, especially the increasingly “illuminated” innocents. George Dorn, one of the other central characters transformed by Hagbard Celine, responds in this way to one of Celine’s many—often contradictory—explanations of the narrative’s odd, conspiratorial events: You’ve just tied two hundred years of world history up in a theory that would make me feel I should have myself committed if I accepted it. But I’m drawn to it, I admit. Partly intuitively—I feel you are a person who is essentially sane and not paranoid. Partly because the orthodox version of history that I was taught in school never made sense to me, and I know how people can twist history to suit their beliefs, and therefore I assume that the history I’ve learned is twisted. Partly because of the very wildness of the idea. If I learned one thing in the last few years, it’s that the crazier an idea is the more likely it is to be true. (200)

Much of Illuminatus! depicts an initiation process into a form of ongoing hyperinterpretation. Explanatory frameworks begin to form only to be destroyed and rebuilt as new evidence and new “crazy ideas” of a different conspiracy surface. Deferring explanation while disorienting characters and readers alike, the trilogy suggests what the open-minded conspiracy theorist (if such a thing existed) would experience: every day, a new conspiracy! By associating this ideal of the conspiracy theorist’s mental gyrations with Hagbard’s untold wealth and Moon’s sexcapades, Shea and Wilson harness conspiracy to a smart adolescent male’s dream, romanticizing behavior and politics that would otherwise be dismissed as marginal, paranoid, distasteful, and nerdy.

168

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

Characters are not the only ones initiated; as Dorn, Goodman, and Malik are educated in the hermeneutic of conspiracy almost simultaneously across time and space, the intrepid reader must similarly work to bring coherence to the scattered and often contradictory pieces of “true,” “false,” and “speculative” history the novels present with virtually every sequence. For coauthor Wilson, this narrative strategy serves as a ﬁctional representation of quantum physics, a kind of “serious proposal for a more Einsteinian, relativistic model than the monistic Newtonian theories which conspiracy buffs favor” through a narrative built on “indeterminacy and probability, not . . . religious or ideological dogmas.”28 In one collection of essays, Wilson calls this approach “guerrilla ontology,” an attempt “to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page ‘How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?’ This literary technique seems justiﬁed by the accelerated acceleration of new knowledge, new theories, new inventions, and new possibilities in our time, since any ‘reality’ map we can form is probably obsolete by the time it reaches print.”29 A particularly good example of this process, and one that has become a running joke among fans of Illuminatus!, is the episode in the second novel in which Saul begins to “see the fnords.” In an advanced stage of his transformation from innocent to adept, Saul wakes up one morning, begins reading the New York Times, and continually sees the “word” fnord! in a story about an angry dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union. Other fear-provoking stories concerning topics such as war and pollution, he notices, contain fnords at regular intervals. Having undergone a type of deprogramming hypnotherapy, Saul can ﬁnally see the fnords and realizes that they are a form of mind control intended to create a docile, hypnotized, and anxious population through the fear of impending emergencies. Saul learns that there is only one release for people under the hypnotic spell of the fnords: because advertisements are the only part of the media without fnords, “only in consumption, endless consumption, could [people] escape the amorphous threat of the invisible fnords” (Illuminatus!, 438–39). The radical left critique of consumer society thus has its perfect conspiratorial explanation, and only by learning to peer through the hypnotic ideology of fear and repression, as Saul has done, can one begin to see the extent of the conspiracy—can one begin, literally, to “see the fnords.”

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

169

The conspiratorial twist on a classic critique of media propaganda and commodity fetishism is only one in a series of uses that the trilogy makes of the rhetoric of late 1960s and early 1970s dissent and seeming paranoia. Much of the evidence of conspiracy to which the novels refer was already within the evidentiary reservoir that conspiracy theorists of the time tapped, and remains so today. Beginning with the subtitle of the ﬁrst novel’s opening chapter (“From Dealey Plaza to Watergate”), Illuminatus! reads like a virtual encyclopedia of conspiracy theory, including references to the Lincoln assassination, the U.S. military’s development of germs for biological warfare, and the ruling elite’s manipulation of public fear through fabricated “threats” of communists in the Cold War and planted rumors of invading aliens in UFOs. The trilogy even extends conspiracy theories’ obsessive excesses of confusing connections and conjectures by referencing other ﬁctional works: a British intelligence agent, code-named 00005, patterns himself on Ian Fielding’s James Bond character; Richard Condon’s novel on mind control, The Manchurian Candidate (1959), is described as the result of an Illuminati information leak of the realities of brainwashing as a military weapon; and different subversive groups share the “Tristero” postal system at the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Ultimately, the trilogy features a dizzying series of references to conspiracy theories real and imagined, rewarding the reader who comes to it with previous knowledge and leading interested “innocent” readers into the realm of deepest suspicion and a vast body of ﬁctional and historical literature. Its references to the John F. Kennedy assassination are particularly telling of the trilogy’s use of “real” conspiratorial events. Early in the ﬁrst novel, Shea and Wilson describe Lee Harvey Oswald’s attempt to shoot Kennedy from the Texas School Book Depository, which is frustrated by shots from the Triple Underpass and the grassy knoll that occur before Oswald has the opportunity to ﬁre (Illuminatus!, 28); the second novel includes a scene that focuses on John Dillinger’s30 attempt to shoot Kennedy on the grassy knoll, which, like Oswald’s, is also frustrated, this time by an unnamed killer who ﬁres before Dillinger has the opportunity (514–16); and ﬁnally, in the “real” solution to the assassination, Hagbard tells Joe Malik that the man who actually committed the assassination of Kennedy was a true “lone-nut” gunman (but not Oswald). Of course, even this ﬁnal “solution” is met with “proper” skepticism, as

170

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

Malik replies: “You sound very convincing, and I almost believe you” (586–87). References to “real” conspiracies might be a central feature of Illuminatus!, but in its often farcical, fantastic play with such conspiracies, the trilogy neither presents a “true” theory nor even identiﬁes the possibility of a ﬁnal, “true” explanation for the unsolved riddle of the JFK assassination. The conspiratorial hermeneutic of “sensing wholes” endlessly defers discovery of the “whole” it seeks; its ongoing play of interpretation ﬁnds its purpose and pleasure in ongoing conjectures about and refusals of a singular truth. For the trilogy’s innocents, the initiation into this hermeneutic is a process of transformation through which one acquires both knowledge and the ability to correctly perceive and interpret the historical, political, and spiritual “real” (such as it is). Speciﬁcally, the adepts continually teach the innocents to question all forms of accepted “reason” and “truth” through manipulation, lies, drugs, induced hallucination, and religious and political instruction. The innocents transform into adepts through a painful learning process because, one character is told, “illumination is on the other side absolute terror. And the only terror that is truly absolute is the horror of realizing that you can’t believe anything that you’ve been told” (278). After hearing Hagbard’s countless contradictory explanations of himself and the plot, Joe Malik complains in frustration to Hagbard Celine, “You’re just an allegory on the universe itself, and every explanation of you and your actions is incomplete. There’ll always be a new, more up-to-date explanation coming along a while later” (695). In such a situation—and again, the reader’s position is analogous to Joe’s, given this dialogue’s position immediately prior to another in a long line of “explanations” of the signiﬁcance of the trilogy’s penultimate scene—the role of the innocent (and the reader) is to ponder, both critically and humorously, a further explanation of the “truth.” If the play of the conspiracy hermeneutic leads to greater knowledge, the ability to see connections between seemingly disparate events is also necessary to save the world. An ongoing dynamic throughout the trilogy concerns the shape and dimension of the larger conspiracy against which the adepts struggle. The conspiracy’s meaning and the alliances among those ﬁghting with and against it change with virtually every contradictory and confusing piece of evidence and explanation. Following the mutating connections between groups and events is so difﬁcult for character and reader alike because the Illuminati have

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

171

created a conspiracy that looks like randomness, an orchestrated plan whose enactment looks like sheer coincidence. Individual pieces of the conspiracy might be visible because, as Simon explains, “It amuses the devil out of [the Illuminati] to conﬁrm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it” (133). Only he, Hagbard, and other associates have the ability to integrate individual pieces into an interpretive framework, and they quite literally save the world by correctly interpreting and acting on that interpretation. As Hagbard says to Joe Malik, “Anybody who tries to describe their operations sounds like a paranoid” (270). But in the trilogy’s world, such paranoia is a necessary pre-condition to the performance of heroic acts. As the trilogy twists and reconﬁgures the mass of ﬁctional evidence and prominent and obscure intertextual references into an ironic catalog of conspiracy theory, this heroically paranoid hermeneutic becomes inexorably linked with humor. Hagbard informs Joe Malik about this central theme of the trilogy in the following exchange: “Trickery is your métier,” Joe [Malik] said bluntly. “You are the Beethoven, the Rockefeller, the Michelangelo of deception. The Shakespeare of the gypsy switch, the two-headed nickel, and the rabbit in the hat. What little liver pills are to Carter, lies are to you. You dwell in a world of trapdoors, sliding panels, and Hindu ropetricks. Do I suspect you? Since I met you, I suspect everybody.” “I’m glad to hear it,” Hagbard grinned. “You are well on your way to paranoia. . . . Just remember: it’s not true unless it makes you laugh. That is the one and sole and infallible test of all ideas that will ever be presented to you.” (250; emphasis in original)

The trilogy’s relentless use of puns, scatological acronyms (BUGGER, “Blowhard’s Unreformed Gangsters, Goons, and Espionage Renegades”; KCUF [note its backward spelling], “Knights of Christianity United in Faith”), and outlandish escapades all place paranoia within a context of laughter. Such is the play of conspiracy; as the Principia Discordia, the “sacred document” of Discordianism, a “text” and “religion” that heavily inﬂuenced Illuminatus!, claims, “The human race will begin solving it’s [sic] problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously. To that end, [Discordianism] proposes the countergame of NONSENSE AS SALVATION. Salvation from an ugly and barbarous existence that is the result of taking order so seriously and so seriously fearing contrary

172

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

orders and disorder, that GAMES are taken as more important than LIFE; rather than taking LIFE AS THE ART OF PLAYING GAMES.”31 Like Discordianism itself, the hermeneutic proposed and enacted by Illuminatus! is nonsense, a type of play meant for fun and pleasure. As Wilson told an interviewer from a publication for conspiracy theorists named Conspiracy Digest, skepticism might be “liberty’s greatest ally,” but “chronic suspiciousness, or suspiciousness without a sense of humor, can be just as blinding and limiting as the naïve submissiveness of the masses.”32 Illuminatus! thus establishes a number of inﬂuential ways of understanding conspiracy: as a form of interpretation, as a form of play, and ultimately as a form of cultural practice that seeks to decipher events in a simultaneously paranoid and humorous way. Reading the trilogy, its prequels, and Wilson’s often similar nonﬁction is itself an enactment of this practice—one that is followed up and extended in other texts and practices that similarly invite audiences to “sense the wholes” as a source of pleasure and play. Playing Conspiracy

A tongue-in-cheek compendium of conspiracy theories titled It’s a Conspiracy!, and authored by the “National Insecurity Council,” includes in its introduction a description of the situation in which its author ﬁrst conceived it: “This book began in France in 1990, when three vacationing American couples met at a dinner party. Knowing nothing about each other, they groped for something to talk about. At ﬁrst the conversation was self-conscious. Then somebody mentioned JFK’s assassination. Suddenly they had a lot in common, and plenty to talk about.”33 Conspiracy has become a parlor game, a kind of trivial pursuit for Americans abroad, a nice way to break the ice at parties.34 On the Internet, such playfulness can become the idea for a Web page. On one site, you can “Make Your Own Conspiracy Theory” in the manner of the children’s travel game Mad Libs, where blindly ﬁlling in blanks under subject headings that ask for personal information, important historical dates, and leading conservative and liberal ﬁgures can enable the Web surfer to create an individualized, tongue-in-cheek right-wing conspiracy.35 This playful aspect of conspiracy theory-mongering was showcased in a 1998 episode of Saturday Night Live, in which an animated short

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

173

offered a half-serious parody of conspiracy theory called “Conspiracy Theory Rock,” modeled on “School House Rock,” an animated educational series for children that aired on ABC during the 1970s and 1980s. “Conspiracy Theory Rock” humorously and self-referentially identiﬁed a conspiracy of media conglomerates (including General Electric, the corporate parent of NBC, which televises Saturday Night Live) that censor the news and spit out propaganda and mindless entertainment. After the short originally appeared, it was cut from reruns of the episode—an action that has itself engendered conspiracy theories.36 In “Conspiracy Theory Rock,” the narrator/ singer, a scruffy long-haired man who hears voices in his head, informs viewers of the dangerous “media-opoly,” mixing fact (corporate scandals surrounding the corporate owners of the broadcast television networks) and ﬁction (the allegation that GE “supplied the bullets that shot JFK”—for which the cartoon footnotes “My Uncle Larry”). The short parodied conspiracy theorists and the crazy stuff they make while suggesting that their theories identify fundamental truths. It also indicated, more cynically but still all in good fun, that the conspiracy always wins: the short inserts its own “Please Stand By” title card to black out purportedly sensitive information about NBC’s corporate parent GE. Anticipating the media-opoly’s censorship, the short both mocks and accepts conspiracy theory’s ultimate defeat. Yet, discussing, studying, documenting, and lamenting conspiracy is not a source of fun solely for the upscale demographic of the author of It’s a Conspiracy! or the lucky SNL viewer who caught “Conspiracy Theory Rock” (or the Web surfer who has since viewed it on YouTube). Two games designed by Steve Jackson Games of Austin, Texas (publisher also of games on time travel, space aliens, and “swashbuckling,” and particularly famous for having the FBI raid its ofﬁce and computers while it was developing a game on cyberpunks), a card game and a role-playing game both named “Illuminati,” enable players not merely to track or discuss but also to enact the practice of conspiracy.37 In these games, conspiracy is at once a frightening aspect of human society about which one should be paranoid and a source of amusement and competition.38 If conspiracy buffs are, in Robert Anton Wilson’s words, “adrenaline freaks”39 in search of the rush or “zap” of adrenaline that Jonathan Vankin has described, these games domesticate the ﬂow of adrenaline through ﬁctional roles and competitive entertainment in which

174

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

participants can indulge their desire to “experience” conspiracy and paranoia for a few hours or for however long a role-playing game runs. The Illuminati card game has relatively clear rules and goals for players: stated simply, the objective is “to take control of the world.”40 Four to six contestants begin the game by drawing and placing facedown on the table one of the eight “Illuminati” cards, each representing a different group engaged in secret competition to take over the world and each referring to a group from conspiracy theories, science ﬁction, or some equally obscure, ironized, subcultural source. The eight Illuminati groups include “The Bavarian Illuminati,” whose goal “is simply raw power;” with its powers and relative invulnerability, it is the strongest such group in the game. In addition, there are “The Gnomes of Zurich,” “Swiss bankers who are reputed to be the money-masters of the world,” and who win by amassing money; “The Discordian Society,” who “seek to bring all the strange and peculiar elements of society under their banner, and especially delight in confusing the ‘straights’ around them”; and “The Servants of Cthulu,” masters of “arcane powers and inhuman forces” whose objective is to destroy other groups. Each Illuminati card rates that group’s powers and income; each player then attempts to use her group’s money and strengths to take over lesser groups (which are described on a different set of cards). The success of a takeover is determined by a roll of dice, and the game proceeds until one Illuminati group either controls a certain number of groups (determined by the number of players in the game) or meets the speciﬁc conditions for victory outlined in the rules. The Illuminati card game, like a conventional board game, has a relatively standard duration (one and a half to three hours, except if players decide to use different types of “advanced rules”), is generally played in one room at one sitting, and its game playing is analogous to “classic” board games such as Risk or Diplomacy.41 Its time- and spaceboundedness make the experience of the card game quite a bit different from GURPS (Generic Universal Roleplaying System) Illuminati. Rather than playing with a set of strict rules and goals, and in a speciﬁc space and for an agreed-upon period of time, in GURPS Illuminati players “become” (at least during those times when they are “playing”) the roles that they choose or are assigned. In addition, there is far less of a prespeciﬁed objective for the players; instead of amassing power, GURPS Illuminati players attempt to gain or protect secret knowledge,

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

175

depending on the roles that they assume. Friends or acquaintances initiate a game on a weekend, at a game playing convention or gathering, or even over postal or electronic mail.42 The role-playing game consists of a game manager, who designs and manages the shape of the conspiracy and information about it and is in charge of deﬁning the players’ roles, and any number of players assuming different character roles outside and/or inside the conspiracy’s power structure. Players can assume the roles of investigators seeking to study and expose the conspiracy (for example, conspiracy theorists, historians, journalists), members of groups that play a subordinate role in the conspiracy (the military, law enforcement), or members of competing conspiratorial groups that control vast resources and subordinate groups, and seek some larger, secret goal. Obviously, the more people who participate as players, the more complex and interesting the game; the more people the manager can get involved in the “conspiracy”— such as the person who is not formally in the game but is recruited by the manager to divulge to an unsuspecting player a piece of information that becomes crucial to the game—the more engrossing the action. Although players and the game manager can use the Illuminati card game as a reference, and a game of GURPS Illuminati will most likely take suggestions from a book published by Steve Jackson Games for groups, roles, and tactics with which to play,43 much of the pleasure of role-playing games, and particularly of playing Illuminati, comes from its amorphous, anarchic play, and its relative freedom from set rules and from the limitations of space and time associated with board games. The game manager “authors” at least the framework and contours of the game, yet her role is far more interactive and improvisational than the printed rules that govern the card game. Indeed, the very notion of assuming “roles” in tracking, ﬁghting, and possibly becoming part of a “conspiracy” within a role-playing game is a far different practice from that of “winning” the card game. If “playing” conspiracy is about the creation of fear, dread, and a kind of manufactured paranoia, as well as quest, interpretation, and knowledge, then “experiencing” these emotions and practices in a “role” that threatens to infuse the player’s everyday life—and often succeeds in doing so—becomes a more affectively engaging and resonant form of play. The role-playing game, in other words, enables players to “become” a character in a conspiracy narrative (hence the importance of the connections between the Illuminati game

176

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

and the Illuminatus! trilogy)—a “ﬁctional” (that is, not real) enactment of a ﬁctional representation. Indeed, the link between the Illuminati game and the conspiracy narrative is an important one for players and manager alike. The GURPS book describes the game manager’s introduction of the basic rule structure to players in this way: Most introductions to the Illuminati depend on the “pyramid of evidence.” The [game manager] leads them into things slowly, dropping very minor hints that there are mysteries behind the facade of the normal. The [players] can ﬁnd clues that at ﬁrst seem to have nothing to do with the current adventure. Only when they follow up on these clues do they start to learn the true nature of the world around them, and the existence of the Conspiracy. One clue leads to another, and each new adventure builds on the previous one. Characters can start off as innocents, totally unaware of the Illuminati’s existence, then ﬁnd that they’ve become pawns of the Conspiracy. As they peel one level of the “truth” after another, they can penetrate deeper into the structure, until they become conspirators themselves. (GURPS Illuminati, 46–47)

The manager thus serves as the “author” of an interactive classical conspiracy narrative. The GURPS book suggests that the manager either create a “pregenerated” power structure, in which she plans the conspiracy’s architecture with care before the game’s inception, or employ a more “improvised” method, reacting to the players’ moves and strategies as they develop. Groups control vast resources, have a speciﬁc purpose (gaining power, destroying certain enemies, etc.), and enjoy control over various subordinate groups. The GURPS book also lays out a series of “requirements” for the successful game manager, emphasizing that the manager should “maintain an ongoing sense of mystery and paranoia” by gradually but continually revealing pieces of knowledge while postponing the ability of players to see the entire conspiracy (GURPS Illuminati, 10–11). The conventions of the conspiracy narrative and its accompanying interpretive practices are thus in play within an openended game format: the characters search for knowledge and need to interpret pieces of evidence within an all-encompassing framework; they suffer an ongoing crisis of agency as they begin to recognize the limitations of their knowledge and action in their insertion into the context of a seemingly all-encompassing conspiracy; their longing to know and to act is frustrated by a world that makes full knowledge and

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

177

agency impossible; they experience a quickening velocity of global and even interstellar intrigue and complex events; and they operate in the midst of a conspiracy that resists and exceeds closure. As all-knowing author, the manager not only constructs a conspiracy narrative, then, but also reconstructs the precise power relations of which the game is a representation at the level of “designing” a “conspiracy.” In a game of Illuminati, one individual, albeit known to and approved by all, creates and controls secret knowledge. In “playing” conspiracy, players submit to a particular relationship to knowledge (controlled by the game manager and kept from the players) and to power (held outside the game by the manager and within the game by any players whose characters are part of the game’s ruling group or groups) that corresponds to the arrangement of conspiratorial power. To “play” conspiracy, in short, one must submit to conspiracy. One passage from the GURPS book, describing the ability of the manager to “alter the memories” of one or more players (that is, the manager can tell a player that something that her “character” remembers from the game was not real but a ﬁgment of her character’s imagination), illustrates this relationship between manager and players quite well: “This is a particularly twisted ploy to spring on a player. Remember, in a roleplaying game the player’s memory equates to the [role’s] memory; it’s the [manager] who decides on what reality is, and that reality might not match either the player’s or the character’s memory” (118). This mental state seems to approach clinical paranoia—not only can the subject not protect her memory from the other, she cannot fully trust it herself. But it is a highly constructed form of “paranoia” that takes shape within the conventions and structures of the role-playing game narrative. The role of the manager is to create this “paranoia”; the pleasure of the roleplayer is to experience “paranoia” as play, and the correct strategy of the role-player is to enact “paranoia.” The challenge and pleasure of GURPS Illuminati inhere not merely in “playing the game” and researching conspiracy, but also in the more formalistic arrangement of ﬁnishing the story as the manager has written it, gaining the knowledge and defusing the power over knowledge that the manager controls. The players’ motivation is to solve the conspiracy by uncovering the secrets constructed by its author, and the role of the manager/author is to construct/write a power structure/ narrative that continually postpones its solution. This returns us to the

178

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

central problems of resolving the conspiratorial narrative and ending the interpretive practice of conspiracy theory: If the joy is in the play, how can one continually postpone the game’s ending? This is the issue discussed in the section of the GURPS book titled “Victory in an Illuminated Campaign:” Players use to other role-playing environments and genres will probably have a view of “victory” that is totally impractical in an illuminated campaign. If the Illuminati are really monstrous spiders in a web of intrigue, you can’t defeat them. You can only soldier on, struggling to reveal one more layer of the conspiracy, while staying one small step ahead of those who would destroy (or co-opt) you. . . . Of course—especially if the [manager] sees the Illuminati as a set of squabbling power groups, rather than a monolithic bloc—it could be possible to defeat some of the Secret Masters. And that could make a satisfying ending to the campaign. But if the Illuminati are vanquished, another group is sure to slip into their position. (“The Illuminati are dead; long live the Illuminati.”) It’s possible that the [players] themselves will become the “new” Illuminati, and may ﬁnd themselves acting in the same way as the “original” conspirators. (13)

This restates and enacts the dilemma of the conspiracy theorist in a condensed form. The end of the narrative/game is at once impossible (“you can’t defeat them,” although you can gain knowledge about and perhaps defeat “some of the Secret Masters,” or even “become” one of “them”) and, even as an artiﬁcial form of narrative closure, its potential marks the end of the pleasure of reading and writing the narrative. Of course, the game’s possibilities are endless: at the conclusion of one game, players and manager can immediately begin planning a new one, while any individual game, through a little rearranging of power structure/ narrative, can easily become an endless serial. The game’s conclusion merely inspires the participant to resume playing it as soon as possible, in order to postpone the “cure” for paranoia because it’s so much fun. Conspiracy, Laughter, and Play

Wilson’s work and the play of the Illuminati games present conspiracy theory as a “rush,” a form of play, and a source of pleasure as readers and participants assume an ironic and almost mischievous distance from the “paranoid” situation of the characters and roles with which they identify. This conception and practice of conspiracy theory suggests

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

179

there is delight in that which is constituted as the marginal, the sick, the apocalyptic. Illuminatus! revels in the carnivalesque of sex and drugs, associating conspiracy and paranoia with a nostalgic representation of the grand collective party of the 1960s—possibly a historically accurate assertion, but pushed in this case to absurd limits—while the Illuminati role-playing game creates a world in which paranoid fears are not only “rational” but a necessary part of a player’s strategy in a world where control over the game’s narrative lies elsewhere. This is not conspiracy theory as, say, the John Birch Society or Kennedy assassination researchers conceive it, in which some past historical moment has been tragically lost because of the machinations of a secret, evil group and must be regained. Instead, this is conspiracy reﬁgured as a transhistorical structure infusing all of human experience, past, present, and future and experienced anew as a positively invigorating experience. Play has transformed the manically depressive pessimism of conspiracy theory into a recreational outing through an ironic, cynical detachment from its dystopian implications. This detachment is a rich, contradictory response both to fears of conspiracy and to the present political order. Without necessarily believing any single conspiracy theory—even, arguably, without adopting conspiracy theory as epistemology—Wilson readers and Illuminati players nonetheless celebrate and assume the perspective of the conspiracy theorist. This is a form of what Peter Sloterdijk has termed “cynical reasoning,” an enlightened false consciousness that is aware of the ideological practice in which it engages while engaging in it nonetheless: “It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably has not been able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reﬂexively buffered.”44 These forms and practices of conspiracy theory revel in powerlessness, seeking to recapture lost control through revelatory fantasies and role-playing carnivals that infuse a hip, pseudo-“paranoia” with an enervating sense of fun. They are based on the simultaneous acknowledgment and enjoyment of misery and powerlessness. As Žižek notes, “Cynical distance is just one way—one of many ways—to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things

180

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”45 Yet, in its utopian moments, playing conspiracy is also a populist rejection of ofﬁcial historical and political understanding through irony and excess, a cheeky, indulgent strategy that delivers anarchic belly laughs to knowing players and exposes ofﬁcial, dominant political ideologies as banal covers for the brutality of power. More broadly, the joy of plunging headlong into conspiracy theory and “paranoia” illustrates the pleasures of active interpretation and the conspiracy narrative, even for those who do so without the irony of gamers and Illuminatus! readers. Tugging on the semiotic slack of politics in an all-encompassing search for clues allows the conspiracy theorist to leave the quotidian, even if only for a while. The theorist learns and then knows what is unknown, and can read and then tell the untold story. Even without the cynical distance that can imagine conspiracy but keep it at bay, the enjoyment of conspiracy’s practices is as thrilling as the fear of its actuality. The psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic critic François Roustang argues that laughter provides a signiﬁcant ﬁrst step toward a cure for clinical paranoia in that it represents “the smallest conceivable unit of detachment, of difference, of removal” from a life lived in fear of the other that the paranoiac has created. The analysand can begin to construct an identity, a sense of limits, a territory, by constructing a distance from which to view with laughter the all-consuming threat that her individuality and sense of self face from an imagined, inﬁltrating enemy.46 Such laughter—working in, around, and against the most totalitarian of political possibilities—can allow for what Dick Hebdige proposes when he writes, “We may have to learn to laugh our way around whatever sense of dread and crisis may afﬂict us.”47 Laughter serves as a strategy, in other words, not only of self-realization and healing but of survival. When conspiracy seems possible, when conspiracy theory’s interpretive machinery seems a rational response to a context in which political and economic power are always elsewhere, one must learn to laugh and play, to ﬁnd a point of ironic and critical distance from what at least feels like a rotten present. Furthermore, the play and laughter of these types of practices constitute some degree of carnivalesque disruption of political order. The Rabelaisian carnival has historically worked as a signiﬁcant cultural and political transgression of the ordered distinctions between categories such as high and low, and popular and dominant, and serves as a

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

181

source of social renewal, a practice that could be used to challenge and destroy older orders.48 The carnival’s material excesses and degradations constructed the body “not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life, but as something universal, representing all the people. As such it is opposed to the severance from the material and bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and body. . . . The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable.”49 Illuminatus! reconsiders and ironizes the entirety of the social and political order as conspiracy, ﬁnding in its intellectual exercise an analogy to the carnivalesque’s corporeal gluttony, similarly disrupting notions of separate spheres of public/private, political/cultural, and so on. In its excesses and role playing, conspiracy theory as play represents an attempt to break free from the quotidian humdrum as well as from normative, bourgeois subjectivity, and to move toward an ongoing, allencompassing game made up of alliances of liberating and liberated coconspirators. In transgressing, and thus “resisting,” dominant political interpretations, Illuminatus! and the Illuminati games subvert the “consensus” interpretation of history and the “rational,” sane interpretation of everyday life and politics. Live as though someone were really out to get you and the rest of the world becomes an object of desire, a transgression of boundaries between center and margin, sane and irrational, serious and ironic. Indeed, the “poetics” of such transgression constitutes a far more signiﬁcant domain than mere subcultural subversion. The carnivalesque transgression of playing conspiracy as a practice of popular cultural politics, as with the carnivalesque in the popular culture of the subjugated classes of the Middle Ages, takes on “a symbolic role in bourgeois culture out of all proportion to [its] actual social importance,” because “what is excluded at the overt level of identity-formation is productive of new objects of desire.”50 The acceptance of political “consensus,” participation in the pluralist exercises of political elections and interest groups, and so on constitute the norm of establishment politics—they are what the good citizen does. Playing conspiracy mediates between these dominant modes of political engagement and the radical populist skepticism

182

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

of which conspiracy theory is a non-necessary but signiﬁcant element. Such radical skepticism about the democratic, equitable distribution of power and capital is itself an ofﬁcial Other to the dominant political identity of proper citizenship. At the level of the political unconscious, conspiracy theory occupies and embraces a site of “disgust, fear and desire,” of “degraded” popular politics.51 This is not, however, an entirely satisfactory account of conspiracy theory’s social and political effects. Playing and enjoying conspiracy theory may to an extent challenge norms of understanding and engaging power, but it also quite often cynically abandons profound political realities and merely reafﬁrms the dominant political order. Although a source of populist pleasure, conspiracy theory substitutes fears of all-powerful conspiratorial groups for political engagement and hope. Even Illuminatus!, which posits a utopian collective of right- and leftlibertarians, allows for little in the way of democratic, political activity; in order to effect change or ﬁght the forces of evil in Wilson’s trilogy, as well as the Illuminati board game, one must join a small group of experts in law, politics, sex, drugs, and the occult. In other words, to ﬁght the conspiracy one must form another conspiracy. The Illuminati role-playing game shrinks the basic unit of resistance even further, to an individualist, pessimistic vision of “resistance.” “Victory” is virtually impossible, as is a challenge to the larger “conspiracy.” One’s best hope is to gain knowledge of the larger narrative that controls the player. Political engagement is an illusion, an endemic disappointment, an impossible instrument that will inevitably fail to affect change through either individual or collective effort.52 Viewed this way, the carnivalesque of conspiracy theory appears merely ideological, or at least misplaced, as the populist political engagement it suggests is largely dissipated in the pursuit of phantoms— whether in the play of conspiracy games or in the pleasures of the serious practice of interpreting and narrating conspiracy. Danny Casolaro and the Collective True Crime Narrative

This is not to deny the seriousness of conspiracy theory or its practitioners. For believers, the lone, heroic investigator willing to sacriﬁce his career, and even his life, serves as the reference point through which interpretation, narrative, politics, and, ultimately, community ﬂow. Resistance to the conspiracy begins (and often ends) with the work of

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

183

one extraordinary person who is able to interpret disparate events and reveal hidden treachery correctly in order to bring about the salvation of some vulnerable entity, usually the nation or all humanity. This ﬁgure is as integral to the “real” world of conspiracy theorists as he or she is to conspiracy ﬁction; the individual researcher—such as Bruce Roberts of A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File, Lyndon LaRouche, and Mae Brussell—functions for his or her followers in the same way that the tireless hero represents and effects the restoration of proper political order in ﬁctional representations. One of the most resonant such ﬁgures within the conspiracy community in the past two decades has been Danny Casolaro, a virtually unknown investigative journalist who was found dead in a motel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in August 1991. While conducting research on a relatively obscure, alleged wrongdoing by the U.S. Justice Department under Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, Casolaro became convinced that he had uncovered evidence pointing to a series of secret interlocking scandals, including the funding of the Nicaraguan contra rebels through arms sales to Iraq that constituted the major parts of the Iran–contra scandal, and the “October Surprise,” an illegal deal made with Iranian hostage holders by members of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign to delay the release of American hostages until after Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter.53 Prior to his death, Casolaro had told friends and colleagues that his research had uncovered a cabal of secret groups, which he provocatively termed the “octopus”—the conspiracy whose tentacles seemed to reach everywhere. Purportedly close to ﬁnding evidence that would conclusively prove the existence of the octopus, Casolaro was, according to suspicious friends, family, and conspiracy theorists, “suicided”—murdered in a way that looked like self-inﬂicted asphyxiation. The conspiracy community’s reporting and discussion of Casolaro, his research, and his death demonstrate the power of this lone ﬁgure, whose murder signiﬁed a premature and unsatisfactory ending to the narrative of his life and work. In the years following his death, Casolaro has become a point of identiﬁcation for conspiracy theorists, a ﬁgure who left the realm of theoretical speculation—the play in which conspiracy theorists indulge their well-developed interpretive skills—and found himself the main character in a drama from which he could no longer distance himself. His research, presumed to have reached a point

184

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

close to realization, and his life, presumed to have ended just before he could attain his goal of uncovering the octopus, represent the peculiar completion of the conspiracy narrative, the tragic realization of conspiracy’s desire: the knowledge that never fully arrives, the resolution that never fully closes. For the conspiracy communities that memorialize him, Danny Casolaro has come to represent the promise and danger of conspiracy theory, the perils that the mortal body faces as it enters into the politics, narrative, and interpretation of conspiracy. The scandal that Casolaro initially pursued concerned Inslaw, a company that designed computer software for law enforcement. Inslaw had developed a powerful program named PROMIS that would enable prosecutors to track thousands of defendants and cases in the criminal justice system across the United States. Originally a nonproﬁt company supported by grants from a federal law-enforcement agency, Inslaw later went private and worked as an outside contractor for the Justice Department on a specially enhanced version of the software. The version developed under this contract was eventually installed in twenty U.S. attorneys’ ofﬁces across the country. The Department of Justice refused to pay the company for its work, however, leading Inslaw to ﬁle for bankruptcy. Bill and Nancy Hamilton, founders and owners of Inslaw, have alleged that PROMIS had been pirated by Earl Brian, a friend of Attorney General Edwin Meese, and sold abroad, becoming an integral part of legal and illegal surveillance programs run by American intelligence services. The Hamiltons assert that Brian ﬁrst attempted and failed to purchase Inslaw and then proceeded to steal the company’s main asset. Meese protected Brian’s theft and forced the Justice Department to refuse payment to Inslaw for the software that the company had developed.54 More recently, allegations have surfaced claiming that American and Israeli intelligence agencies inserted a “Trojan horse” in the program before giving it to foreign intelligence services and banks, enabling the Americans and Israelis to covertly retrieve information collected and inputted into the program.55 A different tale, reported originally by The Washington Times, suggests that FBI mole Robert Hanssen secretly and illegally sold the PROMIS software to Russian intelligence, which in turn sold it to Osama Bin Laden.56 The Hamiltons have been indefatigable but unsuccessful in their efforts to pursue compensation from the Justice Department. Inslaw sued the Justice Department, initially winning a $6.8 million-dollar

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

185

decision in bankruptcy court that was upheld in 1989 by a federal district court.57 A federal court of appeals dismissed the case on technical grounds in 1991, however, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear any of Inslaw’s further appeals of the appellate court’s rulings.58 A Senate subcommittee, chaired by Sam Nunn (D-Georgia), concluded in 1989 that the Hamiltons’ claims of victimization by the Justice Department had merit, and chastised the Department’s stonewalling and efforts to intimidate witnesses.59 The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, chaired by Representative Jack Brooks (D-Texas), concurred with the Nunn Committee’s report, complaining that the Justice Department “delayed and hindered Congressional inquiries into the Inslaw matter over several years” and calling for the Justice Department to settle Inslaw’s claims fairly and immediately. Brooks’s committee also recommended that the Justice Department initiate an independent investigation into Inslaw’s most troubling allegations about the theft of PROMIS and high-level governmental corruption. However, Department of Justice Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, appointed by Bush Attorney General William Barr, found “no credible evidence” that Brian and Justice ofﬁcials conspired to steal the software.60 The Hamiltons subsequently complained about the “secret” preparation of Bua’s report and the fact that they had no opportunity to examine or question the evidence, but to no avail, and federal investigations into their more sensational allegations effectively ended.61 In May 1995, the U.S. Senate passed Senate Resolution 114, which would have ﬁnally put the Inslaw case before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, and which also contained provisions to compensate the Hamiltons should the court rule in their favor. Further, the resolution granted Inslaw full subpoena power to investigate its claims.62 Unfortunately for the Hamiltons, the Court of Claims ruled in the government’s favor, ﬁnding that the Justice Department neither acted in bad faith nor violated any of Inslaw’s proprietary or contract rights.63 The procedural history of the Inslaw litigation is quite arcane, but many of the allegations concerning why the Justice Department refused to pay Inslaw, what happened to the software, and the results of various investigations into the fate of the company and its computer program were incorporated into spectacular charges of corruption and conspiracy beginning in the mid- to late-1980s. The “Inslaw case” had been a public concern of some in the conspiracy community since before

186

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

Casolaro’s death (radio talk show host Dave Emory, whose show One Step Beyond was carried at the time on KFJC in northern California and syndicated to other public and community radio stations, had associated Inslaw with Iran–Contra and other scandals just a week prior to the discovery of Casolaro’s body), but over time the dead journalist’s body has become just as important in many conspiracy theorists’ discussions of Inslaw as the scandal itself. The mystery lingers: What did he know, what was he working on, and who was he meeting in Martinsburg, West Virginia—home of the national computer center of the Internal Revenue Service and less than two hours west of Washington, D.C.—on the night that he died?64 The question was important enough to warrant at least cursory investigation by Congress, as the Brooks Committee of the House of Representatives made note of Casolaro’s death in its report on the theft of PROMIS. Although the committee came to no conclusions about the cause, it did characterize the circumstances surrounding the alleged suicide as suspicious.65 Danny Casolaro had been chief reporter and, brieﬂy, owner of the Washington-based trade publication Computer Age. With some previous experience in conspiracy-related investigations (in the late 1970s he had investigated some of the alternative explanations of Watergate), his transition from computer reporter to investigative journalist/conspiracy researcher and the expansion of his investigation from computer software threat and governmental abuse to the shadowy and conspiratorial power of the “octopus” were relatively quick and complete. As a 1993 proﬁle in Spy magazine described, Casolaro had become obsessed in ways that committed conspiracy researchers know only too well: “He worked on [his investigation] 16 hours a day, staying on the phone past midnight, sleeping only 2 or 3 hours a night, talking with quasi-spooks and bona ﬁde spies, chasing leads, always enlarging his vision of the Octopus.”66 One of Casolaro’s most important sources was Michael Riconosciuto, a computer programmer with some experience in clandestine work (allegedly for the CIA) and with a reputation among skeptics and critics of conspiracy theory for embellishing his stories with fanciful fabrications. Riconosciuto has claimed that allowing Earl Brian to steal PROMIS and protecting him from prosecution was a payoff from Edwin Meese for Brian’s assistance in the “October Surprise” negotiations. As articles in both mainstream and conspiracy-related periodicals have revealed, Casolaro followed the trail from Inslaw

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

187

through the “October Surprise” and into covert arms dealing during the Reagan administration (particularly to the contras), the collapse of the savings and loan industry, and a multiplicity of illegal abuses allegedly perpetrated by the CIA. Casolaro appears to have relied on shady sources for his research—a necessity, conspiracy researchers (as well as investigative reporters) maintain, given the shadowy worlds they are studying, but one that prompts criticism from outsiders. Although Casolaro had developed contacts besides Michael Riconosciuto—including, according to some reports, federal law enforcement and intelligence sources, as well as at least one source with connections to organized crime—Riconosciuto’s name and questionable credibility often arise in connection to Casolaro. Riconosciuto is accused of lying or stretching the truth toward the fantastic, and he was arrested on drug charges, which, he and his defenders claim, were ﬁled in retaliation for his testifying before the Brooks Committee’s investigation of Inslaw. Casolaro had fallen into the paranoiac netherworld of conspiracy theory, Chip Berlet (see chapter 2) has argued, with a dubious notion of the “octopus” built on information from faulty, conspiracy-obsessed sources.67 Unfortunately for Casolaro’s friends and supporters, his notes and ﬁles disappeared from his hotel room, leaving little evidence to evaluate his research beyond family and friends’ recollections of discussions with him about his work, and a brief, rejected book proposal that contains neither evidence nor sources.68 The very lack of “hard” evidence in Casolaro’s life and death produces an excess of signiﬁcation for the conspiracy community. This is particularly the case in the attempts by conspiracy theorists and Casolaro’s friends to unravel the mysteries of his murder. The two clues that seem to implicate foul play most clearly are Casolaro’s missing ﬁles of notes and references, which his friends and family say he never left unattended, and the fact that local authorities allowed or ordered his corpse to be embalmed without the authority of his family and before they had even been notiﬁed of his death (illegal in the state of West Virginia), which virtually destroyed the chances for an accurate autopsy. In addition, paramedics and police on the scene, assuming the cause of death to be suicide (his wrists were cut and there was a plastic bag secured around his head with rubber bands), bungled evidence necessary for a murder investigation. Family and

188

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

friends question whether Casolaro, apparently in good spirits prior to leaving for West Virginia, would have killed himself; they also have doubts about a terse suicide note that seemed out of character for a verbose writer.69 Short of a confession, the mystery of Casolaro’s death will remain a narrative that will not reach full closure, his prematurely embalmed corpse a body that refuses to disappear. Coupled with his investigation, Casolaro’s dead body makes him a particularly compelling ﬁgure among conspiracy researchers precisely for what it is not able to speak. The signs of Casolaro’s murder and the conspiracy he attempted to uncover have resounded throughout the conspiracy community, where accounts of both appeared in virtually every conspiracy-related forum in the months following his death. The fanzine Paranoia reprinted an article on Casolaro from the Liberty Lobby’s publication, The Spotlight, on the third page of its premiere issue, and Steamshovel Press editor/ publisher Kenn Thomas wrote several articles and a book (republished in a revised edition in 2004) that make bold and fanciful connections between Casolaro and conspiracies hither and yon, including: elements of the JFK assassination (because through Casolaro’s sources in the Gambino crime family he apparently was able to meet with E. Howard Hunt, who some in the research community implicate in the Kennedy assassination); Watergate (through Hunt’s involvement in the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist ofﬁce and in the bugging of the Democratic National Committee); Lee Harvey Oswald himself, who links to Casolaro in a number of nebulous ways, the most prominent being that, “in lieu of all the facts, the best speculation makes both look like hapless patsies in a game of control played by larger, more invisible forces;”70 the foreign banks Banco Nazionale del Lavoro and Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), and thus the illegal arming of Iraq and Saddam Hussein before the ﬁrst Persian Gulf War; then-governor Bill Clinton’s alleged assistance in covering up the use of a small airport in Mena, Arkansas, for drug and gun smuggling as part of the Reagan White House’s efforts to aid the Contras in Nicaragua; and, ﬁnally, the cover-up of information concerning UFOs, to which Casolaro was connected through his investigation of an alleged factional split in the intelligence community, one side of which appeared in memoranda “ostensibly documenting the retrieval of aliens” from a legendary UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.71

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

189

An article on A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File (see chap. 4) nicely places Casolaro at the end of an extended and extensive conspiracy narrative: Industry discovered in its infancy that a domestic population can be colonized as lucratively as a foreign one. Urbanization served the crude necessities of industry, while destroying long-established social structures as basic as the family. Transforming the nation into a protector of corporate rights over and above citizen’s [sic] rights has made-over the national character as an extension of industrial domestic colonization. The promise of a “new world order” arising from the dust in the dried-up sea of promises has been signed with the inky deception of a ﬂeeing, multi-legged cephalopod. Freedom lovers intrepid enough to challenge the veil of secrecy for a glimpse of the truth as it writhes in the clutches of an American shadow government in the employ of organized corporate criminals often as not die premature and mysterious deaths. Enter and as quickly exit Joseph Daniel Casolaro.72

On his radio show a week after Casolaro’s death, Dave Emory connected Casolaro’s “political assassination” to an entire postwar history of such events: Whenever a major investigation breaks with regard to the intelligence community, it is always followed and accompanied by a wave of very mysterious deaths. This has been the case in so many different investigations that we’ve looked at in the past: the Iran–Contra investigation, Edwin Wilson’s trials, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and other people, . . . a massive series of deaths in connection to the investigation of the Vatican banking scandals and the other machinations relevant to the Propaganda Due Lodge, a bogus Masonic lodge in Italy that became a cryptofascist government for Italy and was inextricably linked with NATO. Unfortunately, as I’ve said, this country has given itself for so long to the obviously incorrect view that we do not have political assassinations that it makes it very difﬁcult for anyone to approach a tragic death like Joseph Daniel Casolaro’s [with] any kind of objective framework.73

The grand narrative of instrumental power, brutal exploitation, sensational murder, political scandal—all were linked to Danny Casolaro’s death. Originally one of those engaged in uncovering these linkages, Casolaro himself became immortalized in the conspiracy community’s

190

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

evolving narrative as one of conspiracy’s most recent victims and mysterious pieces of evidence. Kenn Thomas’s description of the circumstances surrounding the murder scene and investigation in fact assumes that Casolaro was a victim of conspiracy’s insatiable and inevitable appropriation of everything. “The all-to-familiar [sic] pattern, of course, brings to mind the dictum that if They control the coroner, They control the city. . . . Most of Casolaro’s notes and his manuscript disappeared, to [sic], naturally.”74 The “familiar,” the “natural”—where else would such events become not merely possible, not merely probable, but certain, except in the narrative structures of conspiracy? Indeed, Casolaro’s corpse appears to bring the “octopus” to life, offering evidence more palpable than mere theory, as a radio host on WBAI, a leftist community radio station in New York City, stated one month after the reporter’s death: “[This story] is just so amazing, because it really started with a blurb in the New York Times that said a reporter looking into a case was found dead. And now we’re talking about people who were involved in the so-called ‘Secret Team’ [a term used most often by the Christic Institute in its failed lawsuit against a number of ﬁgures in the U.S. government], the ‘Octopus,’ almost like a secret government in the United States.”75 Constructing a narrative that would include such descriptions was, apparently, not foreign to Casolaro himself. A book titled Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (1993), published by Adam Parfrey’s Feral House (which also produced Apocalypse Culture), included the ﬁrst publication since Casolaro’s death of the journalist’s book proposal (which at the time of his death Casolaro was calling Behold, a Pale Horse, after two verses in the Book of Revelation). In it Casolaro wrote: An international cabal whose freelance services cover parochial political intrigue, espionage, sophisticated weapon technologies that include biotoxins, drug trafﬁcking, money laundering and murderfor-hire has emerged from an isolated desert Indian reservation just north of Mexicali. . . . I propose a series of articles and a book, a true crime narrative, that unravels this web of thugs and thieves who roam the earth with their weapons and their murders, trading dope and dirty money for the secrets of the temple. Behold, A Pale Horse will be a haunting odyssey that depicts a manifesto of deceit, decisions of conscience, good and evil, intrigue and betrayal. . . .

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

191

Possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth, and while [the] allegations [of conspiracy] by a handful of people are indeed remarkable, they are also wrought with undocumentable details—at least thus far[—]and veils of deniability masking the necessary spine for a traditional journalistic effort. It is for this reason that Behold, A Pale Horse is subtitled A True Crime Narrative.76

Reading this proposal today, a reader cannot help but offer a new ending, one consistent with the conspiracy narrative it employs: Casolaro lies dead in the bathroom of a West Virginia hotel room, killed by the very octopus he proposed to describe. Casolaro’s demise thus has meaning, signifying the possibility of a tragic ending to the conspiracy narrative. Perhaps the best statement of the inspiring meaning of Casolaro’s death comes from a freelance reporter and friend of Casolaro, who stated in an interview on WBAI: Well, I think what has to happen is exactly what Danny Casolaro intended to happen. And that is to understandably tie all of these events together because they are, in fact, all linked. And only under those conditions—and if our Congress and our Senators regain their intestinal fortitude to do their job (and I don’t mean just [give] themselves pay raises, but actually monitor what’s going on within the judiciary and within the executive branches of government, as they are supposed to do to maintain our balance of power), maybe then the citizens can rely upon obtaining some answers.77

All of these extensive narratives and explications of Casolaro, as well as Kenn Thomas’s description of Inslaw’s PROMIS as “the software that ﬁgured prominently in events leading to the suspicious death of writer Danny Casolaro in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991,”78 come to signify Casolaro’s role in Inslaw (or vice versa)—and, more important, as his story has circulated, Casolaro’s role in the conspiracy community itself. Casolaro only became signiﬁcant when he was stitched into the narrative of conspiracy; before that, he was just another investigative reporter who had stumbled onto the trail of a conspiracy. Having died under suspicious circumstances, Casolaro’s death and life can now be viewed alongside his book proposal, enabling what might otherwise have seemed a generic, even hackneyed, conspiracy theory to take on an aura of the real—notwithstanding Casolaro’s own acknowledgement that his “true crime” story was “undocumentable” and “narrative” (and thus perhaps more than real).

192

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

Having entered into the domain of conspiracy, Casolaro has become public property, a collective narrative with which all members can identify that has survived and even thrived on the Internet. This began during the period immediately after Casolaro’s death. Articles on Inslaw and Casolaro that had appeared in such periodicals as the Village Voice, Barron’s, and the Napa Sentinel (a northern California community newspaper that ran an extensive investigative series on Inslaw) were transcribed and posted along with transcriptions of radio interviews with such prominent ﬁgures as Bill Hamilton of Inslaw, Michael Riconosciuto, and the Napa Sentinel’s Harry Martin. During this period, conspiracy theorists and people who learned of the story engaged in widespread, vibrant discussions of Casolaro and his work on the USENET newsgroup alt.conspiracy, at the time one of the most important online sites for discussion of conspiracy.79 Invoking Casolaro, some regular contributors to alt.conspiracy in early 1992 began to discuss potential alliances within the conspiracy “community” that could be built through the Internet and USENET. Suggestions that people holding differing theories could at least come together in opposition to a common enemy were not infrequent on alt.conspiracy during this period, but in February 1992 the notion that “the net” itself could provide the structure for conspiracy investigation as a political practice of resistance took on new meaning. Had Danny Casolaro been on “the net,” one contributor reasoned, and had he been aware of the ability to circulate information through it and use it to make contacts with other researchers and interested parties, he might have been able to further his investigation and better protect himself and his work before his death. Perhaps, the writer suggested, creating a “Casolaronet” and a “Danny Casolaro Foundation for Online Journalism,” while it seemed a “pipe dream,” could enable the spirit, if not the body, of the dead journalist to live on.80 Having begun as the archetypal lone researcher, following a trail of interpretation and composing a narrative, Casolaro had emerged, after death, as a linchpin for discussion of collective action, a ﬁgure around which conspiracy theorists could build a network for information distribution and sharing ideas, and a means to provide mutual protection. And the interest in Casolaro remains alive. A Google search of his name still returns numerous articles, largely on Web sites related to conspiracy theory on Inslaw and Casolaro, both because of the proliferating

PLOTTING THE RUSH

|

193

connections between his research and more recent conspiracy theories and because PROMIS allegedly can be used to augment the government’s already powerful surveillance capabilities.81 Perhaps not surprisingly, Casolaro’s research, theories, and death have even been connected to what has become, since his death, the seminal event of conspiracy theory, the 9/11 attacks.82 More strangely, Jim Keith, one of the co-authors of a book on Casolaro and a longtime ﬁgure within conspiracy theory circles, died in 1999 under mysterious circumstances (he had entered the hospital for routine emergency surgery to repair a broken leg and died of a blood clot that traveled from his leg to his lungs), demonstrating to the conspiracy community again that its active members engage in perilous work.83 As one leading ﬁgure of the UFO research community noted when forwarding a message he had received about Keith’s death to the UFOmind e-mail list, “Perhaps the highest accomplishment of any conspiracy researcher is to die under ‘mysterious circumstances.’”84 Gallows humor, to be sure, but this is a knowing recognition that Keith, like Casolaro, was onto something—as are, by implication, their friends and colleagues in the conspiracy community. The death and life of Danny Casolaro thus demonstrate that conspiracy theorists use the Internet not merely to distribute information and ideas, but also as a forum for the formulation of political and cultural practice. In the circulation of his legend, Danny Casolaro has become a public ﬁgure for others prepared to enter the conspiracy metanarrative of which he had unwittingly become a part. Participants in these discussions of Casolaro’s work and death are not (as the diverse and competing theories circulated in print, on television and radio, and through computer modems demonstrate) political activists able to form alliances and a cohesive group in order to advance a speciﬁc agenda.85 Rather, Casolaro could draw together divergent theories and cantankerous theorists by the lack of speciﬁc knowledge of what exactly he was working on: his voice silenced, his notes missing, all that was left to speak is his corpse. In the circumstances in which it was found, his corpse ﬁt quite well into the popular conspiracy narrative and thus into one of the few aspects of the conspiracy “community” that is truly shared and collective: its mythology of a simple antagonism between “the people” and the ever-elusive, ever-conspiratorial power bloc. Casolaro’s signiﬁcance, ultimately, is his position as a tragic ﬁgure of almost mythical quality that is at the same time recognizable as the average conspiracy researcher.

194

|

PLOTTING THE RUSH

This resemblance makes his stumble upon his “octopus” that much more thrilling and frightening, and makes his corpse the object upon which multiple speculative theories and a “community” can be built. The approach offered in this part has developed means to understand conspiracy theory that are informed by Hofstadter’s insight into the cultural aspects of populist fears of conspiracy, but without the burden of the pathology model Hofstadter used both to explain those fears’ causes and to exclude them from the mainstream political and social consensus he prized. I have suggested that something more than the madness of paranoia is going on in conspiracy theory—speciﬁcally, a reckoning by those who consider themselves to be outside of the centers of power (however that is deﬁned by an individual or group) with what is deemed to be an inaccessible, essentially opaque political and social order. In its interpretive practices of desire and production and its ability to narrate a totalizing vision of a world gone wrong, conspiracy theory challenges the individual who engages in it to ﬁnd new, hidden possibilities lurking in the recesses of history and the daily newspaper. In so doing, it offers particular pleasures and opportunities to play, as well as a promise of social interaction, community, and political involvement that it ultimately cannot deliver. It may frequently or even usually be “ideological” under either a Marxist-inﬂuenced or non-Marxist approach that would view conspiracy theory as expressing a false consciousness or distorting some fundamental truth. But it expresses a longing for involvement, a desire for political meaning and signiﬁcance on the part of the political subject. The two chapters that follow carry this analysis into case studies of two prevailing conspiracy communities in contemporary America: evangelical Christian believers in the imminent rapture and return of Christ, who share interpretive and narrative strategies, as well as sources and empirical data, with far-right-wing, secular conspiracy theorists; and the 9/11 conspiracy movement, which has come to dominate the broader conspiracy community both by drawing in existing conspiracy theorists and theories and by attracting a new generation of activist practitioners into its ranks. These studies attempt to bring the approach developed in this part to bear on contemporary conspiracy theory.

PART III

Conspiracy Communities

This page intentionally left blank

6 The Prophetic Plot Millennialism and Christian Conspiracy Theory

Peter knew the prophecies concerning the Rapture, but even this great apostle didn’t have the insight into prophecy that the diligent believer can have today through the Holy Spirit. In our time we can see that current events unlock areas which were hidden from the understanding of earlier believers. —Hal Lindsey, with C. C. Carlson, The Terminal Generation (1976)1

C

hristian eschatology and millennialism—the study of and belief in the end of human history and the return of Christ that inaugurates a glorious age lasting one thousand years—have been central to Christianity since its beginnings, and can be traced back at least to Jewish apocalyptic belief. A large segment of the American public, along with many other fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Protestants throughout the world, await the imminent return of Christ and the establishment of his millennial kingdom as prophesied by certain biblical passages. An exact or even approximate ﬁgure of those who believe in an imminent millennium is impossible to ascertain, but given the large numbers of American Christians who consider themselves “born again” and believe the Bible and its prophecies to be literally true, and the millennium’s central role within the dogma of most fundamentalist and conservative evangelical denominations, such believers certainly number in the millions.2 In addition, the proliferation of nonﬁction books, videotapes, weekly television shows, and novels relating biblical prophecy to human history and current events demonstrates the ongoing religious and cultural importance of millennialism. In the months following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, for example, evangelical Christian publishers rushed more than a dozen prophecy volumes into print, and Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, a revised version 197

198

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

of a 1974 book by leading millennialist seminary professor John F. Walvoord, sold more than a million copies in the ﬁrst months of 1991. In the post-9/11, Iraq War period, the book is still selling briskly on biblical prophecy Web sites.3 Such popularity extends to Web sites like the “Rapture Index,” which since the mid-1990s has provided continual updates and quantitative estimates of the proximity of eschatological triumph based on current events.4 The general model of a historical and futuristic narrative that describes the apocalyptic coming of a millennium has been remarkably resilient, particularly within Christian cultures. Although the apocalypse can be disconﬁrmed (that is, it does not happen at a speciﬁc moment seemingly prophesied by the Bible), such frustrating mistakes do not discredit a narrative model that can remain current by appropriating changing cultural and political interests, rival apocalypses, and different historical knowledges and historiographical epistemologies.5 Despite historical developments such as the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the breakup of the Soviet Union (which, in many Cold War–era theories of the apocalypse, was supposed to march on the Middle East imminently), as well as many attempts both within and outside the church to debunk the theories and historical elements behind apocalyptic narratives, popular Christian eschatology remains a vibrant religious and cultural practice.6 By the term “popular eschatology,” I refer to texts that provide an accessible and comprehensible, all-encompassing narrative frame or metanarrative that can explain the past, the present, and the future for a mass audience. Popular, mass-mediated texts that circulate these kinds of narratives warn and proclaim the degree to which biblical prophecy is coming true, thus heralding the return of Christ. They also attempt both to make prophecy a comprehensible aspect of Christian belief and to make the practice of reading about and deciphering prophecy in light of current and historical events a popular activity. Popular eschatology thus serves as a form of historiography, articulating and circulating a method of historical interpretation, a general theory of historical agency, and an underlying conceptual structure that makes human history intelligible. This historiography is distinct, however, from the theory and method of research practiced by professional historians; rather, much of contemporary eschatology serves as a form of popular historiography that seeks to provide an overarching theory of history in

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

199

an accessible format in order to call readers to action in the practice of interpreting history.7 Popular eschatology also contradicts dominant historical narratives of human progress by asserting that human events are supernaturally determined and that human agency is ultimately ineffectual in curbing sin and improving the world. Indeed, it seems explicitly to deny the ability of humans to know and fully understand what human history is at all. Its call to Christians to challenge received notions of history and to investigate and “unlock” secret knowledge through the rewriting and rereading of human current events and history (as the well-known popular eschatological author Hal Lindsey exclaims in this chapter’s epigraph) constitutes an actively resistant cultural practice that struggles over the signs and meaning of history. In its interpretation of current events and history through biblical prophecy and supernatural signs, this type of popular historiography demonstrates the contest over history and historical narratives, as well as over how to understand and represent the past, present, and future. Although distinctly religious and not conventionally “radical,” popular eschatology shares an oppositional status with political out-groups that challenge the “consensus” explanations of historical actions, agents, and forces.8 Popular eschatology connects and overlaps with conspiracy theory. Offering a speciﬁc master narrative, it invites prophecy “experts” and many everyday believers to interpret the hidden meanings of current and historical events within a mechanistic theory of power. It often echoes, and at times explicitly borrows, the theories of more secular right-wing conspiracy theorists; the lines between popular eschatology and reactionary, secular conspiracy theories can be blurry indeed. It also shares certain functional qualities, enabling groups and individuals to deﬁne the problem and source of evil, as well as, by implication, the nation, community, and moral code that this evil secular or supernatural conspiracy has made vulnerable.9 My purpose in this chapter is to note the cultural signiﬁcance of this form of historiography in relation to the roles of fundamentalist Christians in contemporary American culture and politics, as well as in relation to the seemingly more secular historiography of conspiracy theory. As Lee Quinby argues, “apocalypticism constitutes a regime of truth that blurs religious and secular lines, informing a range of beliefs and practices that include popular culture, fashion, science,

200

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

social science, technology, and so on.”10 I do not, however, want to consider popular eschatology as equivalent to or deﬁned by “secular” conspiracy; they each emerge from distinct, if at times overlapping, social and cultural contexts. Liberal political writers Michael Lind and Frank Rich confused the eschatological and secular in their attempts to “expose” Pat Robertson’s 1991 book The New World Order as mere conspiracy theory because it relied heavily on the work of current and early–twentieth-century right-wing conspiracy theorists.11 For Lind and Rich, Robertson was akin to Louis Farrakhan and militia movement leaders because his book reproduced the arguments and intonations of Nesta Webster and other earlier and contemporary antiSemites.12 Insofar as Robertson was a conspiracy theorist, they argued, he could not have been a Christian, at least in any acceptable sort of way, and his book and his understanding of history had “little to do with ordinary evangelical Protestant theology.”13 In fact, although The New World Order is merely one of many versions of the distinctive popular eschatological narrative, its conspiracy theory–like presentation of the relationship between prophecy and current events quite typically presented the kinds of ideas produced and circulated within certain sectors of conservative Protestant fundamentalist culture. Robertson’s work and the similar, more explicitly proselytizing texts described in this chapter both relate to and are distinct from seemingly nonreligious conspiracy theory, and a proper analysis needs to look at both their afﬁnities with and divergences from secular political sources. The ﬁrst part of this chapter provides a general historical background on conservative Protestantism and millennialism in the United States, specifying the religious and social context within which popular eschatology operates. Readers who are familiar with this history and context can skip ahead to the analysis of popular eschatology, which begins with a discussion of Hal Lindsey’s work. The remaining sections analyze three different types of popular eschatological texts, including “nonﬁction” print accounts of biblical prophecy, as exempliﬁed by Lindsey’s work; “nonﬁction” prophecy on videotape and television and Internet broadcasts that review current events in light of biblical prophecy; and commercially successful Christian novels whose tales of a not-too-distant future are closely based on the eschatological master narrative.14

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

201

Contemporary American Fundamentalism and Conservative Evangelicalism15

A strong and well-documented set of beliefs drive contemporary conservative Protestantism.16 These include the ﬁnal authority of the Bible, the real historical character of God’s saving work, salvation to eternal life through the redemptive work of Christ, emphasis on evangelism and missions, the imminent Second Coming of Christ, and the importance of a spiritually transformed life.17 Although “conservative” and “modernist” or “liberal” Protestants share some doctrinal principles, their differences deﬁne popular eschatology’s core hermeneutical principles, politics, and historiography. From the late nineteenth century onward, modernists have advocated historical criticism of what is seen as an often “metaphoric” (as opposed to a literal or inerrant) Bible, modern scientiﬁc beliefs such as evolution, and certain secular aspects of civil society such as the strict separation of church and state. They have emphasized human progress as the continuing manifestation of the powers of God working in and among men and women. They perceive the historical process to be the result of a close relationship between the divine and the historical. Conservatives, on the other hand, base their religious beliefs and practices on literal readings of an inerrant Scripture. Pessimistic about modern culture, they view history exclusively through a particular reading of Scripture and emphasize the supernatural and the direct intervention of the divine in historical change. Just as many biblical prophecies were fulﬁlled within the Bible, so biblical prophecies made in Revelation and other important books that have not yet come to pass will herald the return of Christ. Fundamentalism emphasizes everyday, individual experience and practice, as well as a personal relationship with various forms of authority, including Christ, Scripture, and one or more preachers. It rejects the intellectualized criticism of modernists precisely because the latter produces no direct, visceral experience and is beyond the realm of the average Christian believer. Conservative Protestantism’s fragmented denominations allow for a more dynamic relationship among groups of preachers and believers; it does not constrain the religious practices and institutions of individual ministers and parishioners within tight, concrete hierarchical structures of established denominations that place theological, political, and social control.18

202

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

Despite fundamentalists’ belief in the supernatural and prophetic and fundamentalism’s commitment to fragmented, decentralized church institutions focused on individual revelation and experience, the hermeneutical principles and the more general epistemological assumptions and methodologies of conservative Christianity are by no means antiscientiﬁc or even antimodern. As George Marsden has argued, conservatives’ notion of inerrancy relies on exact conclusions and literal, logical, and positivistic, almost scientiﬁc readings of scripture. It favors simple, positive empirical evidence over complex theory, and expresses conﬁdence that such commonsensical scientiﬁc principles will reveal the fact of the Bible’s inerrancy, as well as the truth of biblical prophecy.19 Indeed, respect for the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, as Ernest Sandeen has pointed out, has been so central to conservative American Protestantism that premillennial dispensationalism, the dominant approach to understanding biblical prophecy in the twentieth century, was able to win converts during the latter part of the nineteenth century because its hermeneutic “required, in fact presupposed, a frozen biblical text in which every word was supported by the same weight of divine authority.”20 In this sense, the hermeneutical principles of contemporary fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism rest simultaneously on a quite scientiﬁc epistemology and a deep belief in the importance of the supernatural. Interpreters read scripture as if it were modeled after a Newtonian view of physical universe: created by God, the Bible is a perfect, self-contained unity governed by exact laws that can be discovered by careful, modern analysis and classiﬁcation.21 Another seeming incongruity in the beliefs and social practices of conservative Protestants is their simultaneous rejection of religious modernity and acceptance of aspects of contemporary society and life, and their adaptation of popular religion to modernity.22 Part of the appeal of popular eschatology is its appropriation of the contemporary vernacular of the written word, the electronic media, and popular narrative forms, as evident in fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians’ very prevalent and successful use of the most modern forms of mass communication—which extends Christian notions of evangelism and American notions of progress to an identiﬁcation of technology with the Almighty.23 Practitioners embrace the popular and commercial success of mass-media religion, while the marketplace serves as a crucial metaphor in which such ﬁgures as the number of copies of a book sold

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

203

or visits to a Web site and the television or radio broadcast rating serve as indices of souls saved and are used as selling points of evangelical effectiveness in further requests for funds.24 Ultimately, fundamentalists and evangelicals have appropriated the secular techniques and technologies of mass communication in order to develop and represent what Stewart Hoover has called a long-distance, mass “parachurch” of organizations, ministries, missions, revivals, broadcasts, recording companies, publishers, and clubs, which surround the more formal denominations and congregations of American Protestantism.25 Within the parachurch, members are constituencies interested in what the ministry/media business (such as the 700 Club or the Trinity Broadcasting Network) or Christian broadcasting star (such as Pat Robertson) with whom they identify is doing to spread the gospel.26 Similarly, activist conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who engage in public politics bring “traditional” moral precepts to the contemporary political arena. The mobilization of the portion of conservative Protestant Americans whose religious, social, and political beliefs mean they view the realm of politics as suitable for Christian activity (a view rejected by fundamentalists who remove themselves from the secular realm27), led to the development in the late 1970s and early 1980s of what has become known as the “New Christian Right.” Such political mobilization was not in itself new in twentieth-century American politics, as a number of religious ﬁgures before and after World War II used revivals and radio broadcasts to circulate conservative political messages. The New Christian Right, represented most clearly throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s by the very visible Moral Majority and subsequently in the more grassroots-oriented Christian Coalition, has focused on a domestic political battle against secular humanism and the perceived immoralism of modernity (exempliﬁed in issues such as abortion, school prayer, feminism, and homosexual rights), as well as on the deployment of greater military resources against communism and Islamic states and in support of Israel. It has achieved large organizational scale and increasing ﬁnancial and political success through its use of mass communications and direct mail, and has been more inclusive as a political movement than previous conservative Christian political movements, building alliances with conservative Catholics, Jews, and Mormons, as well as with the more secular conservatives of the New Right.28 The endorsement of 2008 Republican presidential nominee

204

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

John McCain by the Texas evangelist and ardent dispensationalist John Hagee—an endorsement that McCain had sought in order to bolster his standing among religious conservatives and fundamentalists—further demonstrates the mainstreaming of eschatology within American politics.29 The exuberant belief in a coming end is not universally embraced by all conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists.30 Christianity Today, one of the most important periodicals intended for conservative Christians, has published articles critical of extremist eschatology, calling for more “reasonable apocalypticists” or critiquing the often error-prone and excessive viewing of current events through Scripture.31 Further, as Charles Strozier found in his study of fundamentalists, believers espouse a variety of beliefs and approaches to eschatology, often at least partially determined by gender and class, many containing confusing and self-contradictory elements but each sharing a deep longing for Christ’s return. Whereas working-class believers tend to foresee the rapture occurring sooner than those of higher economic status, women stress the transformations of salvation associated with Christ’s return, while men concentrate more on the destructive and apocalyptic elements of rapture.32 Social historian Paul Boyer seems to capture this variance best with his image of the “world of prophecy belief:” a series of concentric circles with a core group of devotees who invest a great deal of time and resources investigating, reading, attending study groups, and listening to and watching various media about the apocalypse. The next circle includes those believers who are not necessarily as attentive to or informed about the various interpretations of the prophetic biblical passages as those in the ﬁrst circle. Finally, in the outer circle are more secular individuals and groups whose beliefs about and fears of the future may include a latent notion of a coming apocalypse, but whose religious and social practices may diverge from the dogma and doctrines of conservative Christians. This latter group includes those who, in addition to having read Hal Lindsey’s books and the volumes of popular eschatology published during America’s two wars against Iraq, or who may have read one of the popular eschatological novels (such as one from the Left Behind series), may also read non-Christian prophecy or predictions, such as the many interpretations of Nostradamus or the astrology of Jeane Dixon, or follow the stories of unidentiﬁed ﬂying

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

205

objects.33 In each of Boyer’s circles, participants may use or even rely on information and theories from explicitly secular and nonreligious sources.34 Thus, although it is clearly part of conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism, popular eschatology’s importance varies within the lives and denominations that constitute this complex set of movements. Eschatological texts are absorbed and accepted, to widely varying degrees, into secular society and culture, and they also appropriate information, ideas, and rhetoric from the secular world that putatively exists outside the circle of committed fundamentalists. TYPES

OF

CHRISTIAN MILLENNIALISM

In addition to varying in importance for Christian individuals and denominations, eschatology also varies in type. Nearly all forms of Christian millennialism rest on the belief in an extended (one thousand years or more) period, closely associated with the return of Christ, in which a kingdom of God is established on Earth. From this relatively standard belief, competing millennialisms differ over when the millennium will arrive, precisely how the kingdom will be established and what role the church will play in its coming, and how the millennium ﬁts into the past and the present of human history. The basic disagreement between “postmillennialists” and “premillennialists” (as opposed to “amillennialists,” who reject the notion of a literal millennium) can best be understood this way: “Postmillennialists believe that Christ will return after the church has established the millennium through its faithful and Spirit-empowered preaching of the gospel; while premillennialists expect Christ to return before the millennium in order to establish it by his might.”35 These two very different ways of reading and interpreting the Bible depart signiﬁcantly in the way they understand the historical past, the present state of the world, and the possibilities of the future. Postmillennialists believe that the kingdom of God is now being extended through the work of Christians who live righteously and spread the word of the Gospels, win the world to Christianity, reduce evil, and enable the church to assume greater leadership over worldly institutions. This activity leads directly to a peaceful, prosperous millennium that will end with the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the ﬁnal judgment.36 The church, as an agent of Christ, thus plays a critical role in preparing and bringing about the millennium and in the historical trajectory in which the future is a progression from the past and the

206

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

present. For many contemporary postmillennialists, this “progression” toward the millennium is a struggle between good forces who work in Christ, and evil (often satanic) forces that seek to limit Christian inﬂuence and the “rights” of Christians to practice their beliefs. This chapter concentrates most on the narrative trajectory espoused by dispensational premillennialists, the most active, vocal, and visible of premillennialists, whose approach constitutes the metanarrative of popular eschatology. For dispensationalists—“dispensations” are distinct periods of human history in which humanity is judged, with each successive period having particular meaning with dispensationalist eschatology37—certain signs will precede the coming of the ﬁnal stages leading up to the millennium. These include the general worsening of human society, the preaching of the gospel to all nations, and more devastating natural disasters and violent wars. Soon afterward, the church will be “raptured” (that is, “caught up” into the air to dwell with the Lord) and thus saved from the horriﬁc days to follow, a great “tribulation” period marking time before Christ returns to Earth, during which the Antichrist, as the agent of Satan, will rise to worldwide dominance. The triumphant return of Christ at the battle of Armageddon will end the Antichrist’s reign, and Satan’s power will be bound as Christ establishes his millennial kingdom. An easily subdued revolt led by Satan will brieﬂy challenge Christ’s kingdom a thousand years later, and the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, and the creation of a heaven on Earth will follow. Whereas postmillennialists see the kingdom of God being established over and in human time, thanks to the winning of individual souls and an increasingly powerful church, premillennialists perceive the kingdom as coming through a sudden, powerful, and violent transformation that marks a complete break with the preceding period of human history.38 They believe that within the present day, known as the “church age,” there is little hope for success within human institutions and even within the church itself, which is doomed in its attempt to convert and save the world (but which, despite this fact, should not stop trying to spread the Gospels). Only a personal belief in and relationship with Christ will save the individual, but the judgment at the end of the ﬁnal dispensation will wreak havoc and destruction on worldly nonbelievers, and Christ will establish a literal kingdom in Jerusalem for a full millennium, or a thousand years.

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

MILLENNIALISM

IN THE

|

207

UNITED STATES

Dispensationalist premillennialism has become the most prominent form of millennialism among contemporary fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, but millennialism had been a part of many colonists’ religious beliefs prior to the circulation of dispensationalist ideas in the post–Civil War period. Jonathan Edwards’s conﬁdent postmillennialism during the mid-eighteenth century and the religious “awakenings” of his era eclipsed premillennialism as a dominant belief for a long period and helped give rise to nationalist ideologies of the United States as a “redeemer nation” that could best establish the Lord’s dominion on Earth.39 The Civil War helped to destroy some Christians’ belief that Christ’s kingdom could be realized within their own age and that humanity could bring about its own spiritual or historical development, and postmillennial optimism concerning both the nation’s and the church’s potential to change the world receded. In addition, as liberal and modernist theologians were inﬂuenced by new trends in naturalism and historicism and began to abandon belief in the work of the supernatural in history, conservatives reconsidered many of their assumptions about human progress and the positive transformation of humanity.40 Earlier, a premillennial movement led by William Miller, whose “date setting” of Christ’s return for October 1844 gained as many as a million followers, had returned the notion of Christ’s imminent and millennial return to the forefront of American religious beliefs. After their “great disappointment,” however, many of the Millerites formed their own denomination, Seventh-Day Adventists, and had little further inﬂuence on premillennialism.41 Despite the seemingly unattractive example of the Millerites as the followers of a failed prophet, however, premillennialism has become increasingly inﬂuential and popular since the latter part of the nineteenth century. The American visits, proselytizing, and biblical commentaries of British minister John Nelson Darby during the 1870s began dispensationalism’s American circulation and popularity during the post–Civil War period. In the early part of the twentieth century, the overwhelming success of the Scoﬁeld Reference Bible (1909), which sold millions of copies, carried dispensationalism to a broader public. By the end of World War I, dispensationalism had become so important and compelling that its teachings were a dominant aspect of revivalism. From the earliest American followers of Darby to the leading premillennial ministers

208

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

at the turn of the century, dispensationalism circulated through the structures of conservative Protestantism as a reading of Scripture wholly consistent with the tenets of the evangelicalism of the time. This speciﬁc form of premillennialism ultimately found favor with an increasing number of ministers and believers through years of proselytizing of dispensational doctrine in mission revivals and through the conversion of important pastors.42 As Timothy Weber notes, in order for any form of premillennialism to persuade American Christians in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it would have to establish two facts: that it was connected to and worked within the evangelical and orthodox teachings of the American Protestant mainstream, and that it was in no way associated with the teachings of the Millerites.43 The central difference in millennial understanding between Millerites and dispensationalists lies in the distinction between “historicist” and “futurist” understandings of prophetic events. Historicists believe that biblical prophecies have been fulﬁlled within history, whereas futurists expect the fulﬁllments of prophecy to take place in the future. For these two strains of thought, the clock recording prophetic events reads different times: for historicists such as the Millerites and current Seventh-Day Adventists, the clock has already begun and the purpose of eschatology is to ascertain when the world will end and Christ will return; for a futurist hermeneutic such as dispensationalism, the clock is poised to start as prophetic events begin to take place, and no “last days” prophecy will be fulﬁlled until just before Christ’s return. This represents a core difference in interpretive practice. Historicists more often try to ascertain the date of Christ’s return by comparing past events, biblical predictions, and the present. On the other hand, while many futurists pay close attention to world events in order to compare them to prophetic statements, most refuse to set a future date for the second coming as, according to oft-cited biblical passages, no one can know the date or the hour of Christ’s return.44 Premillennial dispensationalists interpret the “church age” (or dispensation) of the years from the cruciﬁxion and resurrection to the present as a relatively insigniﬁcant period of frustration and waiting, and neither Christ’s return nor any important prophetic event will take place within it. For a number of reasons, over the past hundred and ﬁfty years postmillennialism has lost much of its popularity among conservative Christians, although it has clearly remained important as the secular

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

209

and political doctrine of nationalism. In particular, the concept of “Dominion Theology” and the Christian Reconstruction movement, both of which are postmillennial in their faith in the advancement of the kingdom of God through history, have gained followers and visibility for postmillennialism over the last few decades.45 As Robert Clouse has argued, postmillennialism emerges in the political pronouncements of premillennialists who enter the public arena;46 when Jerry Falwell and many other politically active Christian fundamentalists have argued for a return to “Christian values,” their avowed desire for change and progress (and faith in the public arena by engaging in it) has contradicted otherwise strict beliefs in premillennialism. Such internal contradictions between premillennial politics and rabidly conservative, nationalistic postmillennialism constitute one conﬂicted terrain on which the narrative and interpretive practices of popular eschatology meet those of right-wing conspiracy theory.47 For the dispensationalist, then, the present has little signiﬁcance. The Christian believer should study the Bible, evangelize the gospel (which itself is doomed to limited success, if not abject failure, because this is still before the millennium), and read the signs of a coming end. Popular eschatology teaches and promotes a true Christian to sense the coming end and to understand what Hal Lindsey calls “the key that would unlock the prophetic book: . . . the current events that . . . begin to ﬁt into the predicted pattern.”48 The Late Great Planet Earth: Narrative, Commentary, Imminence

Since the early 1970s, the foremost ﬁgure in popular eschatology has been Hal Lindsey, a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, one of the leading centers for dispensationalist theology.49 Lindsey’s books are mass-marketed by the secular paperback publisher Bantam, which picked up his ﬁrst book, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970; hereafter, LGPE), after its initial success with a Christian publisher.50 They are available in both religious and nonreligious bookstores, deal either directly or indirectly with prophecy, and trumpet on their covers their author’s million-selling status.51 Two important aspects of Lindsey’s work have been his emphasis on reaching young people—in addition to clearly directing his work, especially LGPE, toward youth and collegeage students, he has lectured about prophecy on college campuses—and

210

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

his use of other media, including radio and television programs and his Web site, to spread dispensationalist readings of prophecy. All of his work warns that the end is soon to arrive; in the three decades that he has been a best-selling author, he has continually pointed to current events in the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and what he sees as the social breakdown of the United States as sure signs that this generation is the “terminal” one and that this decade is the “countdown to Armageddon.”52 LGPE, his ﬁrst and most famous book, proceeds from a general introduction that sets forth the problems of predicting and understanding the future by brieﬂy introducing the biblical prophets (“daring men, sure of the source of their faith and strong in their belief ” [LGPE, 9]) and prophecy as an enterprise. Within the book’s initial section, Lindsey resolves the widespread popular concerns about current events and an uncertain future through the Bible, which he describes as accurate in both short- and long-range prediction, particularly about the First Coming of the Messiah. Lindsey focuses on what he and other dispensationalists perceive to be the most important Bible prophecy about the imminent future, which signals the ﬁnal movement toward the end times: the returning of Jews to a sovereign Jewish nation of Israel. The fulﬁllment of this prophecy “set[s] the stage for the other predicted signs to develop in history” (47). The remainder of the book concerns these predicted signs. Individual chapters focus on the various “players” of eschatological visions of the future: Russia (equivalent to the “Gog” peoples of Ezekiel), which is developing a vast army and confederacy and will march on Israel; the Arabs, who will join with Africans and be led by Egypt in a march on Israel; China and a vast “Oriental horde” of more than 200 million soldiers; and the European Community, which will form a new Roman Empire and dominate the world under its leader, the Antichrist. In addition, Lindsey identiﬁes the current conditions that will prepare the way for the Antichrist as a world dictator, including the rise in crime, wars, famines, and population, all of which will aid the rise of a supreme global authority to control earthly chaos. He sees the spiritual domain in similar peril, decrying both the popularity of non-Christian, pagan, and satanic religious practices and increasing apostasy in the mainstream Protestant denominations. These religions will provide the groundwork for the rise of the false prophet, a master of satanic magic who will lead the world even further from Christ. All of these narrative agents enter

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

211

into the penultimate battle of Armageddon in Israel, causing worldwide destruction and ultimately foreshadowing the return of Christ, who will defeat the Antichrist and establish the millennium. This is an elaborate, universal narrative that links history, current events, and a singular vision of a violent and apocalyptic future to a particular set of readings of biblical prophecy. Lindsey’s narrative is not new; it relies on the basic narrative structure delineated by Darby and the early dispensationalists and borrows from the work of other eschatologists who have linked dispensationalism’s readings of prophecy with the present day. The power and inﬂuence of LGPE and Lindsey himself can be traced not merely to the book’s exposition and retelling of the dispensationalist historical narrative, but also to Lindsey’s narration: a skillful storyteller, he draws readers in through his use of language, his presentation of prophecy and Christian faith as direct experiences in which the reader can participate, and his naturalization of the supernatural to explain and resolve humanity’s conﬂicts and fears. Indeed, LGPE (like many eschatological texts intended for popular audiences) continually and excessively interrupts and steps outside of its own story in order to comment on how commonsensical, exciting, and truthful prophecy is for Christians and for those willing to give themselves to Christ. This excessive commentary simultaneously draws the reader into the historical narrative and presents eschatology as a practice and set of beliefs that the reader can and must practice. One of the most obvious narrative strategies in LGPE is its emphasis on prophecy as direct and experiential, even as its practice engages in the indirect and intellectual pursuits of theology or history. As the introduction to LGPE reads, “This is not a complex theological treatise, but a direct account of the most thrilling, optimistic view of what the future could hold for any individual” (vii). Similarly, although Lindsey describes the study of history as “dry bones to some,” he promotes the kind of history that he studies as fascinating (35). Lindsey provides an ongoing metacommentary on the narrative he constructs: this is exciting, this is fascinating, this is entertaining, educational, and can bring about your salvation to boot. The language that he uses—particularly in LGPE, which is very much a product of the late 1960s—attempts to engage and, to a certain extent, parody the vernacular of youth culture. The chapter on the rapture, for example, is titled “The Ultimate Trip,” and the one on the apocalypse is “The Main Event.” The writing is simple, clear,

212

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

and declarative; the commentary continually intercedes, exhorting the reader on and into eschatology. The direct and plain language of both his narration—how he tells the story—and narrative—the story that he tells—attempt to communicate a highly charged, metaphysical story of the relationship between the material and the spiritual, the fascinating historical and the thrilling theological. LGPE assumes a one-to-one relationship between theology and history in which the supernatural intervenes directly within the human and historical. History’s role is to provide the manifest evidence of the workings of the spiritual: “As world events develop, prophecy becomes more and more exciting. Also, the understanding of God’s prophecies becomes increasingly clear as we look at the Bible and then at the current scene” (77); “The Bible contains clear and unmistakable prophetic signs. We are able to see right now in this Best Seller predictions made centuries ago being fulﬁlled before our eyes” (7). The proper and exciting study of the end times enables an understanding of the work of the Lord, the true determinant in human history and individual lives. As American fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism emphasize the experience and practice of individual believers reading the Bible and having a personal relationship with Christ, so Lindsey’s work extends this emphasis into the practice of thinking human history, current events, and the future through his and dispensationalism’s readings of biblical prophecy. Lindsey writes: “Bible prophecy can become a sure foundation upon which your faith can grow—and there is no need to shelve your intellect while ﬁnding this faith. . . . We believe that a person can be given a secure and yet exciting view of his destiny by making an honest investigation of the tested truths of Bible prophecy” (7–8). Notwithstanding the ideals of the “honest investigation” and individual experience of prophecy, popular eschatology and dispensationalism, in particular, strongly structure these “individual” readings and experiences within an already established framework. There are, after all, proper and improper readings of prophecy and current events for Lindsey and others. The grammatical form of “a person can be given a secure and yet exciting view” positions this “honest investigation” within a passive—or at least preconstituted—interpretive practice. In this sense, the interpellation of the reader within eschatological practice is also an interpellation into the ideological structures and practices

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

213

of conservative Protestantism—the reader is called to practice and experience individually what others preach. Lindsey draws readers further into the texts and practices of popular eschatology by naming and engaging their desire for “reassurance about the future,” as well as their “subconscious fear that perhaps there will be no future at all” (7). Reading the Bible properly can allay such worries, Lindsey reassures his readers, allowing the believer to know in advance what will happen, to be able to watch with awe while men and countries, movements and nations, fulﬁll the roles that God’s prophets said they would (65–66). Understood in this way, eschatology is itself an historical agent: The ancient Jewish temple on Mount Moriah will be rebuilt for a third time, despite the presence of the holy Muslim Dome of the Rock mosque on the same spot, because “prophecy demands it” (45); when China marches on the Roman dictator/Antichrist at Armageddon, we will know that “[h]istory seems to be headed for its climactic hour” (76). Because the supernatural controls historical movement (“history” as “demanded” by prophecy and heading toward a supernatural “climactic hour”), knowing and believing in the supernatural enables readers to know and be assured of the future. If “history” moves without human inﬂuence, if the realm of human history is merely the stage or the visible level of the supernatural powers that determine events and change, then Lindsey (and popular eschatology in general) seems to posit a world without human agency. Observing as events unfold within the “biblical” patterns outlined by “professional” eschatologists is the correct collective response to the narrative frame that Lindsey constructs; the correct individual response is a new or renewed commitment to Christ. Interspersed throughout LGPE and all of Lindsey’s books—in the introductions, in the ﬁnal paragraphs of chapters, in the midst of describing a prophetic passage and its relevance today, and, of course, in the books’ ﬁnal words—are calls to salvation: The big question is, will you be here during this seven-year countdown? Will you be here during the time of the Tribulation when the Antichrist and the False Prophet are in charge for a time? Will you be here when the world is plagued by mankind’s darkest days?

214

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

It may come to surprise you, but the decision concerning your presence during this last seven-year period in history is entirely up to you. (126–27) As history races towards [the battle of Armageddon and Christ’s return], are you afraid or looking with hope for deliverance? The answer should reveal to you your spiritual condition. One way or another history continues in a certain acceleration toward the return of Christ. Are you ready? (156–57)

Removed from the historical narrative through the metaphysical power of the supernatural, human agency returns in a limited way in the individual’s decision to become a part of the body of Christ, to ensure that she takes her place in the more desirable part of the narrative, the rapture rather than the tribulation. In deploying its historical narrative to separate the good from the bad, Christ from the Antichrist, true Christianity from the false prophets and apostasy of New Age and liberal Christian movements, and the agents of God from the agents of evil, popular eschatology presents a decision between two possible choices that, for the model reader, is not a choice at all. Through its excessive articulation of the inexorable movement of history, the historical narrative of Lindsey’s popular eschatology places the reader in the text (and, ultimately, in the Bible) by allowing her to “choose” to follow the narrative to its ecstatic resolution (the rapture, Christ’s return, the millennium) or be swept aside in the tribulation and, as a result, be left outside of time. Watching Prophecy Unfold

When popular eschatological tales appear via electronic media (television, radio, and the Web), they engage the general narrative framework and assumptions about the relationship between current events and biblical prophecy in formats that allow regular updating and constant monitoring of current events. Appropriating the structures and conventions developed for the commercial presentation of news in their respective media, electronic eschatology offers a constantly available, regularly updated stream of information and interpretation in recognizable formats. Viewers gain valuable insight into a frighteningly dangerous world while they afﬁrm their faith in the better world that awaits them. To watch prophecy unfold on TV or the Web is to see the Satanic conspiracy through which the Bible comes alive and the rapture draws ever nearer.

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

215

Focused on the most recent events in the secular world, video productions such as Jack Van Impe Presents (JVIP) and The Hal Lindsey Report, which appear on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) and in syndication, as well as via streaming video on the Web, present the latest news with a focus on speciﬁc issues crucial to the eschatological narrative. JVIP boasts a professional, if spartan, set that resembles an authentic television newsroom, and Jack and his wife Rexella resemble traditional television news anchors. It is a remarkably formulaic production, having gone through virtually no changes since 1992, when I ﬁrst began watching it. As the introductory narration proclaims, the JVIP show offers “international news and in-depth analysis from our award-winning team of Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe. Join millions around the globe for thirty minutes of powerful insights!” During the announcer’s voice-over, the titles ﬂash over a spinning globe and images of Jack and Rexella poring over news clippings together and taking notes, Rexella on her laptop and Jack on a legal pad. These are journalists—and yet, they distinguish themselves from mere journalists who actually report on events, “the harbingers of doom and gloom,” as Van Impe refers to them. By contrast, Van Impe proclaims, “we give the good news that Jesus is coming again”—news that they generate by interpreting what otherwise appears to be bad news as signs of Jesus’s imminent return.53 While they distance themselves from mainstream journalists, the Van Impes borrow heavily from the conventions and values of secular news in many ways, especially in their attempts to present an authoritative, expert exposition of current events. Rexella reads a headline from a recent newspaper (a photograph of which is presented on screen for the viewer in order to demonstrate the empirical nature of the show’s work); Jack then explains its signiﬁcance, ﬁrst as a superﬁcially political or social event, and then as a piece of information that holds a place within the prophetic narrative. Both exposition and commentary further an explicitly evangelical message. As the signiﬁcance of the discrete event for the larger prophetic narrative develops, the co-hosts innocently, but also knowingly, attempt to educate the audience about both the larger framework and the interpretive practice that appropriates the event (associated with Rexella’s seemingly naïve reading of the news report) into the eschatological (produced in Jack’s prophetic reading of the event). As in Lindsey’s books, both Jack and Rexella sprinkle their

216

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

talk with wonderment and metacommentary (for example, “You can’t have such an array of signs and not know the Lord is coming soon!”),54 and the show ends with a call to conversion and belief (“You can sit and be amazed at these things all day long, but will you bow your head to Christ?”).55 Like JVIP, The Hal Lindsey Report places its host on a newsroomlike set, facing the audience while he reports on and interprets current events. Lindsey has no co-host; unlike the Van Impes, who divide the newsreader and news interpreter roles between them, Lindsey performs both roles. His show also appears more up-market: he uses video feeds, frequently of current events in the Middle East (which has long been the focus of his prophecies), and multiple cameras, which offer some variety to a set of otherwise static, dull images and move the show closer to the standard of professional, secular news programs. The Lindsey Report offers far more detail about the events on which Lindsey reports than JVIP; he can pronounce (albeit in a deep southern accent) the names of foreign leaders and seems to have far more facility with current events than the Van Impes do. Lindsey also appears far more engaged in contemporary politics. The Van Impes are appalled at the current state of global geopolitics and American morality; Lindsey is positively enraged by the cravenness of liberals, who control the media, universities, and public schools, and by the perﬁdy of evil—especially as manifested by Arab states and European leaders. Were it not for the prophetic codas with which Lindsey ends each report—all of this means the end is coming soon!—he could easily be Rush Limbaugh or a charismatic John Birch Society spokesman. During June 1992, JVIP focused particularly on the creation of the European Community (which became the European Union [EU] in 1993), which they described as the likely site of the new Roman Empire under popular dispensationalist eschatology.56 This is particularly signiﬁcant because Europe is the possible base from which the Antichrist shall rise, and the formation and ascendancy of the EU are thus sure prophetic signs of the coming end. Van Impe dealt speciﬁcally with Denmark’s 1992 vote against acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty, speaking on the effect that this rejection would have on the number of nations in the EU. The number ten is signiﬁcant in this context because of dispensationalists’ belief in the prophetic signiﬁcance of the appearance of a ten-horned beast described in Revelation 13 and Daniel 7.

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

217

For Van Impe, Denmark’s refusal to accept the treaty and become part of a ten-nation EU demonstrated how “everything is coming right according to the predictions of the Scriptures as far as the fulﬁllment of these things is concerned.”57 Fifteen years later, although Van Impe’s numerology no longer works very well for EU’s membership (in fact, twelve nations, including Denmark, ultimately signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, and the EU as of May 2008 boasts twenty-seven members), the portents of Christ’s return remain in the current news. In July 2007, the Van Impes discussed reports forecasting the imminent forced implantation of identiﬁcation chips in humans, which would correspond to the Book of Revelation’s mark of the beast (a mark on the skin that Satan will require everyone to bear), as well as reports that Russia, Iran, and North Korea were building and stockpiling nuclear armaments.58 Each datum demonstrates the proximity of Christ’s return by marking the rise of the Antichrist and the one-world government that he will use to torment the unsaved and un-raptured left behind during the imminent, seven-year tribulation. During the same time, Lindsey focused on events in Israel and the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, all of which provided important events for the eschatology initiate to master.59 Little changes in these shows over time: whether it’s Europe, the Middle East, or domestic politics, and whether it’s the mark of the beast or the one world government, the narrative remains unchanged and the particular news story ﬁts neatly within it. The constant updating of information on prophecy Web sites epitomizes this by regularly and immediately transforming speciﬁc news events into the metaphoric characters of Bible prophecy. Current events become abstract raw data for devoted readers and Web surfers to interpret—although in such a way that that the data is always already interpreted for them. The “prophecy news” available on the Prophecy Update site is all bad: crises in the Middle East, natural disasters, terrorism alerts, Russian aggression. The headlines announcing these linked stories (available from various newspaper and wire service Web sites) appear under a montage of photographs of well-known and more obscure world leaders titled “Storm Warning.”60 Prophecy Central helpfully organizes various signiﬁcant prophecy-related topics (“New World Order,” “One World Religion,” “Lawlessness,” “European Union,” etc.) into their own individual pages, each with links to recent stories and relevant biblical passages.61 But Rapture Ready offers the most helpful and

218

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

Web-savvy insights, making available at the top of its main page links to “Rapture Ready News” (links to “End Times Related Events,” with daily updates), “Nearing Midnight” (offering “in depth weekly commentary”), “End Times Top Ten” (ranking the most important current prophetic news), and, most famously, “The Rapture Index,” the “prophetic speedometer of end-time activity.”62 The Index uses a ﬁve-point scale in fortyﬁve different categories (including “Satanism,” “Liberalism,” “Mark of the Beast,” and “Israel”), with points awarded based on how suggestive events are that the end times are near.63 The index reached its high score of 182 two weeks after the 9/11 attacks when, in addition to a number of other factors that rated the high score of 5, the Web site proclaimed that “the major act of terrorism against the US creates perfect setting for the Antichrist to come in and work his magic,” thus leading to a ﬁve-point score in the “Antichrist” category.64 These formats of electronic eschatology—the weekly news program and the constantly-updated, information-rich Web site—emphasize currency, on the one hand, but on the other they demonstrate the timeless immutability of the eschatological narrative’s broad outlines as well as the narrative’s ability to ﬁt recent events within a stream of time ﬂowing rapidly and inevitably towards an end point. Electronic eschatology demonstrates that popular eschatology requires an ongoing practice of interpretation that measures the imminence of Christ’s return on a regular basis, but it anchors the contingencies of new events within the larger temporal structure of eschatological Bible prophecy. Narrating the End: Millennialist Popular Fiction

The millennialist novel, a realist ﬁctional representation of a near-future apocalypse, has become an increasingly popular cultural form among conservative Christian readers.65 Borrowing from popular eschatology in narrative sweep but inﬂuenced also by the secular thriller genre, these novels tell the story of a future in which Satan and God wage war on Earth, and the Antichrist and Satan’s other agents gain control of the world by opposing Christians, exploiting the sinful nature of humanity, and encouraging apostasy and false religion. Like other forms of popular eschatology, these novels’ focus is global and universal; the battle is real and everywhere for the souls of Christians. Yet, like popular ﬁction, the narratives of these novels focus on one or a relatively small number of characters involved in the attempt to uncover and ﬁght the

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

219

satanic conspiracy.66 As models of proper Christian behavior, these characters are quite conventional, but the novels themselves face a difﬁcult resolution, one related to but quite distinct from the conspiracy narrative’s closure: How can realistic naturalism, human agency, and narrative closure—so central to the structure of popular ﬁction—be achieved within a narrative structured around an apocalyptic belief in the supremacy of the spiritual, a belief that denies the possibility of realism, humanism, and human triumph? These novels also face the difﬁcult problem of creating a plausible narrative that includes the rapture, an element of eschatology that assumes that the saved will be taken up into heaven before the tribulation period. Narrating only the rapture and ending at the rapture itself, of course, precludes all that would be interesting in an apocalyptic novel. An evangelical tract intended to convert nonbelievers needs to show them the terror that the unsaved face during the period of tribulation. Indeed, the ﬁlm A Thief in the Night (1972) represents that very “horror,” beginning the morning after the rapture has already occurred; it has been used, apparently quite successfully, in youth missions for decades.67 The ﬁrst of the three novels discussed here, Larry Burkett’s The Illuminati, approaches the edge of the millennium only to pull back, leaving the future, as well as the distinction between pre- and postmillennialism, open; the second, Pat Robertson’s The End of the Age, is ﬁrmly postmillennial, and so faces the continual narrative crisis of having its ending entirely foretold before and during the early parts of the novel; and the third, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind, plunges directly into a post-rapture period, initiating a twelve-novel series that presents the entirety of the tribulation period. Due to the nature of biblical authority, the problem of representing the rapture and tribulation is also an advantage—the fact that the end has been foretold might spoil the novels’ surprise, but to the extent any novel can succeed in persuading readers of the “accuracy” of its representation it can claim that it reﬂects the inerrant word of God. The Illuminati (1991), a very successful novel by Larry Burkett published by the Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson, exempliﬁes the problematic articulation of the end-time story within popular ﬁction.68 Prior to the novel’s publication, Burkett was already well known among many fundamentalists for his “biblically informed” ﬁnancial advice and doomsday predictions concerning federal spending and monetary

220

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

policies, which he had delivered in books such as The Coming Economic Earthquake (1991) and his frequent appearances on Christian television programs such as the John Ankerberg Show and the 700 Club. Burkett repeatedly warned against the “godless” and socialistic spending and budget deﬁcits undertaken by the federal government, and his warnings suggested that the economy—determined by the spiritual world (in an interesting reversal of Marxist notions of the base–superstructure relationship)—faced the same imminent apocalypse as every other element within a society that has forgotten Christ.69 The Illuminati is set at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, when an agent of Satan, working through a secret group called the Society (with ties to the Druids, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati, whose members have included Mao, Lenin, and Hitler) attempts to prepare the world for Satan’s rule. The story includes many of the elements of popular premillennial eschatology, including the imposition of a one-world government, the use by satanic forces of the mark of the beast, rising violence against Christians, “Asian hordes” marching on Israel, and the threat of nuclear disaster. The world averts the end times, however, through the work of underground Christian groups and an innocent computer genius turned hero. Satan does not, however, suffer his ultimate defeat; as the novel ends, the specter of another potential Antichrist looms on the horizon, “chosen to prepare the world for the ﬁnal conﬂict that would eventually pit the people of God against the forces of Satan to arise in ﬁfty years” (306). The novel works as a morality tale in which Christians learn the importance of both faith and the need to ﬁght the inﬂuence of Satan wherever it appears. The list of such inﬂuences reads like an accounting of New Christian Right fears: “militant homosexuals” who chant “God is dead, God is dead,” carry placards with inverted crosses, and riot and loot homes; the “National Civil Liberties Union,” which leads the violent persecution of Christians; the anti-Christian, liberal media, which circulates false information and serves as a tool of the Antichrist; and federally enforced bans on ﬁrearm ownership. The novel’s description of a conspiratorial “secret society” covertly controlling the political machinations of evil resembles closely the entire history of right-wing conspiracy theories concerning such entities as the Freemasons, the Jews, the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Importantly, Pat Robertson’s nonﬁction book The New

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

221

World Order, published the same year as The Illuminati, similarly connected such conspiracy theories and Christian fears of satanic inﬂuence to make a putatively nonﬁctional argument—indeed, Burkett’s novel seems at times to be a ﬁctionalized account of Robertson’s description of the conspiratorial workings of Satan in contemporary America. Through these references to contemporary social and political issues, the novel’s landscape integrates the historical events of the current day, particularly as perceived by Christians who consider themselves under the siege of a hostile government and culture. Yet, this “realistic” landscape serves merely as an epiphenomenal surface for the seething spiritual and supernatural battle waged beneath the surface. The would-be Antichrist, Amir Hussein (a half-Arab, half-Jew Israeli), working through the secret society he manipulates, attempts to control the United States and ultimately the world by turning people against Christ and Christians and by exterminating those believing Christians who resist him. Christians who do not recognize their dire situation within a superﬁcially secular but in fact satanically controlled world must either rebel or face forced removal to concentration camps. The novel provides no spiritual options besides fundamentalist Christianity: Jews are either dupes or willing accomplices of the Antichrist, while non-Western religions are directly linked to the satanic plot.70 Secularism is an untenable position: the “spiritual warfare” is so encompassing between evil and the good Christians and moral people who by the novel’s end will recognize the spiritual necessity of conversion that any claim for the nonspiritual merely masks the work of Satan. Of course, this direct, deterministic relationship between the superstructure of the human and the base of the supernatural is part of the model reader’s set of religious beliefs, and the novel works both to conﬁrm and to narrate this belief—to set the spiritual and contemporary events within a narrative that can carry both of them forward into a possible future. Although the end is not apocalyptic, the moral lesson is clear: the characters who either retain their committed, personal relationship with Christ or who come to Him as a result of the events of the novel are saved, and all of the saved must work together to ﬁght the power of Satan on the human plane. The end is averted, yet still near, and only true Christians can survive the end of the novel and the end of the world.

222

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

Although the eschatological metanarrative brings closure to the progression of dispensations under which humanity has been judged and resolves the ongoing spiritual battle between the forces of good and evil, it radically calls into question realism and human agency. The apocalyptic biblical prophecies, particularly as they are interpreted and articulated within the framework of popular eschatology, provide a violent, fantastic vision of supernatural warfare that allows for little human agency beyond the individual choice of committing one’s life to Christ. The Illuminati attempts to resolve this potential representational crisis by positing the spiritual as real, with the Antichrist portrayed as a real character, and by allowing for some limited human agency, as the human characters are able to repel the Antichrist’s rise, at least for the next ﬁfty years. The eschatological metanarrative may provide closure, but its ending seems literally unrepresentable within the thriller genre, which seems at best able to promise a heaven on Earth under Christ’s kingdom but cannot narrate the ultimate deﬁciency of human agency necessary to achieve it. For the apocalypse to come, the effort of humans to save the world morally and spiritually must fail. Signiﬁcantly, the novel refuses this ending, offering instead contingent resolutions to individual narratives that leave in place, as a looming threat, the failure of humanity and the saving grace of apocalypse. Pat Robertson’s The End of the Age (1995), in contrast, plods forth into the millennium by sketching out the author’s postmillennialist vision of the battle on earth for human souls.71 Unlike both straight and “ﬁctional” prophecy, The End of the Age offers no mysteries or riddles to be deduced from current events, and provides little tension as to whether humanity will be saved. From the very ﬁrst chapter, when news spreads of an impending collision of Earth with a huge meteor, the novel does not hesitate to signal that the Antichrist is rising and Jesus’ return is imminent. The End of the Age begins by focusing on two families who are able to escape from what will soon become the devastated and uninhabitable West Coast, and who end up in the survivalist camp of evangelist John Edwards outside Albuquerque. The meteor, the novel quickly relates, not only eliminates life in the western United States, but also causes giant tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, nuclear accidents, earthquakes, and a cloud of volcanic ash that blankets the Earth. Unsurprisingly, most of the world suffers terribly. Meanwhile, satanic elements in the American government, acting through the Hindu god Shiva, seize power and

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

223

promote New Age religion, “deviant” sexual practices, widespread drug use, and the persecution of Christians throughout the world. Even beyond this basic plot description, the novel is odd for a number of reasons, especially given the position of its author as an important political ﬁgure and activist in the religious right. The spiritual warfare it describes between Satan and God so overpowers human agency that believing Christians can do little more than study the prophetic scriptures of the Bible, provide moral and material support for Christians who cannot reach Edwards’s compound, and save a few more souls. Indeed, whole passages in the middle of the novel describe impromptu Bible-reading seminars that Edwards leads for the lucky California survivors, which offer both the novel’s central lesson (Christ will return and save believers from an awful fate) and a scriptural justiﬁcation for the novel’s suggestions about who will be the Antichrist, and when and from where he will arise. By the end of the ﬁrst of these lessons, before the midpoint of the novel, the entire second half of the novel is foretold in this exchange between Edwards and Dave Busby, a former star athlete and follower of Edwards who is further along in his study than the others: “After the attack by the horde of demons, people will no longer be thinking rationally. They’ll be willing to give political power to anybody who’s able to restore order and get the world moving again. Then, the devil will bring out his satanic savior, the man of sin we call the Antichrist. For a short time, he will rule the world.” “Then comes the fourth quarter,” said Dave Busby, jumping to his feet, “and the good guys will win!” (164)

By Part Two, when the book changes its focus from the practice of interpreting prophecy at Edwards’s survivalist camp to the rise and fall in global power of the Antichrist, the typical elements of popular eschatology appear in rapid succession, including the victory of a “New World Order” (the title, of course, to Robertson’s controversial work of “nonﬁction”), the tattooing of the “mark of the beast” on an unsuspecting populace, and the gathering of satanic forces for a ﬁnal battle in the Middle East. Heavenly angelic forces protect the camp, and then proceed quickly and rather easily to defeat the Antichrist’s forces in a ﬁnal battle. In an extremely strange passage in the novel’s climax, however, Robertson (through Edwards) makes the bold prophetic argument against his premillennial competitors that the ﬁnal battle does not take

224

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

place at the battleﬁeld of Armageddon, but at Jerusalem, “[d]espite the popular notion of the last several years” (399). Liturgy thus intercedes into narrative, suggesting that for Robertson, the correct prophetic reading can resolve the most dire dramatic conﬂict. But can this conﬂict also be resolved through politics? In his political activism, Robertson tries to persuade his audience that by engaging in political struggle, they can help bring about God’s kingdom on earth. His postmillennial logic and his novel’s narrative suggest, however, that human agency plays no role in prophetic events.72 The popular eschatological narrative thus faces its own crisis of narrative and political agency in the thriller genre. Assuming the form of the conventional thriller, with its realist focus on the psychology and agency of characters facing and overcoming extraordinary challenges, The Illuminati and The End of the Age never fully resolve the tension between the form and their faith, insofar as their millennialisms suggest that neither a character’s psychological development nor her ability to act upon the world make any difference to the ultimate spiritual power at the base of the eschatological narrative. Where is the thrill of a world in which the characters don’t need to act? Nor, indeed, can the novels easily resolve the tension between their commitments to politically conservative causes, which preaches the duty to engage in worldly struggle, and their novels’ depiction of an all-encompassing apocalypse that sweeps such struggles away through divine intervention. Left Behind, the ﬁrst of a twelve-novel series (which also includes three “prequels” and one sequel), also represents the coming of the millennium, but offers a decidedly premillennial version.73 It begins immediately after the rapture and ends with an agreement by the main characters, all of them left behind because of their insufﬁcient commitment to the Lord, to form a “Tribulation Force”—a resistance movement that will ﬁght the rise of the Antichrist, help others understand the rapture and come to Jesus, and prepare for its members’ opportunity to go with the Lord at the end of the tribulation period. The novel introduces a range of protagonists who represent various categories of sympathetic but unsaved souls: the Christian who doubts, the husband who loses his Christian wife to the rapture and must save himself to join her, the rebellious daughter who resists what she sees as the foolishness of Christian faith, and the brilliant agnostic journalist who needs empirical conﬁrmation before committing to

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

225

Christ. All of these characters are redeemable and will be redeemed by series’ end; but in the meantime, their lack of sufﬁcient faith means their new commitment must survive the literal hell of the tribulation period. The novel includes many of the typical elements of the eschatological conspiracy: the United Nations as the institution that welcomes the Antichrist and becomes his seat of power, discussions of a “new world order,” and shadowy leaders from the world of government. Indeed, one character who is mocked early in the novel for having a “tendency to buy into conspiracy theories” is murdered just as the inside information he was passing along is conﬁrmed (Left Behind, 80–85, 174–86). The eschatological narrative again dovetails with that of secular conspiracy theories, and with far-right-wing politics—unsurprising, given the status of one of the novels’ co-authors, Tim LaHaye, as a long-time leader of the New Christian Right.74 And the novel demonstrates both the individual and collective practices of interpretation. Each character must individually commit to Christ, a decision that will be based in part on his or her ability correctly to interpret the meaning of the rapture and the ensuing degradation of the world. But the characters can only truly access the eschatological narrative by collective readings and shared understandings which take place in an “emergency” Bible reading session during which the nascent Tribulation Force make sense of the codes embedded in the Book of Revelation (308–14). Left Behind’s enormous success as a novel and the initial volume in a large series comes at least in part from its embrace of both the eschatological narrative and the conventions of genre ﬁction.75 Unlike its predecessors, the series plunges into the tribulation period and presents in full-throated, gory detail all of the trials that beset those who are left behind. Blending the techno-thriller with horror and fantasy, the book offers plenty of suspense and gore—perhaps unsurprisingly, a computer game maker has licensed the rights to adapt the series.76 Although missing the rapture is obviously calamitous, the series teaches that ﬁghting the Antichrist and saving souls from the eternal torment that the tribulation period foreshadows is a fantastic, if high-risk, opportunity.77 Left Behind thus faces and leaves unresolved something of a paradox: the correct response to reading the novels is to commit to Christ before the rapture; but if readers do so, they will miss the action that propelled them through the novels. If the novels make the characters

226

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

and action seem too attractive, and they present divining and resisting conspiracy as too engaging, then they risk inviting readers to forego the proper religious commitment or at least realize that there remains a second-best option—membership in the Tribulation Force. The novel works as a cautionary tale for believers and an evangelical call for the unbelievers, but one whose narrative drive and whose call to ﬁnd, watch, and resist conspiracy offers the reader contradictory pleasures.78 Popular Eschatology as Historiography and Conspiracy Theory

Popular eschatology works within and helps to deﬁne further the religious practices and beliefs of contemporary conservative Protestants. It plays a role within the general structures and belief patterns of most fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals and helps to win converts and to bind believers through faith in the imminent return of Christ. It emphasizes the place of individual experience and collective religious faith by calling Christians to understand and prepare for the rapture and the millennium. Eschatology also helps to extend religious faith and practices into the everyday lives of believers; if Christ’s return is imminent and can happen at any time, then one must be prepared at all times for horriﬁc destruction and ecstatic rapture.79 Hope and fear motivate believers attempting to follow a disciplined, holy life. As Timothy Weber writes, “Premillennialists may not have developed a new Christian lifestyle, but they used their beliefs about the second coming to fortify some of the slipping behavioral standards they shared with other evangelicals.”80 Eschatology also instills an evangelical fervor, and premillennialists have been among the most active Christians in missionary and proselytizing activity, spreading the word of the coming end through personal witness and evangelism, as well as by contributing to prophecy ministries. Finally, and not unimportantly, popular eschatology can be a source of great pleasure, not only as a means to make sense of the world but also via the visceral pleasures of solving the puzzle of Revelation and of a seemingly incomprehensible world, and of sharing an activity with the minister or author who teaches it and with family, friends, and fellow believers.81 Popular eschatology also has a number of important effects on the political and social practices and views of many conservative Christians. First, because of Israel’s role in the end times, most believers in biblical

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

227

prophecy throughout the rise of premillennialism from the nineteenth century to the present have been strong Christian Zionists, arguing not only for a sovereign Jewish state but also for a well-armed Israel that can defend itself and strike against what many fundamentalists see as inherently evil Arabs who threaten Judeo-Christian order.82 Hal Lindsey’s focus on events in the Middle East and especially Israel make this plain, while the Left Behind series, as Melani McAlister has argued, portrays a Jewish Israel in which Palestinian Arabs have been erased, and their history on the land and claims for it have been forgotten.83 Second, many popular eschatological texts lean toward right-wing conspiracy theory, particularly in their militaristic patriotism, fears of a one-world government, virulent anticommunism—all of which would seem to contradict their sublime longing for Christ’s return from a spiritual realm over which humans have no power. Eschatology’s problematic patriotism exempliﬁes this tendency. The presence of the United States in biblical prophecy is the subject of much debate between eschatologists; indeed, although Lindsey’s LGPE works from the assumption that the United States must inevitably lose power and cede authority to the Roman dictator, his later work seems to imply that the United States can remain strong until rapture by making its foreign policy more stridently anticommunist, destroying the evils of the “welfare state” and governmental bureaucracy, building up a strong military, and continuing to support Israel.84 This conﬂict between the inexorable fate foretold in the apocalyptic narrative and the growing desire among conservative Christians, particularly since the rise of the New Christian Right, to change America for what they see as the better, can only be contingently resolved. The eschatological work and political tracts of more politically involved Christians such as Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye demonstrate this problematic resolution: outside his novels, LaHaye has argued that the tribulation is not necessarily going to come about soon and could be forestalled by the public work of Christians, and Robertson’s postmillennialism does not deter his political activism.85 Similarly, some millennialist ﬁction attempts to resolve the demands of the thriller narrative with the imminent end posited by eschatology by resolving the single narrative through heroic, Christian agency and prayer, while keeping alive a near-future threat that the end will come regardless. And the Left Behind series offers both: the rapture has come, but those who are left behind but then come to Christ must participate in armed political and

228

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

spiritual struggle against the demonic forces of evil (which only appear secular) that would enslave them. This suggests a contradictory political response—existential theological commitments to scriptural prophecy, which might suggest political passivity and retreat into religious observance, lead to overt political struggle in the name, presumably, of protecting the right to retreat into religious practice.86 Finally, one of the most important aspects of popular eschatology that works within many of the teachings and political views of conservative Christianity is the tendency to view historical and current events in terms of vast conspiracies led by knowing and unwitting agents of Satan. The tendency to divide reality into antitheses of good and evil, and to place such antitheses within a historical narrative that seeks to understand the natural through the supernatural, leads to a speciﬁc type of cognitive understanding and mapping that structures the interpretation and understanding of events.87 In this respect, the degree to which popular eschatologists such as Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, and Pat Robertson share many of the fears and conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society and other far-right–wing groups is not particularly surprising. This way of narrating the past, present, and future leads one to view the world as the domain of secret and dangerous groups that seek to undermine and destroy Christian beliefs and values. Ultimately, as Lee Quinby has argued about apocalypticism in general, popular eschatology constitutes a Foucauldian “regime of truth that operates within a ﬁeld of power relations and prescribes a particular moral behavior.” It simultaneously narrows conventions for understanding, iterating, and acting on the meaning of history and constructs a vast network for the proliferation of discursive and nondiscursive practices of eschatology.88 I want to conclude by returning to my original discussion about the implications of popular eschatology for conﬂicts over the social and political meaning of history. Popular eschatology relies on the construction of a historical narrative, one that structures discrete historical and current events into a dynamic and all-important framework that can adequately explain for believers a world seemingly beyond the realm of human understanding and agency. It presents the “reality” of the present and past (and the importance accorded to currency and factual information, as we have seen, is great) in an explanatory

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

229

plot that can adequately and meaningfully account for this reality. A historical narrative, as Hayden White argues, “reveals to us a world that is putatively ‘ﬁnished,’ done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience.”89 The individual eschatological narrative—whether in the form of a “nonﬁction” book on prophecy and current events, a televised prophecy/news program or a Web site, or a novel that ﬁctionally represents the movement toward the last days—does its work in the space between the individual events reported in it (whether they are biblical, “real,” or “ﬁctional”) and the larger structure of the Christian eschatological narrative as it currently survives. Each popular eschatological narrative attempts to provide a form of resolution and closure between the natural and the supernatural. “Bible prophecy,” a character in Left Behind informs another, “is history written in advance.”90 Put another way, human history is a product of a spiritual narrative; the eschatological historiographer moves between and connects these two realms, recognizing that the events he witnesses are wholly determined by God. The successful reader/viewer who moves between these realms comprehends and accepts both the information represented by these accounts of discrete historical events and the larger narrative at work in them. The ongoing framing and reframing of present and historical events within the larger narrative demonstrate the intense will to know that characterizes eschatology, a continuing quest for transparency and sharply deﬁned images and information. The Bible provides a combined timetable, map, and script; the annals of human history and current events are a shifting and mobile text; and the practice of popular eschatology is an ongoing attempt to match the latter with the former in order to know the coming future.91 This effort to narrate the past serves a crucial role in the understanding and experience of time. As John Gager argues, the Book of Revelation serves a similar purpose as psychoanalytic therapy, attempting to transcend the line between a real and dangerous present and a mythical future. Indeed, this line is not merely transcended, it is suppressed; the future is at work in the past and the present, which serve as both preludes to and signs of the great days to come. The triumphant visions with which all popular eschatological texts end thus do not

230

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

merely describe future events, they “transcend the time separating present from future, to make possible an experience of millennial bliss as living reality. Just as the therapeutic situation is the machine through which the patient comes to experience the past as present, so the myth is the machine through which the believing community comes to experience the future as present.”92 Ultimately, as Frank Kermode notes, in eschatology the end is not merely imminent, it is immanent—present in the whole of history and the individual life is the promise of the End.93 Popular eschatology serves as both narrative and interpretive practice, fulﬁlling the desire to provide a complete explanation of historical and present events as well as to suppress the dangers and threats that these events represent. Clearly, such fulﬁllment is “ideological” in the sense that it displaces the possibility for recognizing and enacting afﬁrmative social and political change for current and past problems in favor of an abiding belief in a metaphysical solution. It offers a curious politics that seeks to impose a patriarchal, free-market design on a world from which it also hopes to ﬂee as soon as possible. Yet, the social narrative of the end times is not simply the production of a passive, impotent public. Although it works within and is clearly articulated to the more general lack of a plausible social and historical imagining of a better past, present, and future, its utopian impulse and its creative agency allow the practices of popular eschatology to work not unlike what Fredric Jameson calls “fabulations,” postmodern novels (such as, for example, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime) that retell and recast history as parody and fantasy. He explains: Fabulation . . . is no doubt the symptom of social and historical impotence, of the blocking of possibilities that leaves little option but the imaginary. Yet [the] very invention and inventiveness [of the “fabulation”] endorses [sic] a creative freedom with respect to events it cannot control, by the sheer act of multiplying them; agency here steps out of the historical record itself into the process of devising it; and new multiple or alternate strings of events rattle the bars of the national tradition and the history manuals whose very constraints and necessities their parodic force indicts.94

Popular eschatology does not view human agency as having much of a role in the historical process—the individual can do little but be saved through a personal and meaningful relationship with Christ—but

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

|

231

it does offer believers a signiﬁcant role in the practice of historicizing, in participating in the ongoing rethinking and reconstruction of the popular eschatological narrative. The notion that “anyone” can understand prophecy and relate it to current events by comparing the nightly news to Revelation suggests a form of popular historiography that casts its adherents as historians rather than historical actors. The ecstatic promise embedded in this interpretive practice—ultimate redemption, becoming one with the body of Christ—presents eschatology as a transcendent experience of and obsession with the sublime. This is a powerful historiographical practice, indeed. The eschatological subject is not passive: she “chooses” to be born again, to practice her faith and adherence to religious and social principles, to pore over the Bible, to evangelize, and to watch current events, read historical accounts, and consume prophetic interpretations—and, ultimately, to sense the end. The everyday eschatological life promises the transcendence of the everyday through the interpretation of human events. This is also very much a political process that reconstructs the past, present, and future in order to make sense of and activate religious and political beliefs and practices.95 As the work of self-constructed outsiders attempting to question and struggle against what they perceive to be dominant, secular ideologies, popular eschatology participates in the conﬂict over the politics of history and the history of politics. Such struggle demonstrates the importance associated with the power to represent the past (and the future) and the degree to which alternative histories and visions of the historical process challenge the dominant, “consensus” history. This returns us to the discussion in part I. It would be just as easy to dismiss popular eschatology as the paranoid metaphysical fantasies of fundamentalists as it would be to label conspiracy theory as the paranoid political fantasies of cranky outsiders. To do so, however, would be to make two errors: First, as Paul Boyer argues, it would simplify the dynamic processes of religious belief and the everyday lives and actions of millions of people within a rather ﬂat, static notion of sickness.96 Second, it would fail to take into account the ongoing political struggle to represent and understand the past. Eschatology and conservative Christianity in general are clearly ideological in the sense that, as Ernesto Laclau argues, any attempt to describe a singular, uniﬁed, and ahistorical social realm—whether by Marxists, Christians, or consensus

232

|

THE PROPHETIC PLOT

historians—is ideological insofar as it misrecognizes the play of and struggle over meaning and process in society.97 Yet, in demonstrating the conﬂict over history in the realm of the popular, texts and practices that attempt to sense the end also represent the struggle over the interpretation and narratives, as well as the meanings and possibilities, of the past, present, and future.

7 A Failure of Imagination Competing Narratives of 9/11 Truth

It’s not the evidence we’ve seen that we’re concerned about, it’s the evidence we haven’t seen. . . . It’s the dog that didn’t bark.1 — Charles Goyette, KFNX Radio, August 23, 2006, interviewing Davin Coburn, reporter/researcher for Popular Mechanics magazine’s Debunking 9/11 Myths

W

hen President Bush named former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean as chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States on December 16, 2002, he placed Kean in a nearly impossible position. Kean’s 9/11 Commission faced great expectations. Congress, the media, and, in all likelihood, the majority of the American public viewed the Commission in the way faithful Americans since the early twentieth century have tended to see newly established, independent, expert agencies—as the necessary and perhaps only appropriate tool to solve a complex public issue. The troubling but nebulous questions surrounding the events of 9/11, the apparent progenitor of an ongoing age of terrorism and a newly vulnerable America, needed level-headed attention. Meeting such expectations would be difﬁcult. Although the Commission initially enjoyed strong public support, especially from the families of 9/11 victims who lobbied hard for its formation, it faced signiﬁcant institutional and political obstacles. The president had resisted the Commission’s formation, as had many of his more partisan supporters in Congress. The Bush administration had already earned an unsurpassed reputation for secrecy and for resistance to congressional oversight, and it demonstrated its reluctance to release 9/11-related information during the inquiry conducted jointly by the 233

234

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (known as the Joint Inquiry).2 The newly elected 108th Congress promised secure Republican majorities in both chambers, suggesting that the Commission would have little support on Capitol Hill if conﬂicts with the White House arose as the Commission investigated the attacks. The 9/11 Commission’s bipartisan design—Republican and Democratic leaders each appointed ﬁve commissioners, and the Commission required a majority or bipartisan agreement to issue requests for documents or subpoenas—seemed likely to create partisan deadlock.3 The president’s initial appointment of Henry Kissinger as chairman aroused suspicion either that the president hoped the Commission would be restrained, pliable, and sympathetic, or that something more sinister was at work: after all, Kissinger is the ultimate Washington insider, having served Presidents Nixon and Ford, and a practitioner of realpolitik whose tenures as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State were famously associated with American covert action in Southeast Asia and Latin America. (Tellingly, Kissinger resigned the chairmanship upon learning that he would be forced to disclose information about his private activities and that of his international consulting ﬁrm, Kissinger Associates, on behalf of their corporate clients.)4 At the same time, the Commission struggled under the weight of historical precedent: the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, better known as the Warren Commission, an independent investigatory body also established to research a traumatic public event. The Warren Commission had been the target of unending criticism and the butt of an inﬁnite number of jokes over the preceding four decades, offering a cautionary tale for investigatory commissions.5 The 9/11 Commissioners understood this, according to chairman Kean and vice-chairman Lee Hamilton: For decades, the Warren Commission’s ﬁndings have been poked and prodded by conspiracy theorists, in large measure because the commission is not perceived as having had full access to the most secretive materials in the government. Lee Harvey Oswald may have acted alone, but over the years people could point in different directions and say to the commission, “You didn’t look at this document about U.S. policy toward Cuba; you didn’t talk to so-and-so; you didn’t turn over this stone.” To avoid such accusations, we had to

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

235

be able to stand up in front of the American people and say, “We have asked for everything that has to do with the 9/11 story, and have seen everything that we asked for.”6

Accordingly, the Commission resolved that its ﬁnal report would attempt to offer factual support for its conclusions sufﬁcient to satisfy the majority of what it presumed was an interested, rational, and informed public. At the same time, the Commission’s executive director Philip Zelikow told a Washington Post reporter that the report would not play what he called “Whack-A-Mole” with conspiracy theories—attempting to address one set of allegations, only to have a different theory or a new version of a discredited one pop up. Responding to conspiracy theories, Zelikow argued, was an impossible task given their ever-expanding number and the improbability that an ofﬁcial government commission would satisfy those committed to them.7 The Commission would instead try to preempt theories’ formation through a thorough, professional, and independent investigation and report. These, then, were the stakes for Kean and his colleagues. The 9/11 Commission could be seen as an authoritative body presenting a careful account of the attacks and offering effective policy prescriptions to prevent future terrorist attacks, or as a mere extension of a White House seeking to bury its mistakes . . . or, perhaps, to conceal something more nefarious. If the latter possibility came to pass and the Commission was perceived to be a creature of the White House, it would be stitched into the political and conspiratorial narratives about 9/11 that were already forming and circulating among a skeptical domestic and international public growing increasingly frustrated by the Bush administration’s military unilateralism—and, as time wore on, by its failures in Iraq. It could become the new Warren Commission in the same way that 9/11, in its roles as a spectacular and shocking national trauma and catalyst for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had become both the new JFK assassination and the new Pearl Harbor.8 If the measure of the Commission’s success was its acceptance by elite audiences in Washington and the mainstream media, then its ﬁnal 9/11 Commission Report surpassed all expectations. Largely afﬁrming the conclusion of earlier investigations—that the attacks were caused by terrorists who took advantage of lax security and military defenses as well as inadequate and disorganized intelligence efforts—the Commission

236

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

found that the government’s performance demonstrated, among other things, a “failure of imagination,” or an inability to consider and predict the well-organized and creative efforts of terrorist groups. The Report itself was embraced by editorialists, politicians, and book critics, and was even nominated for a National Book Award.9 It also enjoyed enormous popular success, selling 600,000 copies in its initial few months of release and dominating non-ﬁction best-seller lists—despite the fact that the entire Report was available free for download from the Commission’s Web site.10 Early opinion polling about the Commission’s performance suggested that the public at least initially approved of the Commission’s methods and work.11 But if the measure for its success was how well it protected its legitimacy by avoiding what Zelikow described as popular skepticism so “corrosive” to understanding that its “bacteria can sicken the larger body,” then the Commission’s work has not yet received its ﬁnal judgment.12 Two years after the Report appeared in 2004, journalistic accounts of the attacks’ ﬁfth anniversary described a growing “truth movement” of 9/11 skeptics who questioned the ofﬁcial account of the attacks. A handful of somewhat ambiguous polls found widespread, growing public doubt about the ofﬁcial account of 9/11, which rose along with distrust of the Bush administration. All of this indicates that the Commission may yet be seen popularly as a conspiratorial whitewash, and 9/11 itself may join the JFK assassination as a signature event in the canon of American conspiracy theories. This chapter describes the emergence of 9/11 as an object of conspiratorial intrigue and imagination, and thus offers a snapshot of parts of an emerging set of conspiracy theories and conspiracy community as they begin to reach full bloom. As the event at which all current (at least current circa early-2008) conspiracy theories converge, 9/11 thus constitutes the dominant conspiratorial present—a present that looks remarkably like the mid- and late-twentieth century past, despite signiﬁcant changes in information technology and the continuing institutionalization and ironization of conspiracy theory as an inﬂuential form of popular politics. The Commission’s knowing and savvy efforts to respond to 9/11 conspiracy theories and to preempt popular belief in them, and the 9/11 truth movement’s equally knowing and savvy efforts to critique the ofﬁcial account of the attacks, display all of the theoretical and descriptive points that I have identiﬁed in the book thus far.

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

237

The Commission offered its authoritative narrative (or, more precisely, set of narratives), while the truth movement has responded with its own efforts to reinterpret and re-narrate the attacks, their causes, and what they signify about the contemporary world. The movement has taken ambitious, though not entirely successful, steps to form a collective political and scholarly community, which produces a blizzard of texts offering narratives that compete with the ones told by the Commission, and which desires the impossible grail of conspiracy theory: the truth. While the 9/11 Commission may have criticized the federal government and its intelligence services for their failures of imagination prior to the attacks, the truth movement criticizes the Commission either for its failure to imagine an explanation for the attacks that could see through the “ofﬁcial” account or for a quite imaginative cover-up of the hidden truths of 9/11. By considering this clash between ofﬁcial authorities and an active conspiracy community, this chapter also poses a set of questions that the book has not yet addressed: How does the state attempt to preempt and respond to conspiracy theories? And what difference do these efforts make? The chapter begins with a historical account of the emergence of 9/11 conspiracy theories and the community around them, focusing on both a sample of the most prominent theories and the complicated collective nature of the truth movement’s interpretive and narrative strategies. It then describes the 9/11 Commission’s efforts to establish itself as a legitimate, independent investigatory body and the conspiracy community’s largely dismissive, critical response, as well as the community’s own efforts to establish its legitimate, independent authority. The chapter’s ﬁnal section offers a close reading of Loose Change, the most important and widely circulated documentary attacking the ofﬁcial account, which displays and animates conspiracy theory’s cultural forms and practices and populist distrust in distinct and innovative ways. Because of the intense controversy surrounding the 9/11 theories, I offer the following cautions about this chapter. It cannot cover the entirety of the 9/11 conspiracy theories or the controversies surrounding the 9/11 Commission—an impossible undertaking in a single chapter, and one that would be inconsistent with the book’s goal of considering conspiracy theory generally rather than studying any one theory or theorized event comprehensively. What follows is instead a thumbnail description of a sample of the most prominent theories and

238

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

theorists.13 The curious reader can piece together a more fulsome picture by following links on various Web sites cited in the endnotes.14 Also, in keeping with the nature of this book’s project, this chapter does not set out to debunk the 9/11 conspiracy theories, although I will include references to texts and Web sites that do so in the endnotes.15 Instead, it seeks to contextualize these theories within contemporary popular politics and culture. Finally, to disclose my own position: I remain skeptical of all of the conspiracy theories described in this chapter and dismissive of the most speculative. I concede, however, that the 9/11 Commission’s ofﬁcial account fails to hold culpable individuals and institutions sufﬁciently responsible for their negligence on and before September 11,16 and its narrative and explanations (like those of any effort to explain such a complex event) must rely upon enough anomalous, ambiguous occurrences to make me understand and sympathize with those who are skeptical of the ofﬁcial account, even if, based on what I have read, I am not persuaded by the truth community’s conclusions.17 More speciﬁc biases undoubtedly emerge in the text that follows. Contested Truths: The Ofﬁcial Account and the Prevailing Conspiracy Theories

The ofﬁcial account of the 9/11 attacks, as developed in the period immediately following them and as modiﬁed by the Joint Inquiry and 9/11 Commission investigations, identiﬁed as the attacks’ perpetrator the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, led by Osama Bin Laden and acting through nineteen hijackers.18 Three planes hit their intended targets, the two World Trade Center (WTC) towers and the Pentagon, while a fourth, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed in central Pennsylvania when the passengers, who had learned of the earlier plane crashes through cell phone and Airfone conversations with people on the ground, rushed the plane’s cockpit and overcame the hijackers. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had already struck American targets prior to September 11, ﬁrst in a car bomb planted beneath the WTC in 1993 and then in similar attacks on American targets abroad: the U.S.S. Cole, attacked with explosives in 2000 while the destroyer was refueling in a Yemen port, and the simultaneous U.S. embassy bombings in 1998 in the East African capital cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. Earlier in 2001, American intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement had gathered some intelligence reports suggesting

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

239

the possibility of imminent al-Qaeda–sponsored attacks and of Arab men enrolling in American airplane pilot schools. It is unclear whether these pre-9/11 reports provided enough speciﬁcity to prompt an effective response to prevent the attacks, even if their signiﬁcance had been identiﬁed and they had been correctly interpreted as part of the same threat. Nevertheless, bureaucratic inertia, turf protection, and incompetence, as well as confusion about the relationships among the many intelligence and law enforcement agencies, inhibited the ability of those agencies to correctly integrate individual intelligence reports and communicate them to responsible and capable authorities within and across appropriate chains of command. Those same issues—confusion as well as bureaucratic inertia and incompetence—inhibited the response of both the military and civilian authorities controlling domestic airspace on September 11, and of the ﬁrst responders in New York. Widespread administrative incompetence and nonfeasance enabled the attacks to largely achieve their goals as well as to increase the damage and loss of life they caused. Above all, the 9/11 Commission concluded, the Bush and Clinton administrations and the agencies in charge of preempting and defending against terrorist attacks demonstrated failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management—a colossal set of failures that ultimately made possible the successful September 11 attacks. Most 9/11 conspiracy theories contest every point of the ofﬁcial account. They base this refutation on their interpretation of both forensic anomalies at the accident sites whose existence the ofﬁcial account concedes and attempts to explain, and of evidence whose existence and trustworthiness the ofﬁcial account either rejects or ignores. Their interpretive practice, in other words, both reinterprets and ﬁnds conspiratorial details, ripping them out of their place within the ofﬁcial account’s framework and inserting them into a conspiratorial one. The conspiracy theorists assert that any unexplained anomaly, or any anomaly for which they can provide a better explanation than the ofﬁcial account offers, causes the ofﬁcial account to fail, because each of the government’s assertions requires and builds upon the truth of others. If some of the alleged hijackers are still alive, they argue, or if the towers’ collapse was not caused by the plane collision, or if something other than American Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, then the entire ofﬁcial account would be revealed as a series of lies.19 Conspiracy theorists express conﬁdence that their work has already refuted the ofﬁcial account. James Fetzer, a truth

240

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

movement leader whose Scholars for 9/11 Truth organization I describe further below, proclaims, “I can assure you that the things I’m telling you about 9/11 have objective scientiﬁc status. [Any effort to debunk what I present] is going to be built on either fabricated evidence, or disregard of the real evidence, or violations of the principles of scientiﬁc reasoning.”20 Even author David Ray Grifﬁn, who tends to be more cautious and less conclusory than most of the leading researchers in the ﬁeld, has ended one speech by declaring, “It is already possible to know beyond a reasonable doubt one very important thing: The destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by domestic terrorists.”21 Although some of what follows is hotly contested within the truth movement, these are the prevailing theories circa mid-2007 arguing that the Bush administration or some larger conspiracy that in turn controls the administration organized the attacks.22 The World Trade Center towers’ collapse cannot be attributed to the collision and ﬁre caused by American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the north tower, and by United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the south tower. Rather, the majority of conspiracy theorists allege, the buildings collapsed because of remotely detonated explosives that had been placed in the basement during the weeks prior to September 11. A minority of dissenting voices in the community argues instead that a more advanced military technology, possibly a small nuclear device or a directed energy weapon shot from space, was used to cause the buildings’ collapse. Some argue that the planes were remotely controlled; a small number of others argue that no planes hit the towers at all, and that all of the video footage that was shown on television had been digitally manipulated to show phantom aircraft. The Pentagon attack was caused either by a missile or by a plane that was smaller than American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757. Those who might be willing to agree in part with the ofﬁcial account, by conceding that commercial airliners ﬂown by a group of al-Qaeda– organized terrorists were indeed the cause of the towers’ collapse and/ or the damage to the Pentagon, still maintain that the attacks were themselves planned and run by secret U.S. government forces. Virtually everyone seems to agree that both the WTC and Pentagon attacks succeeded because high level executive branch and military ofﬁcials ordered military defense operations and civilian air authorities to stand down; and/or because the military was unable to respond in a timely fashion

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

241

or was confused because of its engagement in a series of war games that had been strategically scheduled for that morning as a distraction. Finally, some argue that United Flight 93 did not crash in Shankstown, Pennsylvania, as a result of the passengers’ efforts to thwart hijackers but instead was shot down by the U.S. military; others believe that the original Flight 93 had already landed safely that morning in Cleveland and that the wreckage at the scene belonged to another plane. By deﬁnition, every conspiracy theorist agrees that 9/11 was intended to serve as the precipitating event for some larger, more nefarious project. The conspirators correctly predicted that the attack would stimulate the American public’s bellicose, nationalistic instincts and provide the pretext for military action in the Middle East, while it would also leave the public fearful and willing to cede greater political and military authority to the president and thus allow President Bush and the Republican Party to gain stronger majorities in Congress, win reelection in 2004, suppress dissent, and drastically reduce the public’s civil liberties. Having amassed greater power, the conspiratorial forces that planned and executed the attacks would be able to advance their global geopolitical and economic interests. For some theorists, these geopolitical interests are nationally imperialistic—9/11 has allowed the United States to impose a neoconservative Pax Americana on the world—while for others, the 9/11 conspiracy was perpetrated by a new world order motivated by its desire to impose a 1984-like totalitarian global state. For most, however, the conspiracy’s motives appeared at once murky and obvious, a combination of nationalistic aggression and totalitarian globalism (notwithstanding the apparent incongruity between those two projects) that amalgamate conspiracy theorists’ abstract, inchoate fears of concentrated power. However mysterious the larger motivation might be, most theories agree on a more basic point: The conspiracy is focused on the Middle East because it covets control over the Persian Gulf region’s oil both to advance its selﬁsh economic interests and to secure domination of an essential resource at a time when oil supplies are drying up and fast-developing countries are becoming increasingly industrialized and economically competitive. The varieties of 9/11 conspiracy theorists share a general rhetorical and discursive approach to presenting their arguments. Recognizing the debased nature of “conspiracy theory” as a label for their beliefs, truth movement writers make a number of strategic, semantic moves. Most

242

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

signiﬁcantly, they engage in reverse labeling: the ofﬁcial account, they argue, itself constitutes a conspiracy theory that is at once overly simple and excessively complex. Quite like the Warren Commission’s simpliﬁcation of a more complex and disturbing truth within the package of a single assassin and his impossibly magic bullet, the ofﬁcial account, they argue, posits one mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, and a rickety story composed of multiple madmen and an absent civilian and military air defense.23 This, too, seems too simple—“is it credible,” one book asks, “that nineteen Islamic fanatics organized by al-Qaeda carried out the 9/11 events without any help from certain elements within the U.S. government?”24 At the same time, they argue, the ofﬁcial account also requires a series of improbable events that result from massive ofﬁcial incompetence by high- and low-level ofﬁcials across the federal and military bureaucracy. The number of bureaucratic culprits is unimaginable, the truth movement argues: the intelligence agencies (including the CIA and the broader intelligence community as well as the FBI), the White House, the Pentagon, NORAD, the FAA, and the National Military Command Center all had to do nothing or precisely the wrong thing in order for the attacks to succeed. Writer David Ray Grifﬁn argues that the ofﬁcial account, which presumes incompetence, “can be understood as simply part of a larger coincidence theory” that itself requires the coincidence of all these coincidental failures—and he counts at least thirty-eight of them.25 The other signiﬁcant rhetorical move made by truth movement writers is to embrace the conspiracy theory moniker, notwithstanding its apparently debased status. They claim to be part of the longstanding, honorable tradition of fearing conspiracy in American history, extending from colonialists during the revolutionary era through Lincoln’s efforts to rally the Union during the Civil War. If the United States was born of conspiracy theorists and survived because of them, then the collective actions of 9/11 conspiracy theorists are perfectly legitimate.26 And if all explanations of 9/11 are conspiracy theories, then the truth movement must demonstrate that its conspiracy theories prevail in the contest for popular support.27 This is not to suggest that the truth movement presents a uniﬁed theory—quite the contrary, as this summary hints and the chapter later explains. Indeed, because it is barred from access to key information, the truth movement largely concedes that it can only posit competing theories of what occurred—and indeed, its multiple theories

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

243

compete not only with the ofﬁcial account but also with one another. From this diversity, however, comes the implicit argument that, as the chapter’s epigraph asserts, “the dog that didn’t bark”—the evidence that is missing because the conspiracy has suppressed it—is more important than “the evidence we’ve seen.” Conspiracy Belief and Community Membership

It is virtually impossible to evaluate with any authority the size of the conspiracy community or the extent to which the public accepts, or even knows much about, 9/11 conspiracy claims. Millions of people, supposedly, have viewed conspiracy-related Web sites and ﬁlms; thousands have purchased the bestselling books of the movement; and hundreds attend the largest conferences and gatherings. When they are not decrying the unwillingness of people to join with them in their efforts to press for more investigations or disclosures about 9/11 or for the impeachment and prosecution of the perpetrators, conspiracy theorists also claim that a signiﬁcant portion of the public agrees with them.28 Public opinion polling has certainly found widespread, profound mistrust of the Bush administration that has grown in the years since the attacks. Depending upon how polls frame the questions—and equally important, how the responses are then interpreted—the resulting data appears to ﬁnd a signiﬁcant number of respondents who think that the administration has hidden what it knows about 9/11 or knew about the attacks beforehand,29 and a smaller though still signiﬁcant minority which thinks the administration may have been involved in the attacks.30 It would be difﬁcult to conclude from these polls that the strongest version of a conspiracy theory—claiming that the administration actively participated in the attacks—attracts more than a sub-group of strong believers. However, viewed alongside the growing public disapproval and distrust of President Bush that polls have found during most of his second term,31 the polls relating to 9/11 conspiracy theory belief generally indicate that a large minority, if not a majority, of the public continues to hold some doubt about the ofﬁcial account of 9/11.32 The trajectory and extent of the public’s belief in JFK assassination conspiracies over a similar time frame offers a useful way to evaluate the extent and trajectory of 9/11 conspiracy theories. The comparison demonstrates that while 9/11 conspiracies are widely believed, the extent of that belief is not unprecedented; in fact, it is not as wide as the belief in

244

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

a conspiracy surrounding the Kennedy assassination in the immediate and ﬁve-year period following the events in Dallas in November 1963. At that time, a fairly large segment of the public was almost immediately skeptical of the ofﬁcial account that identiﬁed Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman: a poll taken within a week of the assassination found, among other things, that 62 percent of respondents thought “other people were involved too.”33 A report issued in early 1964 by a factﬁnding committee of the civil rights division of the Anti-Defamation League summarized polling that found a majority of the public believed that the assassinations of JFK and Oswald was “the result of organized plotting” rather than anomalous murders performed by two random, impassioned individuals.34 The Warren Commission report, issued in late September of 1964, enjoyed acclaim from the mainstream press and elite commentators similar to that garnered by the 9/11 Commission’s report—although, as with 9/11, Europeans expressed initial doubts about its conclusions.35 By the assassination’s third anniversary, however, the Warren Commission report, now more than two years old, faced widespread public suspicion.36 In early 1967, polls showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans doubted the report; and by May of that year, a Harris Poll found that two-thirds of the public suspected there was a conspiracy behind the assassination, while an astonishingly small 18 percent of respondents had faith in the Warren Commission’s report.37 In light of this comparison, one cannot argue that 9/11 conspiracy theories are unprecedented or that the public’s belief in them reﬂects some radical break from the historical past. If either the post-JFK assassination events of the 1960s and 1970s (including the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, urban riots, the Vietnam War, and Watergate), “postmodernity,” or the Internet have transformed innocent mid-century Americans into exceptionally sophisticated or excessively cynical critics of ofﬁcial master narratives,38 9/11 conspiracy poll numbers and the existence or size of the conspiracy community do not reﬂect this. As explained in earlier chapters, conspiracy theories certainly seem more prevalent in popular and political culture than in earlier eras. The Internet has clearly allowed researchers and members of the public to collect both quality and junk information more efﬁciently. It also enables instantaneous communication among researchers and between them and their audience (both existing and

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

245

new), and much quicker and cheaper distribution of information and theories. Paul Thompson, who produced and continues to update a remarkably detailed timeline of 9/11-related events, claims to have collected his copious research on the Internet, while the number of Web sites and videos devoted to 9/11 conspiracy theories, both pro and con, is staggering.39 The immediacy and relative low cost of online communication has likely enabled an active, vibrant community of 9/11 conspiracy theorists to develop and mature quickly. It is unclear, however, how much these changed historical circumstances have expanded the size of that community of active believers; nor can one conﬁdently make claims about the extent to which a broader population shares the movement’s conspiratorial beliefs, or the degree to which 9/11 conspiracy belief is somehow wider or stronger than belief in earlier conspiracies. Moving Truth: The Formation of the 9/11 Truth Movement

In the period immediately following the attacks, no single conspiracy theory, nor any organized conspiracy community, emerged as dominant. Among the earliest well-circulated conspiracy theories about 9/11, the best-known held that Jews who worked in the World Trade Center were forewarned by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and stayed home from work on September 11. Indeed, conspiracy theories spread widely in the Middle East, where newspaper columnists ﬂoated a number of explanations for the attacks, not all of them anti-Semitic.40 Some of the initial rumors in the United States, such as one about a Nostradamus prediction that matched the attacks, did not survive long. A few American Web sites quickly suggested the involvement of the Bush administration and the CIA, however, and thus anticipated the theories that would emerge and ﬁnd favor later in the truth movement.41 Some well-established conspiracy theorists reacted immediately to the attacks, including the Chicago-based theorist Sherman Skolnick, who claimed that the attacks were merely cover for various crooked business dealings by the Bush family and would enable the “overthrow of the American public” that began with the JFK assassination.42 Alex Jones, a radio and public access television host in Austin, Texas, claims to have predicted the attacks in a June 2001 broadcast and immediately began to allege they were an inside job.43 Some leftist peace activists began including conspiracy allegations in their protests in late 2001, and perhaps the

246

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

earliest 9/11-speciﬁc protest was held outside Senator Diane Feinstein’s ofﬁce in San Francisco in January 2002.44 By early 2002, enough conspiracy theories were in circulation on the Internet that journalists and commentators began to express their concern about them and about those who believed them.45 Talk radio and cable access and satellite television shows popularized theories— Alex Jones, for example, followed this path to national recognition as a leading truth movement activist. Books and book sales still seem a more tangible index of popularity and legitimacy than broadcast media appearances, however, and a French book, Thierry Mayssan’s monograph L’Effroyable Imposture (2002, published in its English translation as 9/11: The Big Lie), was the ﬁrst prominent conspiracy theory text. It garnered so much attention in France that American and British newspapers ran stories on it but initially dismissed its success as a purely French phenomenon.46 The book, along with Mayssan’s follow-up The Pentagate (2002), asserted that the Bush administration and a broader military-industrial complex organized the attacks, and that a missile rather than a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon. By June 2002, L’Effroyable Imposture had sold 200,000 copies in France alone, foreign rights had been sold in eighteen countries (including North America), and two French journalists had already written a response rejecting the book’s claims.47 The books had a long-term impact on American conspiracy theories, at least in part because they garnered press attention and came from outside both the United States and its existing conspiracy community—and therefore seemed more legitimate. By the end of 2002, other books began to appear, including British author Nafeez Ahmed’s The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001, and Canadian author Michel Chossudovsky’s War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11.48 It was not until 2004, however, as the 9/11 Commission investigated the attacks and then released its Report, that a coordinated movement became more visible.49 Two conferences in the spring of 2004, the “International Inquiry into 9/11” in San Francisco in March and the “International Citizens Inquiry into 9/11” held in Toronto two months later, galvanized a self-described “truth movement.”50 Around the third anniversary of the attacks and soon after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, a day-long panel session in New York called “The 9-11 Citizens Commission” held “The Omissions Hearings,”

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

247

which presented a detailed critique of the ofﬁcial Commission’s report in a mock governmental commission hearing (complete with a former member of Congress, Cynthia McKinney, who at the time was between her terms as a representative from Georgia).51 A broader community developed from these conferences and various smaller organizations and Web sites that came to life during this period and began to connect with each other. In particular, the conferences and Web sites encouraged the distribution and sharing of information and also created social networking possibilities by enabling people and groups from different parts of the country to meet each other. Around the same time, powerful visual presentations questioning the 9/11 attacks that spread virally around the Web introduced more people to some of the basic conspiracy arguments, most notably Pentagon Strike, a ﬂash-based ﬁlm of photographic stills released in the summer of 2004, and Loose Change, a documentary that was originally posted in April 2005.52 At the same time, the community was growing in two seemingly opposite directions: in organized, locally situated organizations, and via globally distributed Web pages. The early conferences themselves encouraged local groups to form, either by rallying and increasing the membership of organizations that hosted the events, or by enabling people from the same locations to travel together to the conference or meet for the ﬁrst time during the conference. Groups focused on 9/11 formed within and from out of existing political organizations, most typically anti–Iraq War groups. As their ﬁrst step after founding, groups at the local and national level establish Web sites, the number of which has grown precipitously, especially in the past three years.53 Some of the largest and most professional sites are those that welcome diverse theories, such as 911Truth.org, the self-proclaimed “leading portal of the September 11th research community and truth movement,” which claims to “have accumulated vast practical experience in investigation and in campaigns for education, visibility, media, lobbying, street action and litigation.”54 Among 911Truth.org’s stated goals are to support research and build coalitions with non-9/11 organizations in the United States and other countries, and to build new organizations on college campuses. The site frequently announces the movement’s successes in forming new coalitions with organizations devoted to different but related causes (antiwar groups, organizations promoting the impeachment of George W. Bush, etc.), while it also connects its global

248

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

audience with locally situated communities by posting how-to guides for creating local “community hubs” of truth activists.55 At the level of the community “hub,” the Internet meets and enables local and regional activism, melding the two seemingly disparate levels of communication and political activism.56 The 9/11 truth conferences and the conspiracy Web sites and book sales have helped establish a kind of star and leadership system, a trend that had already begun through book sales. As of mid-2007, the leading conspiracy researchers featured a broad array of writing styles and approaches, ranging from the apparently modest, careful scholar to the aggressive dogmatist. In the former category are two career academics, Steven Jones, an academic physicist formerly on the faculty of Brigham Young University, who wrote the leading scientiﬁc paper questioning the ofﬁcial account of the WTC towers’ collapse, and David Ray Grifﬁn, an emeritus theologian at the Claremont School of Theology, whose books The New Pearl Harbor (2004) and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005) quickly established him as a bestselling author in the ﬁeld.57 Jones and Grifﬁn claim not to have been conspiracy theorists prior to 9/11 and their subsequent involvement in the truth movement; indeed, in his books and interviews, Grifﬁn describes himself as a late-arriving, almost reluctant member, telling one reporter, “I want my life back. But how can I ignore that we have become entranced by demonic power, so focused on lust for wealth and control that almost anything becomes possible?”58 In the introduction to New Pearl Harbor, he describes how he had ignored the growing truth movement until spring 2003, when his conventional leftist study of American expansionism and imperialism was interrupted by an e-mail message he received from a “sensible” fellow professor advising him to look at some of the better 9/11 conspiracy Web sites. Describing himself as “surprised, even amazed” to see the amount of evidence “that points to the conclusion that the administration did indeed intentionally allow the attacks of 9/11 to happen,” he then began the research that has culminated in his position as a leading 9/11 truth movement author.59 Steven Jones, too, comes across as an accidental conspiracy theorist. A devout Mormon and former supporter of George W. Bush, he became a fervent critic of the Iraq War as a result of his doubts about the ofﬁcial account of 9/11.60 In November 2005, he also became the most scientiﬁcally credentialed member of the truth movement when he posted on

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

249

his university Web site a paper asserting that the airplane crashes could not have caused the collapse of the WTC towers. Relying on publicly available government documents, he claimed to offer the best hypothesis to explain the evidence, arguing that “pre-positioned cutter-charges,” affected by controlled demolition, caused the buildings’ collapse.61 For obvious reasons—here was a respected professor, albeit of cold fusion physics rather than engineering, who supported theories that the truth movement had previously developed and now widely shared—the paper proved enormously popular and was posted on numerous Web sites. Jones became a virtual celebrity at 9/11 conspiracy conferences in the summer of 2006, especially at a conference in Chicago where he made his truth movement debut.62 Other leading ﬁgures in the movement present themselves as proudly committed, long-time conspiracy theorists who embrace a more global, timeless understanding of the plot that caused 9/11. Most famously, Alex Jones claims to have predicted 9/11 months earlier on his radio show; others, like Jim Marrs, Michael Ruppert, and Webster Tarpley claim not to have been surprised by the event, insofar as it merely conﬁrmed the more general warnings they had been making for years. Marrs maintains that on September 12, 2001, he posted on the Internet his “initial thoughts” on the attacks, suggesting that at minimum Bush knew about the attacks in advance and allowed them to take place, and that they were connected to the JFK assassination (about which he had written the commercially successful book Crossﬁre [1989]). Later, he claimed, his major commercial publisher rejected as too controversial the book he quickly wrote and completed before the end of 2001 proving the attacks were an “inside job.”63 Tarpley, too, claims that his decades of experience as a journalist and researcher helped him realize almost immediately after 9/11 that the ofﬁcial account, as it quickly developed, was “an absurd myth” that would be used as a pretext for American aggression. He felt duty-bound, he writes, to lead the effort to awaken public awareness to the truth.64 Like Marrs, Tarpley has long been involved in conspiracy research and had formerly worked for the longtime conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche and his publication Executive Intelligence Review. Ruppert, who claims his work draws on more than two decades of political awareness, activism, and research into geopolitics that followed a career as a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department, published his pre- and post-9/11 writings largely in

250

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

his newsletter From the Wilderness, parts of which he makes available via his Web site.65 In their published writings, Grifﬁn and Steven Jones focus narrowly on the evidence they have gathered about 9/11, while conspiracy theory veterans like Alex Jones, Marrs, Ruppert, and Tarpley, by contrast, offer comprehensive theories that place 9/11 within more temporally and geographically expansive twentieth-century conspiracies. In his radio shows and DVD documentaries, Alex Jones offers a libertarian take on, among other things, the role of secret societies (Bohemian Grove and Yale’s Skull & Bones) in the worldwide conspiracy and the rise of a police state.66 Tarpley considers 9/11 to be merely another instance of the “synthetic terrorism” and “false-ﬂag operations” that the conspiracy uses to protect its secret, oligarchic order and its project of “waging war on the people.”67 Ruppert sweeps virtually every suspicious event in post-war American conspiracy lore into his theory that 9/11 was driven by a concern among American elites about capturing the wealth and resources being made scarce as a result of the fact that oil reserves are dropping precipitously, especially in relation to demand.68 And, among other interpretive methods, Marrs uses “remote viewers,” or clairvoyants, to learn that not only was a U.S. intelligence agency involved in the attacks, but members of the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations or Bilderberger group were involved as well.69 These leading ﬁgures have appeared at many of the national and local 9/11 conferences that have increased in frequency since 2004, and they are often advertised as attractions to draw audiences. A speaker’s ability to hold and rally a crowd matters in these settings, and the recurring speakers offer a range of styles, including high-energy radio talk show host bluster (like Alex Jones), manic erudition (like Webster Tarpley), and quiet scholarly authority (like David Ray Grifﬁn or Steven Jones). Their speaking styles reﬂect to a great degree their writing styles, and conferences offer authors the opportunity to meet their readers and sell their books and DVDs. Many of the leading researchers and writers pursue this endeavor full-time, and, like traditional academics, are entrepreneurial in their scholarly activities—they promote their careers, attempt to sell their ideas and books, and establish organizations with like-minded scholars. The truth movement built itself around the notion that it was entering and seeking to dominate the marketplace of ideas in order to achieve its larger goal of exposing the conspiracy; before and

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

251

even since the movement’s development, researchers and writers have seen themselves as market actors, with the attention and minds of the public serving as the relevant market in which they participate. As chapter 5 explained, conspiracy communities are built upon, and frequently suffer from, conﬂicts that arise between both collective strategies of community-building and individual self-promotion, and the appearance of this dynamic has become another development that 9/11 conspiracy theorists share with those who had focused on the JFK assassination. Steven Jones’s coming out as a 9/11 skeptic helped inspire the formation in December 2005 of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which sought to organize and legitimate experts with scholarly credentials who doubted the ofﬁcial account of 9/11.70 The organization was established by James Fetzer, emeritus philosophy professor at the Duluth campus of the University of Minnesota and a longtime conspiracy theorist who had been involved in the JFK assassination community and in developing theories about Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone’s death.71 It began with ﬁfty members, few of whom were tenured or tenure-track in the scientiﬁc and engineering disciplines relevant to the study of the attacks’ forensics. Beyond supporting 9/11 research, the organization has sought to legitimate the conspiracy theory enterprise by creating a scholarly community that is akin to, and a shadow of, the authorized academy of higher education. The Scholars group was intended both as an intellectual endeavor, whose members would apply the methods and epistemological approaches of their respective disciplines to the puzzle of 9/11, and as an institution that would lend the legitimacy of scholars’ disciplines, degrees, and employers to the 9/11 project. The organization has also served as a means to support academics, including Jones himself, who have been punished or threatened with punishment for their activism and scholarly activities in questioning the ofﬁcial account of 9/11.72 Debates between competing theories have fractured the broad, collective community of scholars and activists.73 Disputes over the cause of the WTC towers’ collapse have caused an ultimately acrimonious split in Scholars for 9/11 Truth, leaving two separate organizations: the Fetzer-led Scholars for 9/11 Truth and the new, Steven Jones–led Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice. Jones departed the original Scholars in order to distance himself from those who claimed that the towers’ collapse was caused by something other than controlled demolition, such as

252

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

directed-energy weapons ﬁred from space. His new organization’s Web site declares that controlled demolition “is the only serious alternative to the ofﬁcial theory, since the other theories—such as those involving exotic weapons or accidental explosions—lack even rudimentary plausibility.”74 Fetzer’s organization, which has retained the original name, has instead committed itself to welcoming those who develop and subscribe to diverse theories, and to establish a diverse coalition of researchers to press for more disclosures from the government and to work collectively to pursue the truth.75 Debates within the community of scholars and among serious researchers frequently concern two related issues. First, critics of a theory press substantive and evidentiary questions: Can a particular theory be proven based on the evidence conspiracy theorists have gathered? What is the evidence upon which a theory can be based? What are the evidentiary standards to apply in the absence of complete information? Second, they raise political questions about whether a theory is so speculative that it is likely to cast aspersions on the truth movement and harm the movement’s efforts to gain public support. This dynamic has arisen in debates over the Pentagon crash. A post by researcher Jim Hoffman on a 9/11 conspiracy Web site debunked some of the more speculative theories positing that no plane crashed into the Pentagon. Hoffman conﬁdently asserted that controlled demolition brought down the Twin Towers, and admitted that although he once believed the Pentagon noplanes theory, he had more recently concluded that explanations other than the no-planes theories are possible—such as one that explosives planted in American Flight 77 had “progressively shredded” the plane as it ﬂew into the Pentagon. Explanations conceding that the ofﬁcial explanation of the crash is correct but that a conspiracy nevertheless caused the attacks, he argued, could better and more persuasively explain the events of 9/11. The no-planes theories are worse than incorrect, however: “The promotion of theories about what hit the Pentagon in highly visible media,” Hoffman wrote, “provides our detractors with ammunition with which to discredit us, and eclipse easily established and highly incriminating facts such as where the Pentagon was hit, the astounding failures to defend the 9/11 targets, and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 [of the WTC].”76 Intracommunity debates can turn even more acrimonious. When members of the 9/11 community, or those who claim to be part of the

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

253

community, promote theories that differ from those that have emerged as part of the community’s agreed-upon canon, the community begins to suspect agents provocateurs—especially when their theories are covered in the mainstream media, seemingly as a means to mock and discredit the truth movement.77 The Web site TruthMove, which claims to represent the “international truth movement,” has an entire page devoted to the issue titled “Disinformation”: The 9/11 truth movement is a prime target for disinformation, inﬁltration, and other forms of sabotage by forces who do not want the truth to be known. You can imagine that if mainstream anti-war and environmental groups have regularly been inﬁltrated, something as radical and revolutionary as 9/11 truth would demand a very sophisticated counterintelligence campaign. Agents of disinformation may not “play their hand” until the right moment and disinformation must usually appear credible in order to be effective. Deceptive evidence is often delivered alongside accurate information.78

The Web site identiﬁes four speciﬁc disinformation strategies: creating sensationalistic “strawmen” within the community in order to “make 9/11 skeptics look like kooks;” “muddying the waters” by causing splits within the community and making it more difﬁcult for potential new members to discern the best arguments in favor of conspiracy; using a “smear campaign” by associating good research with bad; and fomenting paranoia within the community by sowing distrust among its members. At their most frustrated, movement activists claim that the disinformation campaigns unleashed against the truth movement are the main cause of the movement’s failure to persuade a majority of the American public.79 The disinformation charge has become a means to couch disagreements among theories in terms of sinister motives. Hoffman’s criticism of the no-planes theories, for example, led those he criticized to counter with rumors that Hoffman was spreading disinformation on behalf of the National Security Agency, the U.S. military, and/or a new COINTELPRO program.80 For some, especially those who have lined up behind Steven Jones and against all but the controlled demolition theory of the WTC towers’ collapse, any effort to construct a “big tent” that welcomes all competing theories “beneﬁts the disinformation promoters” by associating incredible, “nonscientiﬁc” ideas with supported, rational ones.81 The best

254

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

response, according to one Web site, is for the more credible conspiracy theorists to “stick together, not get distracted, stay on message, and keep this obvious coalition of government agents and the logically challenged at arms distance.”82 Unfortunate associations seem to be almost inevitable, given some of the less savory conspiracy theorists who will sincerely join the 9/11 community, as when it was revealed that an organizer of a “9/11 Accountability” conference in Arizona had previously written a book questioning whether the Holocaust occurred.83 Members of the community also obsess over less spectacularly bad publicity, such as when someone who seems less than credible is interviewed by the mainstream press. Michael Ruppert, for example, has decried the publicity that some ﬁgures received when actor Charlie Sheen appeared at a 9/11-conspiracy conference and expressed solidarity with the truth movement: In this latest media “frenzy” (yawn) which has Alex Jones parading like a puffed-up superstar version of Edward R. Murrow and a slightly-deranged, multi-pierced, obviously unstable, researcher named Nico Haupt wrapping himself in an ill-ﬁtting label as the new “avant garde” of the 9/11 movement, 9/11 truth has sadly and predictably rounded a corner from Solid Avenue onto Surreal Boulevard. Add to this list of movement “leaders” Webster Tarpley, a former senior researcher for Lyndon LaRouche—whose intellectual capacity far exceeds his street smarts—and you have what the world now “sees” as the only real threats to the US version of events. If the Charlie Sheen episode gets any more traction, the American public and the world will soon see these “public threats” conveniently, ruthlessly, and easily dismissed, discarded, and disgraced.84

Skeptical of each other, fearful of inﬁltration and surveillance by government groups, the conspiracy community is under continual threat of splitting or falling apart.85 And although many in the community identify themselves more closely with the left end of the political spectrum than with the right, and have associated with existing antiwar groups and efforts to impeach Bush and Cheney, the movement has been pilloried by the institutional left, including its leading publications (The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times) and public ﬁgures (including Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky).86 The truth movement thus displays the desire that is typical of nascent conspiracy communities in their quest for “truth:” it hopes to

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

255

act collectively to ﬁnd, interpret, and distribute evidence, to develop theories and narrative frames that would explain the evidence, and, ultimately, to reveal a hidden truth and thereby upend the reigning political order. The movement also demonstrates the dynamics at work that impede the community’s creation, including the suspicion, competition, and organizational disarray that seem endemic to the pursuit of conspiracy. Despite the fragmentation of the research community, however, everyone in it can thoroughly agree on at least one point: the 9/11 Commission not only produced a ﬂawed report but was also likely part of the conspiracy. I turn now to the Commission’s efforts to preempt conspiracy theories about 9/11 and about itself—efforts that demonstrate the extent to which the state considers and attempts to address the problem of conspiratorial belief in its efforts to sustain its own legitimacy. Commissioning Authority

As I explained in the opening of this chapter, from the start of its operations, the 9/11 Commission concerned itself not only with its substantive investigation into the attacks and the events surrounding them, but also with its public legitimacy. To gain both elite and broad public acceptance for its efforts, the Commission saw the need to conduct itself in ways beﬁtting a truly independent investigatory commission and to establish its authority in a number of ways. Most importantly, it tried to establish substantive legitimacy, based on the work it performed under its congressional mandate, by thoroughly reviewing the attacks and their causes. According to Chairman Kean and his vice-chairman Hamilton, this required complete access to all relevant government ofﬁcials and documents, no matter how secret or revealing.87 Anything less than complete access and thorough review—allowing an agency to stonewall, change its story without explanation, or respond incompletely to requests for information, for example, or issuing its ﬁnal report with redacted material—would encourage conspiracy theorists and increase skepticism about the Commission. Kowtowing to agency resistance would also risk the wrath of the victims’ families, a constituency that had played a signiﬁcant role in the Commission’s creation and that possessed a special authenticity and proﬁle thanks to both their personal connection to the attacks and the attention they paid to everything surrounding the attacks’ aftermath.88

256

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

The Commission also tried to establish formal legitimacy by acting independently from those branches and agencies of the government that it studied, as well as from partisan political activity that would leave it vulnerable to charges of bias (Without Precedent, 28–30). Most importantly, to demonstrate both its commitment to nonpartisanship and its thoroughness, the Commission had to remain independent from the Bush administration, the main subject of its investigation, as well as from the earlier Clinton administration, despite the ties that individual commissioners had either to the administrations themselves or the political parties to which those presidents belong. The precise nature of the Commission’s independence, and how it could be deﬁned, was unclear and would be contested by members of Congress and by skeptics in the press during its operations, and by critics of the Commission after it issued its report. But if it allowed itself to be an adjunct either of the state or of any political party or actor (such as the president or congress), the Commission risked dismissal of its investigation and report as elements of an insufﬁciently independent, nonauthoritative review of 9/11. Finally, and equally important, Kean and Hamilton felt that the Commission needed to be seen as legitimate both substantively and structurally. Its administrative operations and political maneuverings were not merely means to an end but ends in themselves that would allow the public to view the Commission as acting independently. The Commission had to show its work as well as do it—in its efforts to force transparency on the state, the Commission itself needed to be transparent (24–26). It needed, in other words, to demonstrate procedural legitimacy by employing neutral, proper means of conducting its investigation, and communicative legitimacy by demonstrating to its constituencies (the public, victims’ family groups, the Congress that created and funded the Commission, and the White House that would decide whether to cooperate with it) that it was engaging in the kind of investigation expected of an independent, expert commission. “Conspiracy theories are like mushrooms,” Kean and Hamilton wrote in Without Precedent, their insiders’ account of the Commission’s work, “they grow where there is no light” (256). The Commission would ultimately hold numerous public hearings, press conferences, and press interviews—in USA Today’s words, the Commission “embarked on a public-relations campaign unprecedented for the type of ‘blue ribbon’ commission usually consigned to the back pages of newspapers.”89

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

257

The Commission may have been nominally independent of the government in its membership—no current elected ofﬁcials were named commissioners—but by congressional design, it was composed entirely of Washington insiders, or “prominent American citizens” who had gained “national recognition and signiﬁcant depth of experience” in a list of professional ﬁelds related to government and industry. The president appointed only the chairman, while congressional leaders from both parties chose the remaining nine members.90 Those with sufﬁcient credentials, of course, would in all likelihood have strong professional and social ties to the president and the congressional leaders who appointed them. And they did: all were former elected ofﬁcials and/or prominent members of past presidential administrations.91 The Commission in turn hired a well-connected staff with experience and connections in the federal government who, the Commission reasoned, would know how the agencies under investigation worked and would already possess the security clearances needed to review classiﬁed documents.92 The commissioners chose as the Commission’s Executive Director Philip Zelikow, an academic who had served in earlier Republican administrations as well as on the George W. Bush transition team—a controversial choice, given his ties to the Bush administration and especially to then–National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.93 The controversy surrounding Zelikow—which, as I explain below, serves as one of the truth movement’s key pieces of evidence that the Commission was controlled by the Bush administration—arose again in early 2008 with the release of a book by Philip Shenon, a reporter who had covered the Commission’s operations for the New York Times, alleging that Zelikow had a much closer relationship to Rice and the Bush administration than had previously been known to the commissioners and the public, and that he served as a White House “mole” who provided inside information to Karl Rove and others during his work on the Commission.94 Zelikow was not the only staff member with ties to the government; many members of the commission staff whom he oversaw had previously served on the staff of congressional oversight committees, or were former employees of the federal agencies whose performance the Commission would review, or were detailed from national security agencies. In the Commission’s self-narrative, the Commission’s insiderness— which, as we will see, has been a particular focus of conspiracy theorists’

258

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

criticism—enabled its (relative) independence, insofar as its greatest successes in the hard-fought battles with the White House over information resulted from the commissioners’ reputation as trustworthy Washingtonians who were at once above the political fray and respectful of political propriety (Without Precedent, 23–24, 57, 63, 288–89). In order to gain and retain that trust, the Commission felt forced to continually demonstrate that it was nonpartisan; accordingly, it focused its investigation on programmatic and bureaucratic mistakes rather than on the errors of any particular individuals. It also took great pains to appear non-confrontational.95 Kean and Hamilton’s aspiration for the Commission, as well as for post-9/11 national security efforts generally, was decidedly non- or bipartisan—indeed, both had reputations for reaching consensus across party lines, Kean as a moderate northeastern Republican and Hamilton as a recently retired, long-serving leader in the House of Representatives. Both had also left politics for explicitly nonpartisan positions, Kean as college president and Hamilton as president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and as Democratic co-chair of the nonpartisan Iraq Study Group. They attempted to imprint their bipartisan political vision on the Commission by using an integrated, nonpartisan staff, making decisions by consensus, and seeking to avoid laying partisan or individual blame on speciﬁc actors. By doing so, and by appearing to the White House and Congress to be doing so, the Commission hoped to win the trust of those it was investigating and, in turn, to be able to access documents and personnel for informative, candid interviews and public hearings and ultimately produce a ﬁnal report that could transcend the partisan divide (Without Precedent, 23–24, 57, 63, 288–89, 322). Most signiﬁcantly in this regard, the Commission controversially deferred using its subpoena power for records until after it had made repeated efforts to gain the records consensually. This was in part because Congress intended to make it difﬁcult for the Commission to issue subpoenas by establishing voting rules that required at least one committee member from both parties to agree that the issuance of a subpoena was warranted—presumably in order to prevent aggressively partisan investigations.96 Kean and Hamilton also presumed that a more aggressive approach would have been less fruitful in the long run. The Bush White House had already demonstrated its willingness to ﬁght legal efforts to force disclosure of executive branch information (most

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

259

famously in litigation over Vice President Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group). Litigation against the White House would prove time-consuming and, in all likelihood, would not be resolved before the Commission’s statutory mandate ended (Without Precedent, 65, 99–101). Instead, although the Commission issued subpoenas to the FAA and NORAD, the two most recalcitrant agencies from which it sought information, and New York City, the Commission used political pressure to get its way.97 It did so in a number of ways: commissioners, usually one of the chairmen, went to the press to complain about a lack of access; the Commission issued interim reports to Congress in order to make its complaints public; it used allies in Congress to seek support; and it asked prominent members of the victims’ families to complain in public and to the press (Without Precedent, 75–81, 94–95, 148–49).98 In a telling episode of the Commission’s struggles with the White House and its ultimate, though limited, success in securing information, the Commission was only able to persuade National Security Advisor Rice to testify in a public hearing after the dramatic testimony of Richard Clarke, special advisor to the National Security Council, who criticized the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 counterterrorism efforts. The Commission was then was able to use her testimony about the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brieﬁng titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” to argue successfully that the document be declassiﬁed (Without Precedent, 175–82). The Commission thus saw itself as limited by the political and legal circumstances in which it operated, but also saw these limits as enabling it to serve as an independent, bipartisan—or even nonpartisan—body. If it was forced to ﬁght the White House and federal agencies—albeit obliquely and without partisan bias or excessively public criticism— then it could play both sides against the middle and would be, at least in the opinion of Washington insiders, independent. Nevertheless, the Commission could not overcome some of the limitations it faced. Its small budget and short deadline constrained its investigation, even though it was able to eke out more money and time from Congress. No matter how it tried, it could not insulate itself from Washington’s partisan politics, nor could it fully control the news media it relied upon for publicity and political leverage.99 It was unable to persuade or pressure the president to testify in a public hearing; instead, the commissioners interviewed the president, accompanied by Vice President Cheney,

260

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

in an unrecorded session in the White House. The administration also mandated that agency representatives would be present when the Commission interviewed current federal employees—a softening of its original stance, when the administration wanted to require that representatives attend even the interviews of former employees, but a policy that might have intimidated interview subjects (Without Precedent, 104). A number of federal agencies also frustrated the Commission. The CIA refused to allow it to interview al-Qaeda detainees or to speak directly with interrogators or interpreters; instead, the Report relied solely upon interrogation reports, a dodgy and potentially unreliable means to obtain essential information about the attacks (120–23).100 The Commission suspected that NORAD and the FAA were not only un-forthcoming with documents and information, but were afﬁrmatively deceptive—a controversy that continued even after the Commission’s dissolution (Without Precedent, 258–60).101 According to Bob Woodward in a well-publicized Washington Post article (itself intended as pre-publication publicity for his best selling book State of Denial [2006]), Zelikow and Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste knew of a July 2001 meeting between NSA Rice and CIA personnel, including Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, that allegedly provided a member of Bush’s cabinet the clearest warning about a coming attack, but, at least according to some commissioners, they did not inform the Commission and the Report made no mention of the meeting.102 The release of a staff monograph scrutinizing civil air security before, during, and after the attacks was delayed until after the ﬁnal Report was issued while it was reviewed by federal agencies, a process that frustrated the Commissioners; a version that was released in January 2005 to the public included a large number of redactions, while a ﬁnal version, with much fewer redactions, did not appear until September 2005.103 Some of the Commission’s wounds were self-inﬂicted, as when it appeared unprepared and obsequious when questioning former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani—a mistake the Commission itself recognized (Without Precedent, 230–31). Nevertheless, by all accounts, the Commission considered its work and its Report to have proven successful, and as I noted in the beginning of this chapter, it was largely embraced by political and media elites upon its publication. The Commission perceived the Report’s role to be

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

261

authorial and narrative in nature and to provide, above all, the “deﬁnitive historical account” of the event (29). As such, the Commissioners strove to offer the “foundational narrative” that would become the “solid and authoritative foundation of the story” upon which later interpretations and books and facts would build (278). And, indeed, the Report’s opening sentence in its Preface declares, “We present the narrative of this report and the recommendations that ﬂow from it to the President of the United States, the United States Congress, and the American people for their consideration.”104 The explicitly textual nature of the Report extended to its publication, for which the Commission granted the commercial publisher W.W. Norton the right to produce an “authorized edition” in exchange for assurances that the Report would be made widely available in bookstores across the country on the date of its ofﬁcial release (Without Precedent, 271).105 The Report in fact tells two narratives about 9/11. The ﬁrst is the story of the hijackings themselves, which the Report relates in a journalistic, at times even novelistic, style. It begins, “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States,” thus highlighting the normality that existed prior to the attacks, and drawing a portrait of a country oblivious to the trauma that was about to unfold.106 Drawing the reader into the Report by beginning with the event under review rather than with the conditions that allowed the event to occur, the opening chapter establishes a discontinuous temporal structure rather than the familiar chronicle of the government report—“ﬁrst this happened, then this,” told through the dull progression of bureaucratic action and inaction. Beginning with the attacks at once foregrounds the event’s position within contemporary American history and popular imagination and defers until the Report’s end any focused discussion of context and solution, the tedious administrative conventions of the government report.107 Following its initial narration of the attacks, the Report ﬂashes back in time from 9/11 to the earliest days of al-Qaeda, and then moves slowly forward again as “The Attack Looms” (chap. 7) but is not stopped, “‘The System Was Blinking Red’” (chap. 8) but no one reacts in time, “Heroism and Horror” (chap. 9) characterize the attacks’ aftermath, and then “Wartime” (chap. 10) follows. A tale of dread whose denouement the reader already knows (both from her memory of the event and from the Report’s dramatic opening), the Report’s ﬁrst narrative suggests that 9/11 constitutes an

262

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

almost unavoidable tragedy notwithstanding its foreshadowing.108 Al-Qaeda acts; America barely reacts. All events circle back to 9/11, whose spectacular horrors capture all attention. The second narrative, which emerges from the analysis and policy prescriptions in the Report’s ﬁnal three chapters, is an authoritative account of a widespread administrative disaster and an uncertain future. It describes the conditions of tragic possibility without identifying a speciﬁc, remediable cause for those conditions. The Commission’s investigation, the Report’s introduction explains, revealed that no particular individual could or should be blamed for the country’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack. Instead, the Commission found an underlying and overdetermined institutional cause in the actions and inactions of the vast parts of the administrative state entrusted with overseeing military, intelligence, law enforcement, diplomatic, and public safety agencies. Civilian and military agencies charged with making air travel safe and responding to hijacked airliners failed to use sufﬁcient and proper procedures before and during the events. Federal law enforcement, intelligence, and foreign service agencies failed to coordinate their efforts to track and investigate information about terrorism generally and about al-Qaeda and its agents in particular. Even when “the system was blinking red” (Without Precedent, 88), as Director of Central Intelligence Tenet conceded to the Commission, “institutional failings” kept relevant agencies from reading the available signals and responding appropriately (265). Congressional committees failed to provide sufﬁcient oversight of intelligence, military, and federal law enforcement agencies. In New York, personnel from different emergency service agencies could not communicate with each other because their communication systems lacked interoperability. The unprecedented disasters of 9/11 were the result, ultimately, of nothing more dramatic than widespread bureaucratic inertia and risk aversion—albeit a particularly vivid instance, both in degree and in effect. This second narrative is a depressing tale—less spectacular and far more banal than the narrative of the attack, and as a result even more frightening.109 No single state entity bore full responsibility for 9/11 because no entity had sufﬁcient agency to control the operations of the state, much less the safety of its people. Indeed, incapable of organizing and controlling its scattered operations and agents, the state itself seemed to have no agency. And if the state lacks agency, how can it be

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

263

institutionally reformed? Having suggested this quandary, the Report steps back from the existential crisis it has identiﬁed and prescribes an amorphous “global strategy” of intelligence, diplomacy, and military attacks to confront the “generational challenge” of Islamist terrorism (chap. 12) and the humdrum of bureaucratic reform (chap. 13). Congress has embraced those recommendations that lie within its purview, most notably a reorganization of the intelligence community, and passed legislation largely (though not entirely) implementing the Report’s proposals—despite initial White House resistance and criticism by some commentators. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the Commission’s efforts, government ofﬁcials and knowledgeable experts continue to warn of the likelihood of future attacks—and there is little compelling evidence to suggest that these structural reforms have changed the conditions described in the Report. The Report’s two contrasting narratives thus implicitly contrast two diametrically opposed regimes. The ﬁrst describes the attacks’ perpetrators, an entrepreneurial band of religiously and politically extremist fanatics able, through skill, luck, and the incompetence of its adversaries, to carry out the most successful terrorist act in American history. The terrorist threat is especially grave because terrorists fail to conform to the rational game-theoretic models of behavior on which international relations and modern bureaucracies depend. The second narrative documents a sclerotic, turf-protecting bureaucracy incapable of coordinating its actions or of understanding the world it needs to interpret. Convinced of its conclusions and authoritative in its ofﬁcial authorial role, the Report offers little comfort that the Commission’s vulnerable patrons, the political branches that authorized it and the public it ostensibly served, could protect the country from the terrorist threat. In the Report, as well as in its investigation and in the Report’s aftermath, the Commission produced its own autobiography, a metanarrative of its communicative legitimacy. This narrative percolates throughout the Report in self-referential asides about its investigation and its act of authorship. In the Report’s preface, Kean and Hamilton describe the Commission’s task (a “sweeping” mandate), its ethical, political, and methodological commitments (“We have sought to be independent, impartial, thorough, and nonpartisan”), and its limits (noting that the Report is a summary and conceding that it neither interviewed “every

264

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

knowledgeable person” nor reviewed “every relevant piece of paper”) (xv–xvii). Designed to fail, facing enormous expectations and a commission structure that would make bipartisan agreement both difﬁcult and necessary for it to perform its tasks, the Commission reached unanimous consensus on the report it prepared. Upon its release, the Report was front-page news. And although its mandate ended with the Report’s release and by law it no longer existed, the Commission continued to inﬂuence Washington politics and policy. Kean and Hamilton, with the assistance of some of their fellow commissioners, actively traded upon and attempted to extend the Commission’s legitimacy in their non-governmental organization “The Public Discourse Project,” which operated through December 2005 as a civic education project seeking to educate the public about the Commission Report, lobby Congress to adopt the Report’s recommendations, and evaluate the federal government’s performance post-9/11.110 In this way, the Commission sought to distinguish itself from precedents that represented bad governance. First, in its competence, its bipartisan agreement and nonpartisan investigation, and its ability to gather information from across the federal government as well as from state and local agencies, the Commission could claim to evade the fate of the Report’s second narrative of tragic governmental ineptitude and inaction. Second, in its investigative and authorial efforts, and just as importantly in its efforts to promote and control its public image, the Commission sought to transcend the model of the captured or conspiratorial investigatory commission established by the Warren Commission. The 9/11 Commission, in short, sought not only to tell the story of 9/11, but also to control its own narrative. Decommissioning Authority/Commissioning Truth

Having called for and followed the work of the Commission, the 9/11 truth movement dissented immediately and vigorously to the 9/11 Commission Report, rejecting not only the Report’s substantive narratives about what happened on 9/11 but also the Commission’s metanarrative about its own work.111 By the time the Report appeared, the Commission’s reputation within the truth movement had already solidiﬁed: it had come to personify the conspiratorial state, and its Report did little more than parrot and defend the ofﬁcial account. Ironically, when the truth movement sought to create a puppet to be

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

265

dragged ceremoniously during protest marches to represent the state’s propaganda and secrecy, it created a large, three-dimensional ﬂoat in the shape of the commercially available version of the Report with a number of large holes in it to signify what critics claimed was the Report’s failure to address various conspiracy-related issues.112 In a similar vein, the documentary video Loose Change plays with the Report’s physical appearance, magically removing the “C” from its book cover in one shot to rename it The 9/11 omission Report. In his book-length critique of the Commission’s work, David Ray Grifﬁn argues that from its political germination to the nomination of its commissioners and the hiring of its staff, the Commission had no legitimacy whatsoever.113 Even before it began, Grifﬁn claims, the Commission was tied to the president, as its two most important members—Chairman Kean and Executive Director Zelikow—were Republicans, and as such were necessarily biased and likely to engage in a cover-up on the White House’s behalf. (Grifﬁn then proceeds to refer to it as the “Kean-Zelikow Commission” rather than its more prevalent nicknames, “9/11 Commission,” “Kean Commission,” and “Kean-Hamilton Commission.”) Kean might have been less implicated in the president’s nefarious world than the president’s ﬁrst choice, Henry Kissinger, but he had sufﬁcient ties to that world (as a director of an oil company with investments in Central Asia) to be a safe choice to lead a cover-up.114 But Zelikow was the real culprit. Grifﬁn claims that his ties to Rice, through their coauthored book and preexisting relationship as well as his work on the Bush transition team, made him singularly inappropriate for a job that would allow him, more than any of the commissioners, to control the investigation by determining which topics the staff would investigate and how it would study them (Omissions and Distortions, 8). His connections to the White House did not merely create a limited conﬂict of interest that could be ameliorated through limited recusals from certain parts of the investigation (9); for Grifﬁn and 9/11 conspiracy theorists generally, Zelikow’s role was evidence of the Commission’s position within the conspiracy itself and was equivalent, in fact, to having Bush, Cheney, or Rice carry out the investigation. After all, Grifﬁn asserts, Zelikow was “their man” (12).115 Kean and Zelikow were not the only ones with conﬂicts of interest on the Commission—the other commissioners also had ties to the Bush administration or the Republican Party, or they had private interests

266

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

with something to gain from the conspiracy, or they were directly connected to Washington corruption and the conditions that enabled the attack (285–90). In Jim Marrs’s words, the Commissioners “should have been called as witnesses” rather than sitting in judgment.116 This criticism of the Commission, which is standard within the truth movement, embodies the conspiratorial theory of the state. Seen from the viewpoint of the conspiracy community, the so-called independent commission was at once utterly powerless and an appendage of an all-powerful conspiracy. It was resisted initially by the Bush administration and starved by Congress of sufﬁcient time and money; but once created, it was staffed by friends, political hacks, and toadies, and was thereby controlled from its inception by the conspiracy (284). The complex conditions under which the state is presumed by academic and lay observers to operate—mechanisms of public accountability such as elections and the press, the rough and tumble of political parties, the competing interests of rational public and private actors, bureaucratic dynamics, the agency of powerful individuals—have merely illusory effects on the state’s operations. Although conspiracy theorists make a number of mistakes about how the Commission was constituted (such as who appointed whom) and demonstrate no interest in the complex political and legal context within which the Commission operated, such mistakes and omissions are ultimately irrelevant to their argument—if the state controlled the Commission, its actual personnel and operations are simply beside the point.117 According to Michael Ruppert, the Commission was “designed, constructed, and functioned to achieve one and only one objective: damage control.”118 For the truth movement, the Commission’s greatest sin in drafting the Report was its failure to acknowledge the existence of alternative theories, much less respond to them. By offering and supporting its own narratives, the Commission only directly addressed conspiracy theories by implication—because it happened this way according to this evidence, the Report suggests, it could not have happened any other way. The Report either ignores conspiracy theorists’ arguments and the evidence they are convinced proves both the invalidity of the ofﬁcial account and the conspiracy’s existence, or it relegates such claims to footnotes or passing reference—evidence, Grifﬁn argues, that the Commission “seems simply to have presupposed the truth of the ofﬁcial conspiracy theory [that is, regarding al-Qaeda] from the outset”

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

267

(Omissions and Distortions, 11). In addition to offering startling evidence (some of the alleged hijackers are still alive!), Grifﬁn incorporates evidence not in the Report to question its conclusions (photos show no evidence that a Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon!), spots reports in the press that conﬂict with the Commission’s Report (someone is lying!), and correctly points to troubling evidence that lower-level FBI employees were frustrated by their superiors’ insufﬁcient response to their reports about al-Qaeda operations before the attacks. Reinterpreting the Commission’s evidence, ﬁnding signiﬁcance in new details, and recasting the Commission’s narratives of the attacks, Grifﬁn—and his many fellow critics of the Report in the conspiracy community—reframes the conspiracy narrative, placing the Commission at its center. In fact, by reinterpreting the Commission’s evidence and discovering evidence the Commission ignored, 9/11 conspiracy theorists invert all of the Commission’s narratives: the al-Qaeda terrorists are now either patsies of a state-sponsored conspiracy or mere ﬁction; the state is an all-powerful, uniﬁed entity capable of holding together and keeping secret all of the elements necessary for the greatest covert operation of modern times; and the Commission is now merely an arm of the state and a helpful mouthpiece for the conspiracy. The Commission emerges, then, as the reincarnation of the Warren Commission—the fate it sought to avoid but that, thanks to the inexorable logic of the conspiracy narrative, it was destined to become. Like the earlier government conspiracy whitewash, the 9/11 Commission focused on superﬂuous and tedious historical and operational data on government agencies and policies rather than on the obvious evidence of conspiracy;119 and, as with the Warren Commission’s use of the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald, the 9/11 Commission blamed one man (bin Laden) with a complex, mysterious history and ties to the netherworld of intelligence for a crime whose real perpetrators and cause remain buried in the “deep politics” of conspiracy.120 The state could have ignored the conspiracy theories that were beginning to gain attention in the period soon after the 9/11 attacks, and the possibility that such theories could spread to a wider portion of the population; presidential and congressional delays in establishing the Commission, and limits those branches placed on the Commission that they ﬁnally did establish, indicate that transparency, accountability, and presenting an independent and authoritative account of

268

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

the events were not a particularly high priority for the president and Congress. The Commission, in turn, could have fully ignored the truth movement that was gaining momentum as the Commission’s investigation was underway. Although it is unclear precisely how much the movement’s efforts affected the Commission’s work, we do know that the Commission was aware both of the truth movement’s existence and the potential effects of conspiracy theory on the Commission’s shortterm legitimacy and long-term reputation. Given the thoroughness of the truth movement’s rejection of the Commission’s composition and institutional position, it is difﬁcult to imagine that a governmentsponsored commission could have been sufﬁciently free of state inﬂuence to satisfy conspiracy theorists. Indeed, the truth movement has largely abandoned its call for a “truly” independent commission in the past few years, especially as it has become more certain both of the existence of a conspiracy and of its ability to uncover its existence.121 The beltway-based Commission and the hardcore believers active in the truth movement talked past each other—which may well be the fate of interactions between, on the one hand, a movement that considers the state to be controlled by a conspiracy, and on the other, state actors whose identities as professional, independent public servants are rejected by conspiracy theorists. Perhaps, in the end, the 9/11 Commission did all it could to address the inevitable emergence of conspiracy theories surrounding September 11. It may have been unable to persuade the truth movement that it was not directly tied to or controlled by the Bush administration, and it may ultimately have been fated to have its credibility tied to that of an unpopular, secretive administration ﬁghting a difﬁcult war whose rationales have been discredited. This is not intended to be entirely fatalistic. The 9/11 Commission’s Report and its efforts to engage and address the public, imperfect though they may have been, represent a vast improvement over the Warren Commission’s efforts, and may have been as good and effective as any independent commission can be. But if conspiracy theory is endemic to democratic politics and American political culture, then the 9/11 Commission’s historical reputation is likely to be contested for generations—perhaps, as time passes, not only by the hardcore of the truth movement but by a broader cross-section of Americans whose distrust of the state leads them to believe the worst of it.

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

269

Catch My Drift? Loose Change and the Conspiracy Gateway

Loose Change, the most-watched 9/11 conspiracy documentary and possibly the best-known 9/11 conspiracy text of any medium, is the archetypal no-budget media phenomenon, having cost its 22-year-old writer-director Dylan Avery all of $2000 to produce on his laptop using found footage and images from the public domain, as well as infringing copyrighted material (that he has since largely excised).122 Avery released a ﬁrst edition of Loose Change on the Web in April 2005 and has subsequently re-released it in a “second edition” seven months later, and then in a “recut” second edition in 2006, with each new edition dropping, adding, or reﬁning arguments as old ones were discredited or better ones emerged.123 In an apocryphal tale that he retells often, Avery had been working on a ﬁctional screenplay based on the 9/11 attacks when, after an inspirational chat with The Sopranos star James Gandolﬁni, he shifted his project to a non-ﬁction video documentary. Aggressively didactic, the video falls within what critic B. Ruby Rich has called the new “samizdat” style of documentary ﬁlmmaking, with production values and channels of distribution that aspire to complete independence from the mainstream media and a style and voice that aspire to political subversion and revolution.124 The documentary has proven to be enormously successful, purportedly selling over 100,000 copies on DVD and, as of September 2007, enjoying nearly 7 million views of its “2nd Edition Recut” version on Google Video (a ﬁgure that does not include viewings of earlier editions, viewings of the video on other streaming video sites, or copies transferred via peer-to-peer programs). Its popularity has attracted the attention of debunkers, including a book published by Popular Mechanics (which sweeps Loose Change’s claims into a broader response to 9/11 conspiracy theories) and a number of Web sites devoted to exhaustive, point-by-point refutations of the documentary’s arguments.125 Even some within the truth movement have dismissed the documentary’s arguments and aesthetics as either “naive, foolish, uninformed and ignorant, [or] . . . the work of a calculating mole or at best a naïf who has been used by such [sic].”126 For younger viewers and some 9/11 conspiracy theorists, however, Loose Change has served as what a writer for Salon.com called “‘the red pill,’ the drug that takes Keanu Reeves down The Matrix’s rabbit hole.”127 Although not a deﬁnitive 9/11 conspiracy documentary (if there ever is one), its role has been to serve as a gateway into the conspiracy

270

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

community, one that self-consciously attempts to attract a teenage and young adult audience and inspire them to question what they know, or think they know, about 9/11 and the conspiratorial state. It is worth considering, then, what, if anything, has made the video so successful, besides the cascading effects that Internet popularity can have as news of a particular video is spread virally via word-of-mouth, blog postings, and e-mail. In its effective introductory sequence and its voice-over narration, Loose Change presents the core problem that conspiracy theory poses, how to make sense of a complex, tragic event that has adverse political consequences, and articulates a possible solution, interpretive and narrative practices that can integrate the disjointed, incoherent information that an investigation into the event uncovers. The documentary argues that there is much to learn about 9/11, and then offers a viewing experience that simulates the disorienting effects that exposure to all that information has on the conspiracy theorist. Finally, abandoning the traditional introduction of character that marks the traditional documentary and docudrama, Loose Change suggests a way out of that disorientation: the disaffection and disembodiment of the conspiracy theorist. The twelve-minute introductory sequence, which runs through the opening title sequence, is composed of two parts—the ﬁrst covering pre9/11 events and the second, which runs under the title sequence, showing the attacks on the World Trade Center—and establishes the video’s intent to challenge and disorient the viewer with a ﬂurry of facts, images, and allegations. After an initial title card dedicates the video to “THE LIVES WE LOST ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001,” a smooth aerial shot pans back from a focus on a large torch to establish that the torch is attached to a stained and aged Statute of Liberty, and then (after the camera circles around to reveal the Manhattan skyline in which the Twin Towers loom eerily in the background) to demonstrate that the video remembers and mourns the loss of the pre-September 11 America. This establishing shot presents us with what was destroyed on that day: innocent lives, the Towers that sit serenely in a crystalline blue sky that echoes the sky in Manhattan on September 11, and a nation and world that existed before the conspiracy that Loose Change will reveal. After the screen then dissolves back to black, it cycles through a series of four black title cards with white text on a black background, each quoting contradictory statements from senior White House ofﬁcials (National Security Advisor Rice, Secretary Rumsfeld, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and terrorism

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

271

advisor Richard Clarke) about what the president and government knew in advance of the attacks. Each of the ﬁrst three statements is digitally scratched out in turn as if by an invisible marker (complete with sound effects), until Clarke’s statement is offered: “Your government failed you, and I failed you.” This declaration is apparently acceptable to the ﬁlmmaker, as no virtual marking pen scratches out Clarke’s statement and the words initiate the documentary’s formal opening. Although Loose Change does not portray the events as a government “failure”—if anything, the alleged conspiracy was an enormous success—Clarke’s statement is an admission by a high-ranking ofﬁcial that transparency and accountability are at least possible in a conspiratorial age, that “the government” can be knowable, and that it can disclose what happened on and before September 11. Clarke himself cannot accomplish this—he does not appear again in Loose Change—but the documentary can, and implicitly promises that it will. Immediately following Clarke’s statement, the introductory sequence becomes for the viewer a formal exercise in interpretation, an induction into the world of conspiracy theory. It begins with a series of photographs and pages from a document dated March 13, 1962: a memorandum that the Chairman of President Kennedy’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Lemnitzer, wrote for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the subject of justifying American military intervention into Cuba (which had recently been taken over by Fidel Castro). Photos of Lemnitzer and McNamara move across the screen as a prelude to an image of the memorandum itself, which is presented in a negative scan, with white text on black background and prominent markings of “TOP SECRET” and “UNCLASSIFIED,” as though it were a copy from microﬁlm. (This presentation is contrived—the document is widely available on the Web in its original state, with black text on a white background.) Both legible to the viewer and read aloud by the narrator, the memorandum proposes a series of covert actions under the general code name “Operation Northwoods.” Scrolling quickly through a selection of these proposals, Loose Change comes to focus on one: a plan to destroy over Cuban airspace a drone aircraft disguised as an American passenger plane. Because shooting down an American civilian plane would appear to the international community to be an outrageous act of war by the new Cuban government, an American invasion of Cuba would have a legal and moral basis. The documentary makes no explicit connection

272

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

between this memo, its proposal, and 9/11—the viewer barely has time to make sense of the text and narration before a new piece of evidence is brought forth—but the breathless presentation, backed by foreboding music, makes clear that while the document may be from the historical past, it has present-day relevance. Indeed, Loose Change’s presentation of the “Operation Northwoods” document makes it (and, by implication, the larger documentary project) appear revelatory: here is something you did not know existed, the visual and audio tone suggest, so pay attention. The cognitive and stylistic pattern is repeated in the introduction for nearly two-dozen pieces of information: a visual display identiﬁes an event the viewer probably hasn’t heard of, illustrated with a document, Web page, photographs, and/or ﬁlm or video footage, which a brief voice-over explains. The events date mostly from the 1990s through the early morning of September 11, 2001, and their connections to the 9/11 attacks vary widely. Some seem especially suspicious: two news Web pages report that NORAD and the Pentagon were engaged in exercises simulating the crash of passenger planes into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, while another news Web page reports that government ofﬁcials (Attorney General John Ashcroft, high-ranking Pentagon ofﬁcials, even San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown) did not travel on commercial airlines or were warned not to do so in the period preceding 9/11. Other pieces of information seem mysterious but not clearly connected to the attacks, including a number of reports, accompanied by grainy color ﬁlm footage, that defense contractors had successful tested unmanned airplane drones. Still more factoids appear downright ominous, but again without any clear connection to the attacks: a Web page document entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” issued in June 2000 (during the Clinton presidency) by an outﬁt called the Project for a New American Century and signed by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush’s former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (among others), declares that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” The screen also shows news Web pages explaining that in the days immediately prior to September 11, a series of “put options” (which the voice-over deﬁnes as “a bet that a stock will fall”) were placed on the stocks of airlines whose planes would be hijacked. Government documents, Web sites, ﬁlm footage,

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

273

photographs—it quickly becomes clear that Loose Change has collected loads of scattered information from various sources and is marshalling this information to persuade the viewer that there is more to learn about 9/11 between the cracks and in the recesses of information than from ofﬁcial accounts. Once the introduction reaches September 11, the events and the documentary pick up speed and velocity. No more random temporal and geographic hopping—we now move more swiftly around the globe gathering more information. Using the program Google Earth to whip from one location to another at high altitude before zooming down to the ground, Loose Change takes us from Pakistan (where Osama Bin Laden is the “guest of honor” at a military hospital) to Chantilly, Virginia (where the National Reconnaissance Ofﬁce “is preparing for an exercise in which a small corporate jet crashes into their building”), to Colorado Springs (where NORAD “is in the middle of a number of military exercises” that will draw attention and move planes away from the imminent attacks), to two locations in the Washington, D.C., area (Andrews Air Force Base, and then ﬁfteen miles away to the Pentagon), and then just as quickly to North Carolina (to follow the path of three F-16 ﬁghter jets from Andrews to a training mission 180 miles south). Pulling away from satellite imagery of a generic location in North Carolina, the voice-over states, “This left fourteen ﬁghter jets to protect the entire United States.” We then pull all the way back and contemplate, brieﬂy, the North American continent—stripped bare of its defenses at the moment of attack, as we have just learned. At this dramatic juncture, the voice-over pauses long enough for the viewer to notice that the music has stopped (it cut out when the narration reached September 11) and a new audio source begins: the recorded voice transmission of an air trafﬁc controller desperately seeking assistance with “a hijacked aircraft headed for New York.” The video then zooms back into Manhattan before cutting to a hand-held, amateur video that shows a plane ﬂying into the North Tower, followed by the sound of the crash. The screen fades quickly to black, then small white text appears on the existing black background: “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.” The attacks have commenced, and the ﬁrst part of the documentary’s introduction, its scattered, forbidding prologue, is abandoned for a hallucinatory montage of the destruction and carnage at the World Trade Center.

274

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

The overall effect of this initial sequence is disconcerting and disorienting—Loose Change seems to be trying to initiate in the viewer a conspiracy rush, a moment of profound transition and transformation that will change the trajectory of his or her life. The scattered bits of information from the initial sequence form a puzzle—what is the connection among these events, and what is their connection to 9/11? The text “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION,” which initiates the documentary’s ﬁrst presentation of the attacks, suggests that an answer is forthcoming: what follows, the structure of the introductory sequence announces, will connect it all for us. The conspiracy will retrospectively give meaning to and make sense of all this evidence. The dissonance of Operation Northwoods, Osama bin Laden’s trip to a hospital, a think tank’s declaration of principles, and Mayor Willie Brown—all these will soon be integrated within a coherent narrative. By deferring this narrative, Loose Change’s introduction offers a taste of the conspiracy theorist’s investigative technique: consider everything, look for clues and ﬁnd them wherever they are available, sense wholes. The attacks, once correctly understood, become the point at which this evidence becomes comprehensible and capable of integration. As the opening credits and the introduction’s exploration of the attacks begin, the narrator goes silent. Replacing the rapid images and brief explanations of historical evidence, the titles play over senseimpressions of the attacks themselves: on the sound track, eyewitness accounts and live newscaster descriptions of the events and commentary on them; on the screen, video from a variety of amateur and cable and broadcast news sources. Here, ostensibly, is the unexpurgated, chaotic event, the moment under scrutiny. But the documentary does not entirely withhold comment. At one point it editorializes via a kind of hip hop montage of building collapse, cut rhythmically to a trance beat breakdown: ﬁrst we see WTC Building 7 fall (the most suspicious collapse, according to conspiracy theorists), then, in stock footage, an unnamed building is taken down by controlled demolition. Cut back to Building 7, then forth again. If you watch carefully, the documentary implies, you will see patterns and similarities between the “attack” and the planned destruction of a tall building. Then, behind video of the Towers’ collapse and interspersed with additional contemporaneous audio commentary, we hear a radio interview with author Hunter S. Thompson (who died in February 2005,

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

275

a few months before the release of the ﬁrst edition of Loose Change) about 9/11. Thompson ﬁrst excoriates the media for being “cowed” by a government and unnamed co-conspirators “who had the motive, who had the opportunity, who had the equipment, who had the will,” and who, Thompson claims from inside knowledge and experience, “do these things.” In this ﬁnal moment of the documentary’s introduction, just when the last title listing Dylan Avery as writer and director comes on screen, Thompson answers a question posed by the interviewer as to whether he is suggesting that the attacks worked in the Bush administration’s favor, and whether the administration might be directly responsible for them. As rubble noisily lands near a hand-held camera seeking shelter under a car, and as we watch singed bits of paper and detritus from the buildings’ collapse ﬂy in poetic circular patterns in the blackened air, Thompson replies, “Oh absolutely, . . . absolutely.” Thompson’s commentary punctuates the introduction, serving as a model for the documentary’s method and an indication of its intended effect. The ﬁrst part of the introduction has offered a panoply of evidence, but of precisely what we are not yet explicitly told. The second part of the introduction, with its impressionistic portrait of the attacks, demonstrates in contemporaneous spoken words and visual imagery the confusion and terror the attacks caused. The inclusion of Thompson’s post hoc commentary with this portrait, which Thompson made in his signature matter-of-fact, world-weary attitude, reveals the video’s argument and method. Thompson knows what happened, because he knows that the government and its shadowy world are capable of conceiving and carrying out these attacks. His mix of curmudgeonly, libertarian distaste for power and his legendary writing style—a “gonzo” new journalism that combined metaphoric hyperbole and copious mind-altering substances with on-the-scene reportage and autobiography—makes him a natural ﬁt for a post-adolescent, formally innovative documentary maker and his post-adolescent, Internet-savvy audience. Avery appropriates Thompson’s words and voice, assuming Thompson’s role as his voice fades and Avery’s name and the title announcing his authorship capture the screen. The fact that Thompson would not, and could not, be held to professional conventions and standards of journalism did not lessen his mythical position as a writer of nonﬁction—if anything it made his work seem to his fans more authentic, more correct, even if it deﬁed the facticity expected of nonﬁction. Gonzo is the

276

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

standard to which Loose Change ultimately wishes to be held. It may well get some things “wrong”—Avery seems to view the video release process via Google Video as allowing a series of drafts that he can regularly revise and resubmit—and it may occasionally overstate its case. But the documentary’s larger narrative about the event it describes and the world it inhabits resonates like Thompson’s. Fear and loathing, indeed: this is a conspiracy. The remainder of the documentary, composed of an effort to document and support the argument that the introduction initiates so dramatically, is more conventional. Its structure resembles a college term paper divided into discrete sections (“Pentagon” / “Twin Towers” / “Flight 93”) and then subdivided into a series of bullet points made within those sections (for example, there are eight distinct, numbered questions about the Pentagon attack). Loose Change espouses a fairly traditional conspiracy theory about 9/11. In sequential sections, it argues that: the Pentagon was damaged by a missile or something other than a Boeing 757; the Towers collapsed from controlled demolitions, not from the plane crashes (which were themselves quite suspicious, since the alleged hijackers are still alive and Osama bin Laden’s alleged confession to the attacks on video was faked); and Flight 93 did not crash in Pennsylvania but landed safely in Cleveland. (The documentary admits, “We may never know what really happened to Flight 93.”) Consistent with this acknowledgment, which suggests that the conspiracy itself holds the secret truths that may never be revealed, the documentary does not develop a positive theory of what actually happened and why. Perhaps, the documentary suggests, 9/11 was purely about greed—gold was stored underneath the World Trade Center, and much of it, Loose Change asserts, remains unaccounted for. More likely, it was intended to allow President Bush to do all kinds of bad things, which the documentary lists: “The Patriot Act. The Department of Homeland Security. Afghanistan. Iraq.” Much of this, as we have seen, is standard fare. In its argument, Loose Change seems like the work of any low-budget, amateur videographer or ﬁlmmaker and conspiracy theorist with an instinctual ability to make a professional-looking documentary. But unlike the work of equally didactic ﬁlmmakers such as Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, Loose Change does not conform fully to the traditional populist style of story-telling, the classical psychological melodrama of the docudrama JFK and the ﬁrst-person documentary

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

|

277

of Roger and Me (1989) and, to a lesser but still signiﬁcant extent, Fahrenheit 911 (2004). It is distinguished by the fact that no individual ﬁgures emerge within the documentary, whether as objects of derision or suspicion or as heroic or authoritative subjects with whom the viewer is to identify and trust. Neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney nor Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, three of the major villains in most 9/11 conspiracy theories, appear extensively in the video (although Rumsfeld is quoted on title cards multiple times and Bush is shown brieﬂy when the documentary identiﬁes the expansion of presidential powers post-9/11 as one of the attacks’ gravest consequences). Instead, “the government” ﬂoats throughout the video as a spoken but undeﬁned presence. Similarly, Larry Silverstein’s ownership interests in the World Trade Center and his allegedly suspicious actions on the day of the attack repeatedly arise, but he never develops as a character, remaining merely a cipher whose strategic actions seem to indicate his involvement in a scam to pocket billions of dollars in insurance. Nor is there a hero. Loose Change presents neither a whistleblower nor an expert who can explain 9/11 as a whole or in signiﬁcant part, and it lacks even a talking head to explain the ﬁner points of engineering, science, or geopolitics as they apply to the ofﬁcial account of 9/11. Avery the auteur never identiﬁes himself or shows himself on screen. Instead, the only recurring human element, the authority on whom the viewer depends for information and revelation, is the narrator, whose disembodied voice matches the cool, contemporary electronic beats of the soundtrack. The narrator drips with increasing sarcasm as the documentary advances, both in his tone and his words, dropping comments like, “Catch my drift?” or “It gets better than that,” or even “You ready for this?” when he is conﬁdent that he has refuted or is about to refute a claim made by the ofﬁcial account. As the viewer either knows already or can learn with a minimum of Internet research, the narrator is Avery himself, whose apparently expansive knowledge of a wide range of issues covered in the documentary secures his voice signiﬁcant authorial presence and authority. On the Internet and in media proﬁles of him, Avery appears as just another guy, the kid with the laptop who began tugging on the strings of 9/11 and ended up with Loose Change. Just as the video’s structure attempts to recreate the surge of information and energy that Avery experienced upon performing his research and thus initiate the viewer’s personal disorientation in a treacherous

278

|

A FA I L U R E O F I M A G I N AT I O N

world that is not what it seems, so its voice offers a solution to the puzzle of 9/11 and the sense of lost identity that the individual experiences on having the truth ﬁnally revealed to her. The message of Loose Change is that we are all Dylan Avery now—a laptop battalion prepared to go into battle, armed with information, insight, and an interpretive method that Loose Change has provided. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, our imagination doesn’t fail. We see everything and omit nothing. Loose Change ends with the narrator’s ﬁnal call to arms, spoken over a waving American ﬂag: “America has been hijacked. Not by Al Qaeda. Not by Osama bin Laden. But by a group of tyrants, ready and willing to do whatever it takes to keep their stranglehold on this country. So what are we going to do about it? Anything. Share this information with friends, family, total strangers. Hold screenings, conferences, whatever you have to do to get the word out. It’s up to you. Ask questions. Demand answers.” Conspiracy is the answer to the interpretive and narrative crisis of a politics captured by the power bloc, Loose Change asserts. The secret group of tyrants gives meaning to the 9/11 attacks and to the events like Operation Northwoods that can reveal the underlying plot to hijack the nation. Conspiracy theorist is the new, emergent identity that can ﬁll the emptiness the individual now feels and can enable her to solve the cognitive crisis she faces herself. Assuming the character of the documentary’s authorial voice—knowing, righteously sarcastic and cynical, gonzo—gives the viewer meaning and agency, and offers a sense of adventure and fun as she attacks the stodgy, conspiratorial state with the latest information technology and Web portals. And the conspiracy community is the collective response that can rally the people and restore the nation. The truth movement, composed of great scholars and regular kids with laptops, can overcome.

Afterword Conspiracy Theory, Cultural Studies, and the Trouble with Populism

T

his book has argued that a culturalist analysis of conspiracy theory’s practices and attractions yields more insight into conspiracy theory’s role in popular political culture than does the traditional blanket condemnation of it, whether made by humanist historians or social scientists. The Turner Diaries (1978), an infamous white supremacist novel, challenges this argument.1 Written by the late William Pierce (1933–2002), under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, the novel achieved widespread notoriety ﬁrst in the 1980s, when a violent, revolutionary organization called The Order patterned its tactics on those of an organization described and celebrated in the book, and then again in the 1990s when Timothy McVeigh, who had allegedly read and enjoyed the novel, bombed the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.2 The Turner Diaries describes the origins and success of the “Organization,” a secret, exclusive group of racist radicals who lead a civil war against the “System,” the Jewish-run cabal that has seized control over the United States with the help of a slovenly and animalistic black population. The System represents the logical outcome of the conspiracies of contemporary politics for contemporary white supremacists: white men emasculated by nonwhite men who lead or proﬁt from the conspiracy and by women “liberated” from patriarchy, and white women living under the constant threat of sexual assault by depraved 279

280

|

AFTERWORD

African-American males. At the same time, the secretive Organization represents the collective violent resistance necessary to overcome the conspiratorial power held by the Jewish “occupation” and supported by blacks and white “race traitors.” Its underground network of terrorists achieves the Organization’s goal of a puriﬁed and sanctiﬁed white society by unleashing an almost poetic ﬂood of bombings, mass hangings, and atomic weaponry against the System and those who uphold it. Despite its extreme violence, The Turner Diaries isn’t unique—it is merely the best-known and most fully realized of the many apocalyptic tracts that circulate among contemporary fascist groups,3 exceptional only in the scope of its vision, the professionalism of its prose, and its relative commercial success among racists and those members of the “New War” culture who are sympathetic to its message.4 The novel’s fetishization of secrecy, obsessive exclusion of the impure, and ﬁxation on the master signiﬁer of whiteness seems like the deranged big brother to the boyhood fantasy of The Secret Three, the children’s book whose fascination with secrecy, exclusion, and interpretation I described in the Preface. Here is where its challenge to this book lies. One could plausibly argue that in The Turner Diaries, conspiracy theory’s populist underpinnings, which I have attempted to recuperate and use to complicate simplistic assumptions about conspiracy theory’s politics, explode in the nascent fascism that underpins any effort to pose “the people” in opposition to “the power bloc.” Here, that opposition is harnessed to the paranoid fear of non-“whites,” and especially of Jews and blacks, and is expressed as a warrant for genocide. Like conspiracy theory in general, the novel implicitly offers an alternative interpretation and narrative of the contemporary political and social order meant to inspire political resistance in its readers. Conspiracies about the JFK assassination, the Antichrist, Bill Clinton, even 9/11—those can be contextualized within the diversity of American culture, dismissed as marginal, even mocked. But it is exceedingly difﬁcult to explain or shrug off a blueprint for white supremacy. Accordingly, The Turner Diaries constitutes an important caution for a book like this that wants to identify populism’s complex role in American political culture and rescue the study of conspiracy theory from those who would condemn it as an inevitable threat to civilized discourse and democratic order. In its absolute extremism, The Turner Diaries conﬁrms, in the direst fashion, Richard Hofstadter’s description

AFTERWORD

|

281

of the committed “right-wingers” of the Republican Party’s Goldwater wing, circa 1964: “willing to gamble with the future, [they] enjoy the wide-ranging freedom of the agitational mind, with its paranoid suspicions, its impossible demands, and its millennial dreams of victory.”5 This same caution also reaches any study of mass or popular political culture that makes claims about the value of a particular set of texts and practices as a populist enterprise—that is, as an object of study that enacts or expresses some degree of challenge or resistance to dominant political and social institutions. If populism is, as I argued in the ﬁrst part of this book, an open-ended political discourse and element of political action that challenges and subverts the “power bloc,” then it is as available for use by William Pierce and his white supremacist organization the National Alliance as it is for individual authors and groups whose political commitments I favor—or at least whose political demands I would deem legitimate.6 The Turner Diaries’ challenge resonates beyond my own argument because it confronts even more starkly those who work in the interdisciplinary ﬁeld of cultural studies, a critical practice whose interests and insights have inﬂuenced scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. This book argues that conspiracy theory is not necessarily marginal or pathological, that its populism and cultural practices suggest often justiﬁable discontent with contemporary institutional democracy and governance; a radically populist cultural studies goes further and champions popular cultural practices that disrupt dominant power structures, oppose the “hegemonic” status of “high” or “bourgeois” art, and, when pleasurable, offer an “empowering” experience.7 The Turner Diaries challenges my argument by asking how one can complicate populism and rescue it from its critics without ultimately approving of or legitimating populism that hurts and even kills, like that of reactionary and violent white working-class racism. It also challenges the radically populist tendencies of cultural studies by suggesting that the disruption, opposition, and empowerment that they champion may be employed in the service of a genocidal racism that deﬁnes “the people” as an exclusionary and violent group. I raise this comparison as a context for evaluating John Fiske’s account of African-American conspiracy theories about race-based plots by whites against blacks, and especially black men. During the late 1980s and through the 1990s Fiske was a leading proponent of an explicitly

282

|

AFTERWORD

populist version of cultural studies, and in his book Media Matters (rev. ed. 1996), he gives a quite sympathetic account of the circulation within black communities of conspiracy theories alleging that HIV/AIDS was developed by white elites as a means to perpetrate African-American genocide.8 Rumors of conspiracy concerning ongoing attempts by federal and corporate elites to perpetrate racial genocide against people of color have long circulated within what Regina Austin has termed the “black public sphere” of African-American controlled institutions.9 Such rumors focus especially on threats to the African-American body, as in the HIV/AIDS conspiracies and rumors that Church’s Fried Chicken (whose franchises, according to these rumors, are owned by the Ku Klux Klan) induces sterility in black males.10 But they are also explicitly political as well, concerning such events as the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., which many blacks (as well as whites) view not as singular deeds by individual perpetrators but as part of the systematic harassment and murder of African-American leaders.11 There is no way to understand such fears—whether, in the case of the Church’s rumor, they are outlandish and unsubstantiated, or in the cases of the King and Malcolm X assassinations, they are reasonable given the abundant evidence of surveillance and provocative actions of state and federal agencies against these leaders—except in relation to the enslavement and historic oppression of African Americans in the United States, which provides an inescapable social context for belief in antiblack conspiracies. Thus, the contrast between the conspiracy imagined in the near future of The Turner Diaries and those circulated in African-American communities can be seen as fairly stark. Even if one allows that the working-class white male audience for the former is marginalized in the contemporary American political economy, that marginalization nevertheless is historically distinct from the marginalization and subordination imposed on blacks.12 However, Fiske goes further than suggesting that the historical oppression of African Americans (both overt and covert) and contemporary discrimination against them (both individual and institutional) help to explain the tendency of blacks to believe in and circulate conspiracy theory. He begins by characterizing investigations and theories about an antiblack HIV/AIDS conspiracy as “blackstream knowledge” and describing them as a resistant practice of creating and disseminating “counterknowledge”—a term that Fiske uses to refer to information

AFTERWORD

|

283

that contradicts and is unavailable from ofﬁcial sources such as the government and the mainstream media, and that in this context we have seen before as the details on which conspiracy theorists obsess and construct their conspiracy narratives. Accordingly, he argues, conspiracy theories are a means for blacks to defend themselves from the racist society that surrounds them. The production and circulation of this counterknowledge is active and political: “Counterknowledge must be socially and politically motivated: recovering repressed information, disarticulating and rearticulating events, and producing a comprehensive and coherent counterknowledge involves hard labor, and hard labor always requires strong motivation.”13 Counterknowledge aims to combine widely acknowledged historical incidents of barbarous white supremacy (for example, the lynching of black men during the Jim Crow era and the Tuskegee syphilis study performed on afﬂicted, illiterate black men by the U.S. Public Health Service that denied the test subjects proper treatment in order to study the effects of the disease) with more controversial conjectures to create a broad narrative that demonstrates a pattern and project of racial genocide. Fiske’s argument implies that all African-American theories of genocide—including, perhaps, those positing Jewish control of the African slave trade, or more general anti-Semitic theories of Jewish control of the media and banks—are presumptively populist and worth championing as practices of resistance. Although Fiske does not mention anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the African-American community, his unproblematized embrace of blackstream and counterstream knowledge neither confronts its existence nor suggests how or if his interpretive framework would respond when the resistant practices he champions themselves articulate oppressive or racist sentiments. He does have his doubts, which he expresses in a moment of self-reﬂection: As I weighed the different bits of evidence in this [study], I found myself pondering which of two possible “wrong” beliefs would have the worse effects—not to believe AIDS-as-genocide if it were true or to believe it if it were not. And I wondered, too, if the answer might not be different for Blacks and whites, for hetero- and homosexuals, for conservatives and progressives. How do I, as a member of the safest group of all (monogamous, white, straight, non–IV-drug using, and living in a small midwestern town) weigh the Black conservative

284

|

AFTERWORD

argument that the belief in AIDS-as-genocide increases African Americans’ sense of themselves as victims and thus their helplessness against the Black radical one that the knowledge arms Blacks in their ﬁght against white supremacy and that what makes them helpless is not knowing the weapons deployed against them?14

Fiske leaves his question unanswered, but what is telling is his attachment of normative terms to the different possible positions he identiﬁes regarding conspiracy theory. The conservative, accommodationist position rejects belief in conspiracy theory while the radical one accepts it as a weapon of the weak—this, in the midst of an argument from a scholar whose work presupposes that “conservative” is a term of approbation and conservative positions lead necessarily to oppression, while “radical” is an honoriﬁc and radical positions are necessary for emancipation. The terms suggest that the ultimately correct answer is one in which the straight white male theorist not only recognizes why African Americans believe in conspiracy theories, but afﬁrms the legitimacy of their belief, if only because of the “radical,” and presumptively positive, consequences that belief will have. Contrast this approach with that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who reﬂects on the circulation of the same theories in the queer community, albeit without the underpinnings of racial genocide. What would it mean, she asks, To know that the origin or spread of HIV realistically might have resulted from a state-assisted conspiracy—such knowledge is, it turns out, separable from the question of whether the energies of a given AIDS activist intellectual or group might best be used in the tracing and exposure of such a possible plot. They might, but then again, they might not. Though ethically very fraught, the choice is not selfevident; whether or not to undertake this highly compelling tracingand-exposure project represents a strategic and local decision, not necessarily a categorical imperative.15

Sedgwick poses the same quandary as Fiske: Should one afﬁrm belief in conspiracy theory and invest intellectual resources in proving a hypothetical, as-yet unproven genocidal plot? Should one approve of it because it is consistent with a populist suspicion of the state rooted in historical evidence of state-sponsored corruption, criminality, and oppression, as well as a commitment to a radical hermeneutics of suspicion? Should one approve of it because it may have positive political consequences?

AFTERWORD

|

285

Sedgwick is more skeptical than Fiske of conspiracy theory, both as a matter of consequence and of theory. The consequences of afﬁrming conspiracy theory as a political project for the subordinated are in fact not clear, she argues, because we cannot tell in advance if a politics of paranoid-like suspicion will achieve afﬁrmative political change.16 For Jack Bratich, the beneﬁt of Fiske’s approach is its commitment to the political opening that counterknowledge enables—an openness that allows those who engage in it to question dominant forms of rationality and to articulate their counterknowledge to radical critiques.17 Sedgwick is not so certain, however, as she warns of the risks of an unreﬂective commitment to a paranoid hermeneutics of suspicion. It can lead to theories and judgments that are reductive and tautological (for example, something that is secret is therefore conspiratorial, because if it weren’t conspiratorial then it wouldn’t be secret). It is unduly anticipatory and reﬂexive: knowing with great certainty and in advance what is going to happen “blot[s] out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand.” It can lead one to obsess over the hidden and in so doing to miss the phenomena and oppression that exist on the surface.18 Sedgwick suggests that a paranoid hermeneutic may aid critical practice and yield important insights and strong theory, but it will not necessarily lead to good theory, correct answers, or better practice.19 Sedgwick’s meditation on this issue demonstrates the poverty of Fiske’s discussion. I share his difﬁculty in responding to “counterknowledge,” as well as his desire to identify with participants’ afﬁrmative belief in the evidence they amass and the narratives they construct. He is correct to foreground the different stakes for populations that believe in conspiracy theories, and he rightly points to the consequences of such belief as one consideration that any account of populist discourse must make.20 I take issue, however, with what could only be described as his unexamined compulsion to champion certain beliefs and practices of “the people” as necessarily correct or as politically defensible simply because they are critical and suspicious and whether or not they are politically, historically, or scientiﬁcally inaccurate—which for Fiske is either secondary or irrelevant. Fiske thus extends his claims about the political and cultural value of conspiracy theory far beyond my own. If, as he implies, active, “resistant” readings must be championed as such, then one must necessarily champion conspiracy theory: it is active

286

|

AFTERWORD

in its interpretation of history and contemporary politics, resistant in its construction of narratives that oppose dominant historical explanations of political and economic power, and produces pleasure and encourages collective action among its participants. Furthermore, if one were also to privilege those cultural texts and practices that demonstrate some instrumental political efﬁcacy—by, for example, helping exploited populations to resist or at least resent certain aspects of the larger structures that exploit them—then the process and results of African-American counterknowledge’s search for a white plot to commit genocide must be considered productive, provided one considers black separatism to be a productive political avenue for the emancipation of the racially oppressed. Yet, what precisely is the resistance of such counterknowledge resistant to? The mindset Fiske champions deﬁnes a very narrow version of power—one premised solely on race. It is impervious to historical correction, and rebuffs any politics of solidarity and emancipation with individuals or collectives outside the resistant group, having premised its interpretation and narrative of the plight of its people around certain core links that preclude linkages to other movements of resistance.21 Fiske, as a white man, is hesitant to question or even respond to this counterknowledge; and, in all likelihood, his responses as a white man would not make much difference—as in any conspiracy community, the attempt to refute or questions conspiracy theory’s interpretive and narrative machinery is likely to be dismissed as incorrect, or even considered to be part of the conspiracy itself. The inability to respond or to argue with this counterknowledge, or to link it to a broader political movement, is troubling enough, but Fiske’s approach cannot adequately distinguish between the AfricanAmerican counterknowledge he would champion and the white counterknowledge of The Turner Diaries that he would abhor. Assuming that the readership of The Turner Diaries includes—and in all likelihood is largely composed of—working-class white males, it too is a text that has been produced by and circulated within a group demoralized by the effects of capitalism and patriarchy.22 It too depends on the interpretation and extrapolation of contemporary power within a broad narrative frame that resists dominant notions of political and social order.23 Yet, in order to judge the relative validity and meaningfulness of black and white conspiracy theories, Fiske has two choices: distinguish

AFTERWORD

|

287

between the causes of black and white searches for counterknowledges or compare their likely effects. To accomplish the ﬁrst, he could compare oppressions, asserting that one can excuse or believe in African-American conspiracy theories more readily than white ones because African Americans have historically been victims of slavery and systematic brutality and are currently more oppressed than working-class whites. To accomplish the second, Fiske could compare the political effects of the respective theories by arguing that black theories of white genocide are less likely to produce racism and violence than white theories of a Jewish/black conspiracy. Neither of these arguments is empirically or normatively satisfactory. Empirically, racism is clearly one of the singular deﬁning modes of historical oppression in American history, but race is not the only determinant that distinguishes oppression. Do counterknowledges based on gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and/ or disability deserve the same response that Fiske gives blackstream knowledge? Would a sexist, homophobic conspiracy theory espoused by a black or Latino man be more excusable than one espoused by a white woman? Would an African-American conspiracy theory that incorporates “white” conspiracy theories retain its racial authenticity?24 What if it was anti-Semitic?25 What about a nascent feminist who during the early twentieth century espoused antiSemitic, fascistic views?26 One could line up a complex matrix of possible oppressions and corresponding conspiracy theories—would Fiske be willing or able to distinguish among them? These questions reveal an underlying normative confusion within cultural studies scholarship, like Fiske’s, that champions populist “resistance.” Why suspend challenge or disbelief in some cases and not others? This scholarly paradigm does not adequately develop either a theory of populism that provides a generalizable, replicable analytic model or a useful strategy for political movements that seek to inform and engage individuals. “Counterknowledge” is too abstract to explain the speciﬁcities of “resistance”; it fails both to explain the political and epistemological valences of black conspiracy theory (tautologically, it is resistant because it resists a politics that I, too, resist) and to provide a theoretical concept that can enable analysis of contemporary populist discourse. Conspiracy theory can just as easily be used to promote oppression as it can be made to advance democratic or emancipatory politics—it might be part of a white supremacist’s novel, it might raise real questions

288

|

AFTERWORD

about historical or present-day efforts by the state or powerful private interests to suppress democracy or oppress minorities, or it might make fantastic, unproven and unprovable allegations. The category of “resistance” as a means of—and a rationale for—embracing some conspiracy theories or populations that believe in them does not assist either in sorting the particularities of any instance of conspiracy theory or in thinking more broadly about it as a cultural and political practice. Nor is its purported effectiveness as an instrumental means for rallying populations persuasive. At minimum, a committed embrace of conspiracy theory as such not only risks that conspiracy theory can be wrong, but to the extent that it rejects out of hand any challenge, conspiracy theory risks never being correct—in the context of the 9/11 truth movement, for example, it leads antiwar activists to commit themselves to the politics of the illusory (in search of controlled demolition and space-based weaponry and withholding political support from those who believe the ofﬁcial account) over the politics of the possible, in turn making more likely a continuation of tragic political commitments to war in the Middle East. As a popular discourse and rhetoric within democratic politics, populism’s understanding of state and private power as an estrangement of the people from the power bloc can be appropriated and articulated in different ways by different political movements and social forces, for inclusive and/or exclusive purposes and to revolutionary, reformist, and/or reactionary ends. As a subset of populism, conspiracy theory constitutes an integral aspect of American political culture, one that also has different effects in different historical periods. In its apocalyptic narrative vision and semiotic apparatus, conspiracy theory assumes the coming end of a moment cursed by secret power and a (neverto-arrive) new beginning where secrecy vanishes and power is transparent and utilized by good people for the good of all. It may appear in a righteous jeremiad that would claim to be acting on behalf of divine or human justice, positing a necessary end to history through dreadful but deserved events that will lead to the victory of the fellow righteous;27 it may appear as an ironic apocalypse, facing an unavoidable end with distance and cynicism;28 or it may appear as a sublime vision of an inﬁnite power-inspiring awe, terror, and pleasure, enabling regressive authorities to promise repressive protection from the great hovering threat.29 Nascent in all of these appearances is a critique of the contemporary

AFTERWORD

|

289

social order and a longing for a better one. Conspiracy theory ultimately fails as a universal theory of power and comprehensive approach to historical and political research, however, because it not only fails to inform us how to move from the end of the uncovered plot to the beginning of a political movement, it is also unable to locate a position at which we can begin to organize and respect people in the complex, diverse world that it simpliﬁes.30

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Preface 1. Mildred Myrick, The Secret Three (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 2. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1960), 332–33.

Introduction 1. This book is concerned almost exclusively with conspiracy theories in and about the United States. On conspiracy theories in the Middle East, see Jon W. Anderson, “Conspiracy Theories, Premature Entextualization, and Popular Political Analysis,” Arab Studies Journal 4, no. 1 (1996): 96–102; Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (New York: Macmillan, 1996). Two essay collections offer comparative studies of conspiracy theory: Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) and Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Above all, these sources caution against broad, global claims about conspiracy theories and their effects in different nations and cultures, or assumptions that one event, like the death of Princess Diana, is interpreted as a conspiracy the same way in England as it is in Egypt (the home country of Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, who died along with her). Claire Birchall, “Conspiracy Theories and Academic Discourses: The Necessary Possibility of Popular (Over)interpretation, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 67–76, 72. As Charles Briggs has argued in a wonderful consideration of the challenge conspiracy theories pose for anthropologists, conspiracy theory is 291

292

|

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

at once shared across cultures and emerges from within speciﬁc cultural, discursive, and political economic contexts. Charles L. Briggs, “Theorizing Modernity Conspiratorially: Science, Scale, and the Political Economy of Public Discourse in Explanations of a Cholera Epidemic,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 2 (2004): 164–87. 2. The most recent example is Nicholas Lemann, “Paranoid Style: How Conspiracy Theories Become News,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2006, 96. Samples from the two-year period of 1995–97 include: on comic books, David Segal, “Pow! Wham! Take That, Uncle Sam: In Today’s Comic Book Culture, the Arch-Villain Is the Government,” Washington Post, December 11, 1995, C3; on movies and television shows, Michiko Kakutani,“Bound by Suspicion,”New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1997, 16; Jeff Gammage, “JFK Killing Takes on Life of Its Own,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 24, 1996, E1; John Yemma, “A Penchant for Plots: Conspiracy Theories Are All the Rage in U.S.,” Boston Globe, September 25, 1996, A1; and Mark Jenkins, “Devil with a Blue Suit On: Government and Authorities as Hollywood Heavies,” Washington Post, May 14, 1995, G10. On the increasingly susceptible news media, see, for example, Kurt Andersen, “The Age of Unreason,” The New Yorker, February 3, 1997, 40–43. 3. In a 2000 article, Jodi Dean found numerous instances, dating back to the mid-1990s, in which commentators linked conspiracy theory to the Internet. Jodi Dean, “Webs of Conspiracy,” in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 61–76. More recent examples include Carl M. Cannon, “Surviving the Information Age,” The National Journal, June 30, 2007; Jim Dwyer, “U.S. Counters 9/11 Theories Of Conspiracy,” New York Times, September 2, 2006, B-1; Nancy Jo Sales, “Click Here for Conspiracy,” Vanity Fair, August 2006, 112. The simplistic argument that the Internet creates and preys upon stupidity is a quite different point, I should note, from the more compelling and persuasive argument that the structure of networked computers is analogous to and functions like a conspiracy. See Peter Krapp, “Terror and Play, or What Was Hacktivism?” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 70–93. 4. The three articles appeared on the front page of the Mercury News on consecutive days, from August 18–20, 1996. Webb later expanded them into a book, Dark Alliance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998). 5. The most thorough account of these stories and the controversy that ensued appears in Nick Schou, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Gary Webb (New York: Nation Books, 2006). See also Daniel Hellinger, “Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Hegemony in American Politics,” in Transparency and Conspiracy, ed. West and Sanders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 204–32, 212–15. 6. Schou, Kill the Messenger, 127–47. Most telling is an article by Peter Kornbluh, an analyst at the National Security Archive and expert on American involvement in Central America, whose 1997 Columbia Journalism Review article both supported the general outlines of Webb’s series and criticized its overstatements and insufﬁcient supporting evidence. Peter Kornbluh, “The Storm over ‘Dark Alliance,’” Columbia Journalism Review 35 (January–February 1997): 33. Perhaps the least substantiated claim in the articles was the extent to which the distribution chain Webb described in fact initiated and controlled the crack epidemic. This claim did not, however, concern the explosive issue of the CIA’s

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

|

293

knowledge of the relationship between Contras and drug dealing per se—merely the extent of its effects. 7. These general points were conceded even by some of Webb’s most vociferous critics in the media. See Jeffrey A. Hall, “Aligning Darkness with Conspiracy Theory: The Discursive Effects of African American Interest in Gary Webb’s ‘Dark Alliance,” The Howard Journal of Communications 17 (2006): 205, 211. Some of these conclusions had been reached in the late 1980s following an investigation by the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, whose report, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1989), noted links between the Contras and drug dealing. On the role of Oliver North in drug trafﬁcking on behalf of the Contras, see “The Oliver North File: His Diaries, E-Mail, and Memos on the Kerry Report, Contras and Drugs,” National Security Archive Electronic Brieﬁng Book No. 113, February 26, 2004, available at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/ [last accessed June 4, 2007]. 8. The CIA’s mid-2007 release of parts of its “family jewels,” redacted documents covering parts of the CIA’s secret, illegal operations conducted before 1973, represents an exception that proves the rule, insofar as critics have alleged the collection was both underwhelming and intended as a distraction from current controversies in which the CIA was embroiled. Mark Mazzetti and Tim Weiner, “Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War,” New York Times, June 27, 2007. 9. See, generally, Hall, “Aligning Darkness with Conspiracy.” The most signiﬁcant articles critical of Webb were Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus, “The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot,” Washington Post, October 4, 1996, A1; Timothy Golden, “Pivotal Figures of Newspaper Series May Be Only Bit Players,” New York Times, October 21, 1996, A14; and a three-part series entitled “The Cocaine Trail” that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times from October 20–22, 1996. For a recounting of how those stories were assigned and edited, as well as some second-guessing of their critical tone, see Schou, Killing the Messenger, chap. 8. 10. Webb’s career and life spiraled downward, and he committed suicide in 2004. Nick Schou’s biography of Webb, while largely sympathetic, notes Webb’s strengths and shortcomings as a reporter, as well as his frustrated and occasionally stubborn response to the criticism he received from other reporters and from his own newspaper. Schou, Kill the Messenger. 11. Jack E. White, “Crack, Contras, and Cyberspace, Time Magazine, September 30, 1996, 16; Michael Kazin, “Conspiracy Theories: The Paranoid Streak in American History,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1996, M2; Timothy Golden, “Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own,” New York Times, October 21, 1996, A14. 12. Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: Free Press, 1997), 2–7. 13. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003). Parenthetical page references in the text refer to this work. 14. Dan Burstein, “In the Netherworld of Conspiracies,” US News & World Report, December 15, 2004; James Verini, “You’re Not Just Imagining It; A Wave of Paranoia Is Engulﬁng Books and Films; in Fact, Conspiracy’s Cool,” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2004, E-10.

294

|

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

15. Dan Brown, Angels and Demons (New York: Pocket Books, 2000). 16. Carol Memmott, “Publishers Try to Crack Da Vinci Code,” USA Today, March 17, 2005, 1D; Mike Thomas, “Da Vinci Has Spawned a New Publishing Genre,” Chicago Sun Times, May 19, 2006, 56; Renee Tawa, “Deep into the ‘Code’; Talks, Tours and ‘Da Vinci’ Follow-up Books Serve a Renaissance of Interest in Art and Religion,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2004, E-1. 17. Gwen Florio, “Controversial Da Vinci Code Sparking Fire at Grassroots Level, Denver Post, February 18, 2004, F-01; Laurie Goodstein, “Defenders of Christianity Rebut The Da Vinci Code,” New York Times, April 27, 2004, 22; Mary Carole McCauley, “Code Read: Just What Is It about The Da Vinci Code That People Find So Compelling?” The Baltimore Sun, October 25, 2004, 1C; Jerome Weeks, “Not Everyone Thrilled About Da Vinci Code,” Dallas Morning News, January 16, 2004, 19A. 18. Laura Miller, “The Da Vinci Con,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, February 22, 2004, 23. 19. Frank Wilson, “Accuracy of Best-Selling Da Vinci Code Comes Under Fire,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 31, 2003, B-5. 20. Today Show, April 28, 2004 (interview with Matt Lauer). See also John Christensen, “Da Vinci Code Enticing But Flawed,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 6, 2006, 3B, which described the book’s story as “an expression of our native distrust of authority, especially heavy-handed authority.” 21. Hofstadter’s work on this subject was collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). I discuss this work extensively in chapter 1. 22. What follows condenses the historical work of, among others, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seculorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 411. A more recent case study is Markus Hünemörder, “The Society of the Cincinnati: Conspiracy Theory in the Early American Republic,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 31 (2002): 65. 23. My use of the terms “populism” and “populist” in this context is not intended to refer to any speciﬁc historic movement that identiﬁed itself as “Populist,” whether in the late–nineteenth-century United States or twentieth-century Latin America (such as, for example, in Argentina under Peron). Rather, I refer to populism both in its more abstract and general meaning within political and social theory and as a tendency of political movements within a mass democracy to present themselves and their claims as representing “the people” in opposition to the controlling forces of the power bloc. I develop this notion and make this distinction further in chapters 1 and 2. To clarify my use of these different terms in the text, I will capitalize “Populist” when I am referring to a speciﬁc historical movement. 24. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 35. This same claim was recently made by a conservative philosopher who decried the hermeneutic of suspicion that

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

|

295

arose from aspects of the Enlightenment tradition and blamed it for belief in conspiracy theory. Edward Feser, “We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist,” Tech Central Station Daily, http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092006B, posted September 20, 2006 [last accessed September 1, 2007]. 25. This was the case not only for the new American republic. As Amos Hofman has shown, the fear of conspiracy was prevalent during the revolutionary and post–revolutionary era in France among those who were both behind and against the revolution. The Jacobins feared a monarchical conspiracy that would secretly sway public opinion and upend their revolutionary struggles, while antirevolutionary conservatives, like the author and priest Augustin Barruel, were equally convinced that the success of philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau came from the Jacobins’ manipulation of mass opinion and ability to disguise their true motives. In short, all parties in revolutionary France were conspiracy theorists and they all considered the key conﬂict in what was then emerging as modern politics to be the struggle between those who claimed to advance the true interests of France (whether deﬁned as the monarchy or the revolution) and the conspiratorial order against whom they were ﬁghting. Amos Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy,” Eighteenth Century Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 27–60. 26. Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, “Introduction,” in Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History, ed. Curry and Brown (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1972), x. 27. In an important rejoinder to the historical work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and others (cited in note 22 above), Ed White argues that the organizational struggles that marked the early Republic era, which included political battles and chicanery during the drafting of the constitution, make clear that the fear of conspiracy was more than simply an intellectual or ideological discourse but a very real concern. Ed White, “The Value of Conspiracy Theory,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 1. 28. Brian L. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (1999): 109–26; Charles Pigden, “Popper Revisited, or What Is Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 25 (1993): 3–34. 29. Jeffrey M. Bale, “Political Paranoia v. Political Realism: On Distinguishing between Bogus Conspiracy Theories and Genuine Conspiratorial Politics,” Patterns of Prejudice 41, no. 1 (2007): 45–60. Bale appears not to have noticed that I made this point quite clearly in the ﬁrst edition of this book as well—as have many of the others he briskly dismisses in a long footnote. 30. Regina Austin, “Beyond Black Demons and White Devils: Antiblack Conspiracy Theorizing and the Black Public Sphere,” Florida State University Law Review 22 (spring 1995): 1021; Michael Eric Dyson, “Haunted by Conspiracy,” New York Times, January 27, 1995, A15; Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), chap. 4. 31. Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 12–13. Elsewhere, I have discussed the importance of developing a theory of symbolic politics and political culture. See Mark Fenster, “Murray Edelman: Polemicist of Public Ignorance,” Critical Review 17 (2005): 366. 32. Christopher Hitchens, “On the Imagination of Conspiracy,” in his For the Sake of Argument (London: Verso, 1993), 14.

296

|

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

33. Placed within the ﬁelds that they represent, a non-exhaustive list of these books includes: American studies and cultural studies (Knight, Conspiracy Culture; Peter Knight ed., Conspiracy Nation [New York: New York University Press, 2002]); anthropology (George Marcus, ed., Paranoia Within Reason [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]; West and Sanders, eds., Transparency and Conspiracy); literary studies (Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000]; Patrick O’Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000]); and political theory (Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002]). 34. On the John Birch Society’s relationship to Barry Goldwater and the Republican Party in the early 1960s, see Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: RightWing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 62–65, and Charles J. Stewart, “The Master Conspiracy of the John Birch Society: From Communism to the New World Order,” Western Journal of Communication 66, no. 4 (fall 2002): 424–47. On the relationship between the Christian Coalition and the Republican Party, see Sara Diamond, “The Christian Right Seeks Dominion,” in Eyes Right!: Challenging the Right Wing Backlash, ed. Chip Berlet (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 44–49. 35. An excellent overview of conspiracy theories in American history is Robert Alan Goldberg’s Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); see also Peter Knight’s edited academic encyclopedia Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2003). Other, more popular books that take an encyclopedic approach to the topic include Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (New York: Citadel Press, 2004); Robert Anton Wilson, with Miriam Joan Hill, Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998); and George Johnson, Architects of Fear (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1983). 36. Steve Clarke, “Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32, no. 2 (2002): 131–50, 143–44; Patrick Leman, “The Born Conspiracy,” New Scientist, July 14, 2007, 35; Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” (January 15, 2008), Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585 [last accessed April 5, 2008]. 37. Clark McCauley and S. Jacques, “The Popularity of Conspiracy Theories of Presidential Assassination: A Baylesian Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 5 (1979): 637–44. 38. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 62–64; Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 40–41. 39. Jodi Dean, Aliens in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 6–8, 60, 109; Albert A. Harrison and James Moulton Thomas, “The Kennedy Assassination, Unidentiﬁed Flying Objects, and Other Conspiracies: Psychological and Organizational Factors in the Perception of ‘Cover-up,’” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 14 (1997): 113; Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 25–26. 40. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, 7–25. 41. Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 35. 42. O’Donnell, Latent Destinies, 12–14.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

|

297

1. Theorizing Conspiracy Politics 1. For a critique of Hofstadter’s work on the late–nineteenth-century Populist movement in his book The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), a precursor to his similar, later work on “political paranoia,” see Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and especially the critical literature review (600–604). 2. The most recent academic effort demonstrating the ongoing inﬂuence of Hofstadter’s approach is Robert S. Robins and Jerold M. Post, M.D., Political Paranoia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 3. Nicholas Lemann, “Paranoid Style: How Conspiracy Theories Become News,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2006, 96. 4. Sydney Blumenthal, “The Emperor’s New Veto,” Salon.com, http:// www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/07/20/bush_veto/index.html? source=search&aim=/opinion/blumenthal [last accessed March 28, 2008]; Glenn Greenwald, “Dick Cheney’s Warped Vision of the World,” Salon.com, http:// www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/13/cheney/index.html [last accessed March 28, 2008]; Paul Krugman, “The Paranoid Style,” New York Times, October 9, 2006, A17. 5. Jonah Goldberg, “Let’s Take a Poll: Just How Crazy are Democrats?” Chicago Tribune, May 17, 2007, C-19. 6. Jonathan Chait, “Paranoid Beyond the Fringe,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2004, B-13. 7. David Brooks, “The Paranoid Style,” New York Times, May 4, 2006, A-31; William Kristol, “The Paranoid Style in American Liberalism,” The Weekly Standard, January 2, 2006, 7; Lexington, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” The Economist, January 7, 2006, 79. 8. See, for example, Daniel Pipes, “The Paranoid Style in Mideast Politics,” Washington Post, November 6, 1994, C1, C4; “‘JFK’: The Movie,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 1991, A10; Richard Grenier, “On the Trail of America’s Paranoid Class,” The National Interest (spring 1992): 76–84; Michael Kelly, “The Road to Paranoia,” The New Yorker, June 19, 1995, 60–75. 9. See Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1933); Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: The Free Press, 1946), 77–128. 10. William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: Free Press, 1959), 130. Kornhauser cites the inﬂuence of Joseph Schumpeter on this aspect of his work (see Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947]). 11. John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27 (emphasis in original). 12. Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, 16. 13. Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (New York: Free Press, 1956), 231. 14. Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, 109–12. 15. Gene Wise, American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 344–45.

298

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

16. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 221. 17. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 9–31. 18. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955). 19. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 452–53 (my emphasis). 20. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 25. 21. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 55–56. 22. For a discussion of the consensus historians’ status as “objective” historians during this period, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 321. 23. J. Rogers Hollingsworth, “Consensus and Continuity in Recent American Historical Writing,” South Atlantic Quarterly 61 (1962): 49. 24. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 377. 25. Both Michael Rogin and Christopher Lasch have provided effective critiques of consensus historians’ and pluralist political scientists’ antipopulism, although Lasch does so within an idiosyncratically adamant defense of the entirety of the nineteenth-century Populists’ program and its current relevance. See Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, and Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), esp. 217–25 and 445–55. 26. Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, 439. 27. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), viii. See, for example, Novick, That Noble Dream, 334, and Higham, History, 213. 28. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955); David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 55–56, 128–30. Although enormously successful at the time—it garnered Hofstadter a Pulitzer Prize and established him as one of the leading historians of the postwar period—The Age of Reform was also criticized for its rather disapproving portrayals of Populists and Progressives. Hofstadter responded to this criticism, expressed by fellow historians in book reviews and by colleagues and friends in personal correspondence, both by defending the book and conceding that he may have painted with too broad a brush. Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 106–7, 114–17; Robert Collins, “Hofstadter and the Originality Trap,” Journal of American History 76, no. 1 (1989): 150–67. 29. Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, 126; Novick, That Noble Dream, 323–24. Hofstadter’s description of American politics was by no means a blithe celebration of American democracy. One of his late works, The Idea of a Party System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), demonstrates ambivalence toward the actual history of the formation and practice of the American party system. He does not, however, demonstrate much ambivalence at all to the American ideal—or, more precisely, fetishism—of an organized “legitimate opposition” of one national party.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

|

299

30. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 135. 31. In addition to Hofstadter’s oeuvre, see Richard O. Curry and Thomas M. Brown, eds., Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971); and John H. Bunzel, Anti-Politics in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). The eight-page “Suggestions for Further Reading” section at the end of Curry and Brown, Conspiracy, lists dozens of books and articles on this topic, the majority of which were published between 1950 and 1970. 32. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). Parenthetical page references in the text refer to this work. 33. Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, 442. 34. Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 89–93; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, “Richard Hofstadter: A Progress,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Elkins and McKittrick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 300, 309, 317–19. 35. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960), 121. 36. Yet, Daniel Bell, whose conﬁdence in the triumph of consensus and fear of subversion were more pronounced than in the case of Hofstadter, was more willing to acknowledge some degree of justiﬁable fear in McCarthy’s paranoia: “This is not to say that the Communist ‘interest’ is a legitimate one, akin to the interest of other groups in the society, or that the Communist issue was completely irrelevant [during the heyday of McCarthy]. As a conspiracy, rather than a legitimate dissenting group, the Communist movement remains a threat to democratic society.” But Bell’s essential faith in American consensus and political processes distinguishes his fears from those of McCarthy: he argues that such inﬁltration was an issue of law that should be taken up by courts and not private individuals, lest it becomes an ideological or moral issue and thus “create strains in a liberal society” (The End of Ideology, 123). 37. On Hofstadter’s role as a public intellectual who fought Goldwater’s candidacy, see Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 154–58; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 451–52. 38. Perhaps the strongest such equation between left and right among those who followed Hofstadter is James Hitchcock’s “The McCarthyism of the Left,” in Conspiracy, ed. Curry and Brown, 239–51. Hitchcock sees the New Left as a mirror image of McCarthy’s anticommunism, including its vision of a conspiratorial “system,” its labeling of innocents with terms such as “racist” (there is a strong similarity between Hitchcock’s criticism and the anti-“political correctness” diatribes of the 1990s), and its lack of proof and scholarship to support its claims. In light of the disclosures of CIA involvement in subversion of democratic movements abroad and the FBI’s involvement in domestic surveillance and treachery, this essay reads today like an odd and dated diatribe against the New Left in an otherwise even-tempered collection of essays. Hitchcock is willing to admit that “there could be” CIA involvement in domestic activities (just as there could have been a “Communist cadre in the State Department in 1952”), but for him that does not allow a hysteria that would destroy “the essence of principled liberalism” (251). 39. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790–1970 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 503.

300

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

40. Some have made this association between “paranoia” as a historical/social scientiﬁc concept and as a clinical term. The most recent effort, which views “political paranoia” as a social and historical phenomenon, is Robins and Post, Political Paranoia. Erich Wulff, by contrast, focuses on the paranoiac symptoms of the individual conspiracy theorist (Wulff, “Paranoiac Conspiratory Delusion,” in Changing Conception of Conspiracy Theory, ed. C. F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici [New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987], 172–89). Hofstadter’s historical approach describes the “paranoid style” as arising in diverse instances that share stylistic components and general generative mechanisms but retain their historical speciﬁcity. Robins and Post and Wulff, on the other hand, attempt to make a broader claim about conspiracy theory as both a social pathology that explodes in instances of mass paranoid behavior (as in the Stalin-era Soviet Union and Nazi Germany) and symptomatic of an individual’s inability to properly function within acceptable social and political discourses. 41. See Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in TwentiethCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chap. 7; Ross, No Respect, chap. 2; Thomas Hill Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 15–19. 42. Andrew Ross discusses this in great detail in No Respect. See esp. 42–43. 43. Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), 37. 44. Joli Jensen’s Redeeming Modernity (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990) provides a good overview of the association often made between “mass society” and the growth of the mass media by both Cold War–era and contemporary intellectuals. 45. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 53. 46. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24. 47. Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 48. In their recent book, Robins and Post assert a biological genesis for paranoia (it is “deeply rooted in the human condition,” they maintain, but arises differentially over time)—thus, “early expressions of the paranoid mobilization of hatred” can at least be watched and noted, with the hope that in so doing society can keep the “paranoid propensity” from “fester[ing].” Robins and Post, Political Paranoia, 303. 49. Serge Moscovici, a European social scientist, makes an argument similar to Hofstadter’s in describing conspiracy theory as a “mentality” based on individuals’ and groups’ fears and resentment against minority groups and outsiders. See Serge Moscovici, “The Conspiracy Mentality,” in Changing Conception of Conspiracy Theory, ed. Graumann and Moscovici, 151–69. 50. For a more obvious example of this mutual exclusion, see Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Sources of the ‘Radical Right,’” in The Radical Right, ed. Daniel Bell (New York: Anchor, 1963), 307–71, and esp. 308–15. 51. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy. 52. See David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1970), 193, 195; David Potter, “The Politics of Status,” New Leader, June 24, 1963, 26.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

|

301

53. It is no better as an approach, I would argue, when it is used to explain behavior by those in power, as Simon Clarke and Paul Hoggett do in their discussion of George W. Bush and post-9/11 America in “The Empire of Fear: The American Political Psyche and the Culture of Paranoia,” Psychodynamic Practice 10 (2004), 89–106. 54. John Higham, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus,’” Commentary 17 (February 1959): 93–100. 55. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 410–11. 56. Torben Bech Dyrberg, The Circular Structure of Power: Politics, Identity, Community (London: Verso, 1997), 202–4. 57. Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47 (1999) 2–16. 58. Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 59. Chip Berlet and Matthew W. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 13–15, 349–52. 60. See, for example, the unsigned editorial “‘JFK’: The Movie,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 1991, A10; and R. Emmett Tyrrell, “Stone’s ‘JFK’ Fuels Fantasies of Those without Minds,” Bloomington [Indiana] Herald-Times, January 4, 1992, A6. 61. Christopher Hayes, “9/11: The Roots of Paranoia,” The Nation, December 25, 2006; Michael Powell, “The Disbelievers: 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Are Building Their Case Against the Government From Ground Zero,” Washington Post, September 8, 2006, C1. 62. The “secret team” theory was developed and promoted by the Christic Institute during the 1970s and 1980s. See David Corn, “Is There Really a ‘Secret Team’?,” The Nation, July 2–9, 1988, 10–14. 63. Except for direct quotations, this section is a condensation of arguments that appear in Chip Berlet, Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchian, and Other NeoFascist Overtures to Progressives, and Why They Must Be Rejected (Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, February 22, 1994 [revised; original draft December 20, 1990]); Chip Berlet, “Friendly Fascists,” Progressive, June 1992, 16–20; Chip Berlet, “Big Stories, Spooky Sources,” Columbia Journalism Review 32, no. 1 (June 1993): 67–71; David Barsamian, “The Right Woos the Left: David Barsamian Interviews Chip Berlet,” Z Magazine, January 1992, 38–43; Michael Albert, “Conspiracy? . . . Not!” Z Magazine, January 1992, 17–19; Michael Albert, “Conspiracy? . . . Not Again,” Z Magazine, May 1992, 86–88; Erwin Knoll, “Anticonspiracism,” Progressive, August 1992, 4; Christopher Phelps, “Forget Conspiracy Theories; Reality’s Bad Enough,” Guardian (U.S.), February 12, 1992, 18; James Ridgeway, “It’s All One Big Conspiracy,” Village Voice, November 5, 1991, 19–20. Although I do not wish to equate all of the work of these activists/writers, their critique of conspiracy theory is generally quite similar and their shared assumptions are my focus here. 64. Berlet has continually updated Right Woos Left, including most recently in 1999 when he posted on the Political Research Associates website a corrected version. The current version can be found at http://www.publiceye.org/rightwoo/ rwooz9.html [last accessed August 30, 2007].

302

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

65. Berlet, “Friendly Fascists,” 26–27; Berlet, Right Woos Left. On LaRouche, see Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 66. Chip Berlet, “Post-9/11 Conspiracism,” http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/ conspiracism-911.html [last accessed August 30, 2007]. 67. Berlet, “Friendly Fascists,” 20. 68. Ironically, both Berlet and Z Magazine, the periodical that publishes regular columns by Albert and Chomsky, have been accused by at least one conspiracy theorist, the late Sherman Skolnick, of having ties to the CIA. To criticize conspiracy theory is to be a part of the conspiracy itself, whether as complicit lapdog or fullﬂedged member. 69. Albert, “Conspiracy? . . . Not!” 17. 70. Berlet, quoted in Barsamian, “The Right Woos the Left,” 43. 71. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 38. 72. Berlet, “Big Stories, Spooky Sources,” 67. 73. Noam Chomsky, “9-11: Institutional Analysis v. Conspiracy Theory,” http:// www.hopedance.org/cms/content/view/42/73/ [last accessed March 29, 2008]. 74. Berlet, Right Woos Left, 61. 75. Daniel Brandt, “An Incorrect Political Memoir,” Flatland 10 (1994): 58. 76. In his long-running column in the Nation, Alexander Cockburn has accused Berlet of serving as an apologist for the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith (ADL), which in 1993 was indicted for collecting and distributing illegally obtained information and running a private spy ring covertly associated with police departments that inﬁltrated and carried out surveillance on private, legal organizations opposed to or merely critical of Israel. Berlet, Cockburn alleged, had assumed the ADL’s “old trick of conﬂating anti-Zionism with antiSemitism,” and, during the reaction against the ADL following the disclosures of its intelligence operation, Berlet’s apologetic criticism “edge[d] any uncompromising criticism of the A.D.L. into the verboten zone of kookdom.” Ultimately, Cockburn asserted, Berlet has “made a career out of anathematizing the New Alliance Party and LaRouche, whose deeds are entirely insigniﬁcant beside the deeds of Israel.” Alexander Cockburn, “Cockburn Replies,” Nation, August 23, 1993, 223–24. 77. I have softened the criticism of Berlet’s work in the following paragraphs because his more recent writings have incorporated a less functionalist, more complex understanding of conspiracy theory. See, in particular, Berlet and Lyons, RightWing Populism in America. 78. Berlet, “Friendly Fascists,” 17. 79. Barsamian, “The Right Woos the Left,” 39. 80. Barsamian, “The Right Woos the Left,” 43. 81. The extent of Berlet’s analysis in this direction is his admission that conspiracy theories are “often attractive as explanations for the otherwise inexplicable, and are undeniably entertaining”; similarly, Albert compares their appeal, drama, and vividness to mystery novels, and warns that they “can become addictive.” This is a welcome admission of conspiracy theory’s cultural signiﬁcance, but is little more than a quick and simple explanation of their “seductive” powers. Berlet, “Friendly Fascists,” 18, and Albert, “Conspiracy? . . . Not!” 19.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

|

303

82. See, for example, Berlet’s literalist, rather patronizing take on The X-Files in “Facilitating Fanciful Fun, or Fueling Fear and Fascism?: Conspiracy Theories for Fun, Not for False Prophets,” at http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/x-ﬁles.html [last accessed March 27, 2008]. Here Berlet warns viewers to see the show as merely “an entertaining ﬁctional account full of suspense and mystery” rather than as a serious account of history or politics. In so doing, he offers a dualistic vision of spectatorship (one either knowingly suspends disbelief or believes) and suggests a simplistic model of the audience in which the people who believe are likely to be sucked into the fascist whirlwind of right-wing populism. 83. For an insightful critique of an overly simplistic approach to the analysis of extreme ideological expressions, see Eric Santer’s discussion of Freud’s homophobic reading of Daniel Paul Schreber’s famous autobiographical account of his own paranoia. Utilizing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the open secret constitutive of the “epistemology of the closet,” Santer’s project is in part to open an analytic space that Freud closed in “too quickly specifying the ideological content of the ‘closet’ before sufﬁciently analyzing the closet as form, as a place where such ideological meanings can be inscribed.” The closet, Santer argues, is “a site where the drive dimension of symbolic functioning becomes manifest,” and therefore where what he calls “the drive dimension of symbolic functioning” is especially visible (Eric L. Santer, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996], 44). 84. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan: The Movie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), esp. chap. 9, “American Political Demonology: A Retrospective.” 85. Under this term, Rogin also groups conspiracy theorists who perceive the threat of subversion to be real. This grouping makes a certain amount of sense— there are some parallels between the way leftist critics of political elites and conspiracy theorists view the political process—but it simpliﬁes the critical distinctions between conspiracy theory and a popular-democratic theory of power, or among different types of populism. I discuss populism further below, and in more detail at the end of chapter 2.

2. When the Senator Met the Commander 1. Steven M. Chermak, Searching for a Demon: The Media Construction of the Militia Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002). Some news reports explicitly or implicitly referred to Richard Hofstadter’s work. See, in particular, Malcolm Gladwell’s “news analysis” on the front page of the Washington Post, “At Root of Modern Militias: An American Legacy of Rebellion,” Washington Post, May 9, 1995, A1, A6, which cited Hofstadter’s work, and the headline in William Saﬁre’s column, “The Political Style,” New York Times, April 27, 1995, A25. 2. The subcommittee hearing was carried live on C-Span and rebroadcast numerous times in the days following. The transcript is available in U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information of the Committee on the Judiciary, The Militia Movement in the United States, 104th Congress, 1st session, June 15, 1995. Further references to this transcript appear in parentheses in the text.

304

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

3. Chip Berlet, “Hard Times on the Hard Right,” The Public Eye 16, no. 1 (spring 2002): 1–22. Membership in the militias, patriot groups, and other far-right–wing organization is notoriously difﬁcult to ascertain. During the period following the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, two separate reports came to completely contradictory conclusions about whether militia membership trended upward or downward. Compare John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1996) (militia membership dropped post–OKC bombing) with Southern Poverty Law Center, False Patriots: The Threat of Anti-Government Extremists (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center) (militia membership rose post–OKC bombing). Surveys by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) show a ﬂat or somewhat downward trend in “Patriot” organizations over the past few years, which follows a steep decline from the militia boom year of 1996, when the SPLC found 858 organizations (by 1997, that number had dropped to 523). “The Patriot Movement: Fewer, But Harder, Patriot Groups in 1997,” Intelligence Report (spring 1998), available at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/ article.jsp?aid=432. According to the SPLC, the number of Patriot groups fell from 158 in 2001 to 143 in 2002, rose to 171 in 2003, and fell again in 2004 (to 152) and 2006 (to 147). See “Active Patriot Groups in the United States: 2004,” [SPLC] Intelligence Report (spring 2005), available at http://www.splcenter.org/images/dynamic/intel/ report/31/patriot_groups_2004.pdf [last accessed March 28, 2008]; “Active Patriot Groups in the United States in the Year 2003,” [SPLC] Intelligence Report (spring 2004), available at http://www.splcenter.org/images/dynamic/intel/report/23/ ir113_patriot_groups.pdf [last accessed March 28, 2008]; “The Year in Hate 2002,” [SPLC] Intelligence Report (spring 2003), available at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/ intelreport/article.jsp?pid=64 [last accessed March 28, 2008]. The actual meaning of these ﬁgures is quite unclear, however. The surveys only count the number of active organizations, with no reference to their membership or the extent of their activity. The surveys also rely largely on news accounts, militias’ own publications and Web sites, law enforcement reports, and the SPLC’s own “ﬁeld reports” (about which it reveals nothing). Equally troubling is the fact that both the SPLC and militia groups have incentives to inﬂate these numbers—the SPLC in order to warn of the strength of “hate groups” in its fundraising appeals and the militias in order to claim the strength of their movement. In this regard, the Anti-Defamation League’s 2004 report “The Quiet Retooling of the Militia Movement” is an especially egregious example of empty fear-mongering. This ninepage document, of which only about ﬁve pages have actual text, offered anecdotes about individuals posting messages on the Internet in search of organizations or members for new organizations as proof that the movement was “retooling.” But there is no question that the population of active militia groups has dropped considerably over the past decade, and that the news media’s interest in the militias has plummeted as well. Chermak, Searching for a Demon, 68–73. 4. The literature on the militias has grown exponentially since the Oklahoma City bombing, and the sources I cite in this brief section constitute a small sample of the print media reporting. A word search of militia on a news database such as NEXIS of stories published during the mid-1990, would likely ﬁnd thousands of entries, most pitched at the level of a moral panic. Some of the best and most fascinating accounts are by local and regional reporters describing one or two militia groups or individuals in them, while national newspapers and newsweeklies that try

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

|

305

to synthesize local reports or emphasize particular ﬁgureheads often tend toward hyperbolic, fearful prognostications of imminent revolution—ironically, the very picture that the militias themselves wish to describe. The full-length books that have been published either for the ﬁrst time or in “revised and updated” editions after Oklahoma City provide a better overview. In particular, see David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), which includes a new chapter on the militias, culled largely from news reports; Jonathan Karl, The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America’s New Militias (New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1995), which is a quickie paperback by a New York Post reporter who is far more sympathetic to the militias and more willing to minimize the danger they pose than any of the other books listed here; Captain Robert L. Snow, Terrorists Among Us (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1999), a good summary of the movement and especially of law enforcement response and strategies to it, written by a local police ofﬁcer; and Kenneth Stern, A Force upon the Plains (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), which is discussed and critiqued in depth later in this chapter. Further references to this work appear in parentheses in the text. Good accounts by journalists of the violent hate groups active in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Klan and the Order, include James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right (New York: Noonday Press, 1987); Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood (New York: Free Press, 1989); and James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 2d ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995). 5. The best single article on this issue is Tod Ensign, “The Militia-Military Connection,” Covert Action Quarterly 53 (summer 1995): 13–16. 6. Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin, 2004), 348–49. 7. Bo Gritz is a former Green Beret who became well known years before the militia movement through his allegations not only that the United States intentionally left prisoners of war behind in Vietnam but also that the military did so in order to cover up massive illegal drug operations with which the CIA and parts of the military were involved. His role as a mediator in the negotiations between Randy Weaver and the FBI at Ruby Ridge further enhanced his position. His commercial and political projects have included SPIKE (Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events), a ten-part paramilitary training course, for which he travels the country instructing paying groups about lock picking, intelligence-gathering maneuvers, cryptography, weapons, and a general approach to self-sufﬁciency and self-rule; and Almost Heaven, a separatist “community” located adjacent to land owned by the Nez Percé tribe in Idaho County, Idaho. See Jonathan Mozzochi, “America under the Gun,” in Eyes Right!: Challenging the Right Wing Backlash,ed. Chip Berlet (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 236–40; Timothy Egan, “Idaho Community Built on Hatred and Fear,” New York Times, October 5, 1994, A1; Samuel S. Jackson, “On the Moderate Fringe,” Time Magazine, June 26, 1995, 56; and James Ridgeway, “Be All That You Can Be,” Village Voice, January 14, 1992, 21–22. Based in Indianapolis, Linda Thompson is best known for her two well-circulated videotapes (Waco: The Big Lie and Waco II: The Big Lie Continues) purporting to disprove federal law-enforcement agencies’ accounts of the siege

306

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

and destruction of the Branch Davidian compound. She gained even greater notoriety within militia circles with her call for an armed march on Washington by a national alliance of citizens’ militias in order to “take back” America from its treasonous federal government. The original “ultimatum” calling for the march has been reprinted in Adam Parfrey, Cult Rapture (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1995), 317–22; see also Thompson’s written statement “SEPT. 19 MILITIA ASSEMBLY CANCELED,” posted August 8, 1994, on her computer bulletin-board system in Indianapolis and circulated throughout the Internet. These two documents exemplify both the general framework of her conception of the grand conspiracy afﬂicting America and the pugnacious, macho posture she assumed against any and all who would challenge her authority as self-proclaimed “Acting Adjutant General of the Disorganized Militia of the U.S.A.” Full-length proﬁles of her include Jason Vest, “The Spooky World of Linda Thompson,” Washington Post, May 11, 1995, D1, D8, D9; and Adam Parfrey and Jim Redden, “Patriot Games,” Village Voice, October 11, 1994, 26–31 (revised and reprinted as “Linda Thompson’s War” in Parfrey, Cult Rapture, 298–316); and Maryanne Vollers, “The White Woman from Hell,” Esquire, July 1995, 50–52. 8. For an early interview with the Michigan Militia founders, see Robert Downes and George Foster, “On the Front Lines with Northern Michigan’s Militia,” Northern Express (Traverse City, MI), August 22, 1994 (reprinted in Don Hazen, Larry Smith, and Christine Triano, eds., Militias in America 1995 [San Francisco: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1995]). For a history of the Militia of Montana, see Marc Cooper, “Montana’s Mother of All Militias,” Nation, May 22, 1995, 714–21. 9. This microlevel of engagement was largely overlooked in media accounts of the movement, although the study of this level could produce the most interesting and helpful research. Examples of good reporting on local militias include Rebecca Shelton, “The New Minutemen,” Kansas City New Times, February 22, 1995 (reprinted in Hazen, Smith, and Triano, Militias in America 1995), on Missouri’s 51st Militia, which began in 1993 as a small group of friends concerned with crime, welfare, and schools in order to represent a “conservative silent majority,” and vows to be antiracist by kicking out any neo-Nazis and skinheads who try to join; Dale Russakoff, “Grass Roots Rage,” Washington Post, May 5, 1995, A1, on Meadsville, Pennsylvania, a town that did not have a militia in May 1995 but contained individuals who seemed ready to begin one; and Phil McCombs, “The Making of a Militiaman,” Washington Post, May 22, 1995, D1, about one man’s effort to form the Perry County (Pennsylvania) unit of the U.S. Militia Association. 10. See David Helvarg, “The Anti-Enviro Connection,” Nation, May 22, 1995, 722–24. In Washington State, one major conﬂict between environmentalists and loggers, ranchers, and property rights advocates linked to the Wise Use movement, led to a visit by MOM leader John Trochmann. See Kathie Durban, “Environmental Terrorism in Washington State,” Seattle Weekly, January 11, 1995 (reprinted in Hazen, Smith, and Triano, Militias in America 1995). See also Downes and Foster, “On the Front Lines with Northern Michigan’s Militia,” August 22, 1994. 11. On “freemen’s laws,” see James Ridgeway, “Freemen’s Law,” Village Voice, April 16, 1996, 22. For descriptions of common law courts, sovereign citizenship, and other attempts by Patriot individuals and groups to reconstitute law in oddball, obfuscatory, and subversive ways, see Richard Sine, “Right-Wing Dropouts,” (San Jose) Metro, March 14, 1996, 11–13: Hope Viner Sanborn, “Courting Trouble:

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

|

307

Emergence of Common Law Courts Raises Concerns among Critics,” ABA Journal (November 1995): 33; Thomas Heath and Connie Leslie, “A Law of Their Own,” Newsweek, September 25, 1995, 75; Michael Janofsky, “Home-Grown Courts Spring Up as Judicial Arm of the Far Right,” New York Times, April 17, 1996, A1; and Angie Cannon, “Rightists Now Using ‘Courts’ to Intimidate Public Ofﬁcials,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 24, 1996, A23. 12. Daniel Levitas, The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002). 13. The best single work on the history and complex religious beliefs of Christian Identity is Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which updates a work that was less than ﬁve years old in order to cover the Oklahoma City bombing and the increasing visibility of the militia movement. The book’s new epilogue makes more sweeping conclusions about the association and ideological connections between Christian Identity and the militia movement as a whole than I would. Although there clearly are some links between the religious racist right and militias, I do not think it empirically supportable given the decentralized, localized, and heterogeneous character of the recent upswing of far-right “grassroots” activity to equate or even associate all such groups, activities, or actors. A better, more nuanced take on anti-Semitism in the militia movement is Martin Durham, The Christian Right, the Far Right and the Boundaries of American Conservatism (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press: 2000), 135–38. 14. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between contemporary Protestant apocalyptic and conspiracy theory, see chapter 6. 15. James A. Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriots (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 13–20. Another, similar typology appears in John George and Laird Wilcox, American Extremists (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1996), 249. 16. See William F. Jasper, “More Pieces to the OKC Puzzle,” New American, June 24, 1996, 4–8; and William Norman Grigg, “Hard Left’s ‘Right-Wing’ Kin,” New American, June 24, 1996, 23–26. The latter article asserts that such “right-wing” terrorists have been inﬂuenced as much by Latin American Marxist guerrillas as by true right-wing ideas. 17. On the people who were joining the Michigan Militia in late 1994, see Beth Hawkins, “Patriot Games,” Detroit Metro Times, October 12, 1994 (reprinted in Hazen, Smith, and Triano, Militias in America 1995); and Keith Schneider, “Fearing a Conspiracy, Some Heed a Call to Arms,” New York Times, November 14, 1994, A1, A14. On the drop in membership after Oklahoma City, see Beth Hawkins, “Damage Control,” Detroit Metro Times, April 26, 1995 (reprinted in Hazen, Smith, and Triano, Militias in America 1995); and Marc Cooper, “Camouﬂage Days, E-mail Nights,” Nation, October 23, 1995, 464. As to links to the bomb suspects, Terry Nichols was from Michigan and had apparently attended some Michigan Militia meetings; Timothy McVeigh had supposedly traveled with Mark Koernke, nicknamed “Mark from Michigan,” who also had some ties to the militia. Koernke, best known for his shortwave radio show and widely circulated videotape America in Peril, became a prominent ﬁgure in the immediate aftermath of Oklahoma City, as rumors spread in the media and on the Internet that he either was involved with or knew beforehand of the bomb plot. A two-part, front-page Washington Post series

308

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

titled “Roots of Anger” attempted to track the lives of McVeigh and Nichols. On McVeigh, see Dale Russakoff and Serge Kovaleski, “An Ordinary Boy’s Extraordinary Rage,” Washington Post, July 2, 1995, A1, A20; on Nichols, see Serge Kovaleski, “In a Mirror, Nichols Is a Victim,” Washington Post, July 3, 1995, A1, A14. On Koernke, see Susan Schmidt and Tom Kenworthy, “MI Fringe Group’s Leader Has National Reputation,” Washington Post, April 25, 1995, A6. Allegations have also been made by the watchdog group Klanwatch of links between MM cofounder Ray Southwell and the Aryan Nations. See Hawkins, “Damage Control.” 18. James Ridgeway and Ivan Helfman, “A Militia of Another Color,” Village Voice, October 17, 1995, 22–23. 19. James Ridgeway, “The Posse Goes to Washington,” Village Voice, May 23, 1995, 17, 19. For a proﬁle on Chenoweth, see Sidney Blumenthal, “Her Own Private Idaho,” The New Yorker, July 10, 1995, 27–33; see also Nina Burleigh, “The Movement’s Sympathetic Ears in Washington,” Time, 8 May 1995, 66. 20. Marc Cooper, “The N.R.A. Takes Cover in the G.O.P.,” Nation, June 19, 1995, 877–82. 21. Roberta Garner, “50 Years of Social Movement Theory,” in Social Movement Theory and Research, an Annotated Bibliography (Magill Bibliographies: Salem Scarecros Press, 1997); Ralph H. Turner and Lews M. Killian, Collective Behavior, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1987). “Strain theory” emanated from the work of Neil Smelser and earlier work by Robert Merton, Hofstadter’s colleague at Columbia and an inﬂuence on the historian’s work. Robert Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological Review 3 (1938): 672–82; Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1963). 22. Doug McAdam, “Political Opportunities: Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, Future Directions,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, ed. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Mass Politics in the Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 23. Joel Dyer, Harvest of Rage (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Economy, Society, and Culture: Volume II, The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 24. Compare Dyer, Harvest of Rage, 112 (no correlation between the strain of lost jobs and farms and militia activity) with Nella van Dyke and Sarah A. Soule, “Structural Social Change and the Mobilizing Effect of Threat: Explaining Levels of Patriot and Militia Organizing in the United States,” Social Problems 49, no. 4 (November 2002): 497–520 (ﬁnding a correlation). 25. Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, “‘White Men Are This Nation’: RightWing Militias and the Restoration of American Masculinity,” Rural Sociology 65 (2000): 582; James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). 26. Joshua D. Freilich, American Militas: State-Level Variations in Military Activities (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2003), 109–10. 27. During his panel session, Olson called Specter “the single-bullet theorist” (U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information, The Militia Movement in the United States, 98).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

|

309

28. Daniel Levitas, “Militia Forum,” Nation, July 10, 1995, 42. An unofﬁcial hearing, held a month later by Congressman Charles Schumer (D-New York), was an attempt to bring such concerns and expertise to the attention of the public and Congress. For an account, see Serge Kovaleski, “Ofﬁcials at Forum Describe Alleged Militias’ Threats,” Washington Post, July 12 1995, A1. 29. From Justice Jackson’s dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 37 (1949): “[I]f the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” 30. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 222. 31. Holmes, dissenting in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919): “[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” The actual phrase “marketplace of ideas” is generally traced to an opinion by the liberal Justice William Brennan, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301, 308 (1965) (concurring). 32. Wayne LaPierre, National Riﬂe Association fund-raising letter dated April 13, 1995 (cited in Stern, A Force upon the Plains, 110). 33. The law ultimately passed Congress as Public Law 104–132, 104th Congress, 2d session (April 24, 1996), Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. 34. Criticisms of AEDPA in the law review literature include Mark Tushnet and Larry Yackel, “Symbolic Statutes and Real Laws: The Pathologies of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Prison Litigation Reform Act,” Duke Law Journal 47 (October 1997): 1–86; Jennifer A. Beall, “Are We Only Burning Witches? The AntiTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996’s Answer to Terrorism,” Indiana Law Journal 73 (spring 1998): 693–710. For examples of criticism of the bill throughout the stages leading to its passage, see James Ridgeway, “The Long Arm of the Law,” Village Voice, May 21, 1996, 32; Diana R. Gordon, “The Politics of AntiTerrorism,” Nation, May 22, 1995, 726–28; Robert Perkinson, “Oklahoma Fallout,” Z Magazine, August 1995, 8–11. 35. For an account of one example of the way the act has been used to deport immigrants based on secret evidence and to impose criminal and immigration sanctions on anyone who provides even humanitarian aid to a foreign organization labeled “terrorist” by the Department of State, see David Cole, “Blind Decisions Come to Court,” Nation, June 16, 1997, 21–22. 36. Mark Koernke, whose videotapes, shortwave radio broadcasts, and acquaintance with Timothy McVeigh made him one of the most infamous militia spokesmen, had been invited to speak but arrived in Washington only an hour before the hearing and sat in the front row behind the panelists (Karl, The Right to Bear Arms, 146–47). 37. For the debate concerning Trochmann’s alleged ties with the Aryan Nations, see Serge Kovaleski, “‘One World’ Conspiracies Prompt Montana Militia’s Call to Arms” Washington Post, April 29, 1994, A1, A13; Floyd Cochran, “OPINION: Racism Takes on a New Face,” Ravalli (Montana) Republic, August 25, 1994 (cited in Stern, A Force upon the Plains, 70); Daniel Voll, “At Home with M.O.M.,” Esquire, July 1995, 46–50. 38. Tony Ortega, “Afﬁrmative Reactionaries,” Phoenix New Times, March 29, 1996. 39. Indeed, the Viper Militia in Arizona, whose members were arrested in June 1996, reportedly named itself after the snake in this ﬂag. New reports have indicated,

310

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

however, that this group was shunned by the local militias operating in the same area. See Carol Morello and Gwen Florio, “Viper Militia Viliﬁed by Other Units,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 1996, A1. Furthermore, many of the Vipers participated in little more than paramilitary games, and conspiracy charges against half of the members were dismissed by the judge in their criminal trial. See J. William Gibson, “Paramilitary Culture after the Cold War,” in The Year 2000: Essays on the End, ed. Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 180–89. 40. For an excerpt of Bush’s speech, see Karl, The Right to Bear Arms, 77–78. 41. Indeed, the fanciful notion of “Don’t tread on me” being stamped on militia members’ foreheads does not seem especially “normal” but instead conjures up images of two groups with which Johnson might not wish to be associated: hippies painting peace symbols and slogans on their faces and neo-Nazi skinheads etching swastikas into the skin between their eyebrows. 42. Morris Dees (with James Corcoran), The Gathering Storm (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). (Further references to this work appear in parentheses in the text.) Dees and the SPLC’s fund-raising tactics and effectiveness in helping poor Southern minorities have been questioned over the past few years. For a summary of such allegations, see “The Myth of Morris Dees,” CounterPunch, May 15, 1996, 1–6, and “The Myth of Morris Dees: The Fall-out Continues,” CounterPunch, June 16, 1996, 3; Alexander Cockburn, “The Dees Money Machine,” The New York Press, January 15, 2001; Ken Silverstein, “The Church of Morris Dees,” November 2000, 54; Dan Morse, “Marketing the Militias,” Montgomery Advertiser, June 26, 1995. These articles include allegations that Dees has personally enriched himself through the auspices of the Center (the subhead of the ﬁrst article calls him “The Civil Rights Movement’s TV Evangelist”), that the SPLC ofﬁces are a hostile workplace for minorities and women, that Dees and the Center have tried to suppress potential criticism through pressure and smear campaigns, and that the Center takes on only a few famous cases for publicity’s sake, and in reality helps only a handful of people. 43. Chernak, Searching for a Demon, 91–95; Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 132–37. 44. HarperCollins, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Inc. empire, published The Gathering Storm; A Force upon the Plains was published by Simon & Schuster, a subsidiary of Time Warner. 45. Another book that makes the same argument in a more explicit and extended way is Thomas Halpern and Brian Levin, The Limits of Dissent: The Constitutional Status of Armed Civilian Militias (Amherst, MA: Aletheia, 1996). 46. Robin Wagner-Paciﬁci, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 143. On the assault on the Branch Davidians, see Stuart Wright, ed., Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conﬂict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Christopher Keep’s suggestive Deleuzian take on Waco, which asserts that the conﬂict in Waco was between the apocalyptic Davidian sect and militaristic federal law-enforcement agencies working under the doomsday regimes of Reagan/Bush (not to mention the early Clinton regime, which implemented the actual tragedy) (Christopher Keep, “An Absolute Acceleration: Apocalypticism and the War Machines of Waco,” in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995], 262–73), as well as James D. Faubion, “Dues Absconditus: Waco, Conspiracy

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

|

311

(Theory), Millennialism, and (the End of) the Twentieth Century,” in Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 375–404. 47. Robin Wager-Paciﬁci, Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 48. Stan Weeber and Daniel G. Rodeheaver, Militias in the New Millennium: A Test of Smelser’s Theory of Collective Behavior (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), 77; James E. Duffy and Alan C. Brantley, “Militias: Initiating Contact,” http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/1997/july975.htm [last accessed March 28, 2008]. 49. This fear is also shared by conservatives such as the historian John Lukacs, who views populism, when coupled with nationalism, as leading inevitably to totalitarian and fascist regimes (which he sees as fundamentally equivalent). Lukacs, Democracy and Populism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 50. Francisco Panizza, “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 1–31, 2–4. Recent historical and social scientiﬁc studies of conspiracy theories manifest this trend; see, for example, historian Robert Alan Goldberg’s survey, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), and the typological approach of Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 1–14. 51. The realist approach that Berlet and others take appears closer to both the historical and empirical categorization approach; Berlet’s co-authored book Right Wing Populism in America, for example, adopts sociological categories for understanding how populism works, and offers a book-length summary of various rightwing populist movements. Chip Berlet and Matthew W. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000). 52. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 18; Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1977), 167. 53. Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47 (1999): 2–16. 54. In the British cultural studies tradition, this linkage is called articulation; that is, the contingent, non-necessary connection between different practices, the tenuous (in the sense of nonpermanent) linkages between social practices that come together at a speciﬁc historical moment. The term plays on the double meaning of the word articulation, which refers not only to expression but also, in British usage, to a non-necessary connection in objects such as the “articulated lorry,” a severable connection that is made between a truck cab and a trailer. See Lawrence Grossberg, ed., “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (summer 1986): 45–60, 53–55. 55. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 73–74; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), 127–34. 56. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 192–93. 57. For a reading of George Wallace’s historical role in this development, see Joseph Lowndes, “From Founding Violence to Political Hegemony: The Conservative Populism of George Wallace,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Panizza, 144–71.

312

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

58. Benjamin Arditi, “Populism, or, Politics at the Edges of Democracy,” Contemporary Politics 9, no. 1 (2003): 17–31. 59. Panizza, Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, 14. 60. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 66–76; Chantal Mouffe, “The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Panizza, 50–71. 61. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3, 15. 62. Peter Worsley, “The Concept of Populism,” in Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (London: Macmillan, 1969), 212–59, 245. 63. Arditi, “Populism, or Politics at the Edges of Democracy,” 26. 64. Stuart Hall, “Authoritarian Populism: A Reply to Jessop et al.,” New Left Review 151 (May–June 1985): 118. See also Stuart Hall, “Popular-Democratic vs. Authoritarian Populism: Two Ways of ‘Taking Democracy Seriously,’” in Marxism and Democracy, ed. Alan Hunt (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980), 157–85; and Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal (London: Verso, 1988). 65. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 162. 66. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 249–55. 67. See Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); and John Higham, “Ideological Antisemitism in the Gilded Age,” in Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 68. See Arthur MacEwan, “Ask Dr. Dollar,” Dollars & Sense, Spring 2007, 38–39, for an excellent parsing of the differences between conspiracy theories surrounding the power of the Federal Reserve and incisive critiques of that power.

3. Finding the Plot 1. Michael Isikoff, “Conspiracy Theorists Find Foster Case Hard to Resist,” Washington Post, March 13, 1994, A10. 2. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 4. 3. On paranoia’s paradoxes, see Yehuda Fried and Joseph Agassi, Paranoia: A Study in Diagnosis (Boston: Dordrecht-Holland, 1976), 4–5. 4. Interestingly, this same difﬁcult process is central to the state’s attempt to persuade a jury of a defendant’s guilt in a criminal conspiracy: “[C]onspiracy is by nature a clandestine offense. It is improbable that the parties will enter into their illegal agreement openly; it is not necessary, in fact, that all the parties ever have direct contact with one another, or know one another’s identity, or even communicate verbally with their intention to agree. It is therefore unlikely that the prosecution will be able to prove the formation of the agreement by direct evidence, and the jury must usually infer its existence from the clear co-operation among the parties. But in their zeal to emphasize that the agreement need not be proved directly, the courts sometimes neglect to say that it need be proved at all” (“Developments— Conspiracy,” Harvard Law Review 72, no. 3 [1959]: 933–34).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

|

313

5. One potentially fruitful use of the term paranoia in this context is the concept in psychology of “healthy cultural paranoia,” described as “an adaptive mechanism for coping with a life that is plagued by prejudice and discrimination,” and speciﬁcally the obsessive fears of individual members of minority groups of persecution. To the extent that this term serves merely as a cover for labeling genuine instances of racism as pathology, however, it merely reproduces the limitations of Hofstadter’s more simplistic approach. See Christina E. Newhill, “The Role of Culture in the Development of Paranoid Symptomatology,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 60, no. 2 (April 1990): 177. 6. Greg Ferguson and David Bowermaster, “Whatever It Is, Bill Clinton Likely Did It,” U.S. News and World Report, August 8, 1994, 29–32. 7. Ferguson and Bowermaster, “Whatever It Is, 29–30. 8. Kenn Thomas, “Clinton Era Conspiracies!” Washington Post, January 16, 1994, C3. Thomas’s conspiracy ‘zine is called Steamshovel Press. 9. Tragedy and Hope is currently kept in print by a small publisher, Angriff Press, whose address is a Post Ofﬁce box in Hollywood. The book’s market seems to be maintained by far-right–wing and conspiracy-related mail-order companies. 10. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 950. 11. In fact, Clinton had identiﬁed Quigley’s role in his development during the week leading up to the Democratic convention. See David Maraniss, “Bill Clinton: Born to Run . . . and Run . . . and Run,” Washington Post, July 13, 1992, A1. 12. John Elvin, “Clinton a Bircher?” Washington Times, July 22, 1992, A6. 13. “Who Is Bill Clinton?” The Project 9, no. 3 (1992) (Ferndale, MI: A-albionic Research). 14. Philip Weiss, “Clinton Crazy,” New York Times Magazine, February 23, 1997, 36. 15. David S. Bennahum, “Techno-Paranoia in the White House,” New York Times, January 25, 1997, A23. 16. Citizens’ Video Press, The Clinton Chronicles (Winchester, CA: Citizens for Honest Government, 1994). Its production and reception are described in Weiss, “Clinton Crazy,” 40–41. On other videotapes and the circulation of materials on Foster by conservatives, see Susan Schmidt, “Two Years after Foster’s Death, Conspiracy Theories Thrive,” Washington Post, July 4, 1995, A1; and Ellen Joan Pollock, “Vince Foster’s Death Is a Lively Business for Conspiracy Buffs,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 1995, A1. 17. The Western Journalism Center (WJC) took out a series of full-page advertisements in national newspapers questioning whether Foster’s death was a suicide. See, for example, “A Special Report on the Vincent Foster Case,” advertisement printed in the Washington Times, March 14, 1994, A9; “Vincent Foster’s Death: WAS IT A SUICIDE?” advertisement printed in the Washington Post, November 16, 1994, A21. On Scaife, see Iver Peterson, “In a Battle of Newspapers, a Conservative Spends Liberally,” New York Times, December 8, 1997, D1; on Scaife’s role in supporting the allegations about Foster through the WJC and his own newspapers, see Trudy Lieberman, “The Vince Foster Factory and ‘Courage in Journalism,’” Columbia Journalism Review, March 13, 1996, 8; and Frank Rich, “Why Foster Lives,” New York Times, November 11, 1995, A13. 18. Thomas, “Clinton Era Conspiracies!” 19. Ferguson and Bowermaster, “Whatever It Is,” 30.

314

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

20. Peter Baker, “One Death Altered Path of Presidency,” Washington Post, July 20, 1998, A1. 21. Lacan distinguishes between “need,” akin to instinctual requirements for survival, demand, the articulating of need in language that at once demands a particular object and another to whom the demand is made, and desire, which he deﬁnes in Écrits as “neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the ﬁrst from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting” (Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 287). While necessarily a simpliﬁcation (Elizabeth Grosz, in Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction [London: Routledge, 1990], 58–81, provides a helpful discussion of the relationship between need, demand, desire, and the symbolic order in Lacan), the analogy that I make between the interpretive drive of the conspiracy theorist and Lacan’s notion of desire focuses on the former’s repetition and tendency to reproduce itself endlessly, its complex relationship to the seeming object of its desire, and its attempt to enter into the larger domain of the law and language of the Other. 22. Michael Berubé provides a useful discussion of interpretation in Pynchon’s work in Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 219–21. 23. Conspiracy theories frequently obsess over anomalous details that fail to ﬁt easily within an explanation, alleging that such anomalies are themselves evidence of conspiracy or at least the insufﬁciency of nonconspiratorial explanations—failing to recognize that no theory of the social and historical world can ﬁt all the available data, given data’s tendency to be false or anomalous. Brian L. Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” The Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (1999): 109–26, 120. But to presuppose that data is anomalous is to decide the crucial question before the data is even properly considered, insofar as any data’s apparent errancy can only be identiﬁed as such in relation to a theory that would explain the data’s irrelevance. A datum is relevant and telling only in context, and conspiracy theory, with its assumption that the framework of “conspiracy” explains all such data, challenges the prevailing context in which any evidence is understood. Steve Clarke, “Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32, no. 2 (2002): 131–50, 140. 24. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, the “drive’s aim is to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal” (Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991], 5). 25. “[T]he impeded desire converts into a desire for impediment; the unsatisﬁed desire converts into a desire for unsatisfaction; a desire to keep our desire ‘open’; the fact that we ‘don’t know what we really want’—what to desire—converts into a desire not to know, a desire for ignorance” (Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do [London: Verso, 1991], 143–44). 26. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 27. One exception to this is fundamentalist Protestant apocalyptic eschatology, in which the ﬁnal culmination of a conspiracy is expected and, somewhat problematically for some fundamentalists, desired. Of course, such an end is easier to predict and to desire than to represent in narrative form. See chapter 6. 28. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 91–92. 29. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 62.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

|

315

30. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 94–95. 31. In this sense, as Baudrillard notes, the details of “history” are marked by contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, “every event is granted its own liberation; every fact becomes atomic, nuclear, and pursues its trajectory in the void”—the detail is a particle that can ﬂow free from a larger mass. On the other hand, every detail “is no longer able to transcend itself, to envisage its own ﬁnality, to dream of its own end; it is being buried beneath its own immediate effect, worn out in special effects, imploding into current events.” The detail, in other words, is invigorating and stupefying, its meaning shorn by movement (the interpretive “freedom” of creative conspiracy theorizing) and its ultimate deceleration (within the paralyzing interpretive chain of conspiracy). Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–5. 32. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 62–63. 33. Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 97 (emphasis in original). 34. The Lacanian concept that this most resembles is known as the point de capiton, or quilting point. Once again, Žižek’s usage of the concept is most helpful in this context, as he describes anti-Semitic theories of a “Jewish plot” for control as “an inversion by means of which what is effectively an immanent, purely textual operation—the ‘quilting’ of the heterogeneous material into a uniﬁed ideological ﬁeld—is perceived and experienced as an unfathomable, transcendent, stable point of reference concealed behind the ﬂow of appearances and acting as its hidden cause” (Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 18). Similarly, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe employ the notion of “nodal points:” the “privileged signiﬁers” within a discourse that constitute “an attempt to dominate the ﬁeld of discursivity, to arrest the ﬂow of differences, to construct a centre,” and, ultimately, to “ﬁx the meaning of a signifying chain” (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [London: Verso, 1985], 112). 35. Conspiracy theory thus shares with a similarly masculinist domain of human knowledge, mathematics, this construction of a mastered cognitive rationality. See Valerie Walkerdine, The Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality (London: Routledge, 1988), 199–200. 36. Carl Freedman, “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” Science Fiction Studies 11 (1984): 15–24. Patrick O’Donnell’s argument that “cultural paranoia is a problem related to constructions of postmodern identity as symptomatic of late capitalism, its enjoyments and its discontents,” is similar (Patrick O’Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000], 13). Adorno, too, made an analogous argument with respect to mid-century American interest in astrology columns: “Thus people even of supposedly ‘normal’ mind are prepared to accept systems of delusions for the simple reason that it is too difﬁcult to distinguish such systems from the equally inexorable and equally opaque one under which they have to live out their lives.” Theodor Adorno, The Stars Came Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, Stephen Cook, ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 115. 37. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3.

316

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

38. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 356. 39. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 126. 40. C. W. Spinks, “Semiotic Shell Games: Foucault’s Pendulum and Conspiracy Theory,” Romance Languages Annual 3 (1991): 597. 41. Jonathan Vankin, “The Gemstone File and Me,” in The Gemstone File, ed. Jim Keith (Atlanta, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1992), 107. 42. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 81. 43. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 112. John Johnston has provocatively analyzed Pynchon’s novels as a semiotic regime of paranoia (“Toward the Schizo-Text: Paranoia as Semiotic Regime in The Crying of Lot 49,”in New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O’Donnell [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 47–78). 44. On Deleuzian notions of decoding and recoding and their relation to deterritorialization and reterritorialization, see Eugene Holland’s essays “Schizoanalysis and Baudelaire: Some Illustrations of Decoding at Work,” in Patton, Deleuze: A Critical Reader, 240–56; and “Schizoanalysis: The Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Grossberg and Nelson, 405–16. 45. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 113. 46. One similarity between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of productive desire and Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s notion of desire is the connections among capitalism, signiﬁcation, and desire. Žižek compares “the fundamental blockage which resolves and reproduces itself through frenetic activity” in the objet petit a with the similar processes of capital (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 52–53). 47. Opposed to psychoanalytic theory (Freudian as well as Lacanian), Deleuze and Guattari refuse to limit desire by assuming that the fantasized object of desire is produced in order to cover an unﬁllable or essential lack. They contrast their theory of desire with that of Lacan by discussing what they see as the two poles of the latter’s work on desire: the objet petit a as a desiring machine and not as the result of need or fantasy, and the “great Other” as signiﬁer, “which reintroduces a certain notion of lack” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 27). They praise the former pole as representing the part of Lacan’s work that describes the productive role of desire, while they dismiss the latter as demonstrating Lacan’s—and psychoanalysis’s—role as an agent of Oedipalization. See also Elizabeth Grosz’s comparison of Deleuze and Guattari and psychoanalytic theory in her attempt to articulate a feminist theory of the sexually speciﬁc body in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 164–73. 48. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 7. 49. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 165. 50. This is not to say that many such conspiracy theories do not germinate from the unethical and scandalous acts for which the Clinton presidency became notorious.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

|

317

51. Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). 52. Spinks, “Semiotic Shell Games,” 595. 53. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 2:643. 54. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 132. 55. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 59. 56. See Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, 156–60, for a discussion of “abduction” as kidnapping and analogy. 57. Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 47. 58. Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 50. 59. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, 24 (emphasis in original). 60. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 330–33. 61. Leonard C. Lewin, Report from Iron Mountain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 62. See, for example, Robert S. Boynton, “A Lefty Reunion,” The New Yorker, May 13, 1996, 36, 38; and Scott McLemee, “Irony Mountain,” [Village] Voice Literary Supplement, June 1996, 7. 63. Doreen Carvajal, “Onetime Political Satire, Adopted by the Right, Becomes Internet Copyright Arena,” New York Times, July 1, 1996, D7. 64. For examples of theorists who continue to be confused as to Iron Mountain’s history, see Philip Coppens, “Conspiracy Times: Report from Iron Mountain,” http://www.philipcoppens.com/ironmountain.html [last accessed March 29, 2008] (ﬁnding its view of the world adopted in current politics, even if the report was a hoax); Texe Marrs, “Exclusive Intelligence Examiner Report: The Report from Iron Mountain,” http://www.texemarrs.com/092001/report_from_iron_mountain .htm [last accessed March 29, 2008] (assuming the report to be a real historical document). This confusion even afﬂicts Jim Marrs, a prominent conspiracy theorist involved in the 9/11 truth movement. Marrs, The Terror Conspiracy (New York: The Disinformation Company, 2006), 369–70. 65. Francis X. Clines, “First Lady Attributes Inquiry to Right-Wing Conspiracy,” New York Times, January 28, 1998, A1. 66. “Excerpts From Interview with Mrs. Clinton on NBC,” New York Times, January 28, 1998, A22.

4. Uncovering the Plot 1. William Grimes, “What Debt Does Hollywood Owe to Truth?” New York Times, March 5, 1992, B1, B4. 2. John Leo, “Oliver Stone’s Paranoid Propaganda,” U.S. News and World Report, January 13, 1992, 18. See also the unsigned editorial “‘JFK’: The Movie,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 1991, A10, which strongly implies that Stone and Warner Brothers, which produced and distributed the ﬁlm, were deliberately playing on the

318

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

American public’s “hatred for the U.S. government and institutions”—the latter in order “to get Time Warner stock somewhere within shouting distance” of two hundred dollars a share to ward off a takeover attempt by Paramount. Apparently, some far-fetched theories are more acceptable than others. 3. Brent Staples, “Hollywood: History by Default,” New York Times, December 25, 1991, A30. Staples’s commentary appeared as an “Editorial Notebook,” a short, signed essay that appears under the general editorials and is written by members of the Times editorial board. Another essay that appeared just a week earlier, John P. MacKenzie’s “Oliver Stone’s Patsy” (New York Times, December 20, 1991, A14), made a similar argument that Stone had exceeded “even the questionable liberties [of presenting speculative theories as truth] enjoyed by television ‘docudrama.’” See also Kenneth Auchincloss, “Twisted History,” Newsweek, December 23, 1991, 46–49, which cites ﬁlm critic Leonard Maltin as a source for the argument that “young people” in the current “media age” are especially vulnerable to movies that can erase the “difference” between “facts” and “dramatic embellishments.” 4. David Denby, in his review of JFK in New York magazine, liked the ﬁlm precisely because “Stone the moral relativist gave way to Stone the Capraesque heroworshiper” (“Thrill of Fear,” New York, January 6, 1992, 50–51). 5. In George Marcus’s words, present conspiracy narratives offer a “revitalization of the romantic, the ability to tell an appealing, wondrous story found in the real.” George E. Marcus, “Introduction: The Paranoid Style Now,” in Paranoia Within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, ed. George E. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–11, 5. 6. A. M. Rosenthal, “Movies, Drugs, Election,” New York Times, September 11, 1992, A15, and “America the Terrorist,” New York Times, March 30, 1993, A15. 7. For example, during the adaptation of John Grisham’s best-selling novel The Firm to ﬁlm, screenwriters Sydney Pollack and David Rayﬁel “toyed with introducing a BCCI [Bank of Commerce and Credit International]-inspired cabal of international bankers.” Interestingly, Rayﬁel had written the screenplay for the 1970s conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor (Greg Kilday, “A Film So Nice They Rewrote It Twice,” Entertainment Weekly, July 23, 1993, 36–37). 8. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 82. 9. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 34–35. 10. Ed Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 11. This chapter is indebted to models of scholarship on postwar American culture that both discern dominant attempts to frame or contain social narratives about the Rosenbergs and nuclear war and describe the ways in which such narratives are continually challenged by competing attempts to reframe history and the social. See Virginia Carmichael, Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 12. I am borrowing the term “classical” from David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s notion of the “classical Hollywood narrative,” a relatively uniﬁed system of production, causality, realism, visual and aural style, time, space, shot, and sequence on which most mainstream, commercial American cinematic

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

|

319

storytelling has been based since 1917. Although the “classical style” enabled some variance in speciﬁc genres (such as ﬁlm noir) and individual auteurs (such as Alfred Hitchcock), and has existed alongside alternative modes of craft-oriented experimental ﬁlm production, it has organized the production and reception of American (and most European) commercial ﬁlm. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Similarly, the formulas of popular literary genres have long been organized through their commercial mode of production, marketing strategies, underlying narrative structures, and recurring types of characters and themes. The best-known general work on popular literary formulas is John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). A work that is more focused on a conspiracyrelated genre and more inﬂuential on the present work is Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 13. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 12. 14. Millicent Manglis, “Paranoid Fictions: Psychoanalysis and Politics in Cold War Hollywood Cinema,” unpublished paper, 1993. As George Wead has argued (using the term “paranoia” instead of conspiracy): “Paranoia is interesting as an esthetic device . . . [because] it ﬁts precisely nowhere. It overlaps the customary boundaries. And yet it is something we recognize as having a structural unity” (“Toward a Deﬁnition of Filmnoia,” Velvet Light Trap 13 [1974]): 2). See also Paul Jensen, “The Return of Dr. Caligari: Paranoia in Hollywood,” Film Comment (winter 1971): 36–45. 15. Hans Zukier provides a psychoanalytic analysis of the conspiracy narrative’s internal logic, likening its efﬁcacy to that of the analysand’s interpretation of past events and psychoanalytic therapy’s attempt to provide a narrative of past events whose rhetorical appeal and plausibility for the patient prove therapeutic. See Hans Zukier, “The Conspiratorial Imperative: Medieval Jewry in Western Europe,” in Changing Conception of Conspiracy Theory, ed. C. F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 87–103, 91–92. 16. Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 19, 48–50. In describing Robert Ludlum’s novels, John Frow refers to the thriller’s “formal solution of how to write a novel: it delivers certain resources of story and plot construction, a repertoire of topoi, a ready-made thematics of conspiracy and paranoia, and so on” (John Frow, Marxism and Literary History [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986], 146). 17. Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 137–39. 18. Michel de Certeau, “Making History,” in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 43. 19. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 70–73. 20. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 286–87. 21. Ernest Keen has analyzed the personal narratives of clinical paranoids in similar ways. See Ernest Keen, “Paranoia and Cataclysmic Narratives,” in Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct, ed. Theodore R. Sarbin (New York: Praeger, 1986), 174–90.

320

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

22. Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” 130. 23. On the James Bond novels, see Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London: Methuen, 1987); on the “New War” texts, see James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). 24. For Timothy Melley, conspiracy theory’s fetish of individual interpretation and cognition cannot rescue the concept of individual agency that it hopes to defend from the historical forces that threaten it—the large-scale private and public bureaucracies and mass communications networks that appear to exercise signiﬁcant degree of social control over the individual. The resulting “agency panic” that individuals experience create “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy or self-control—the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful external agents.” Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 12. 25. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 33–34. Timothy Melley makes a related point when he argues that the very agency that the individual feels she has lost (as a result of the “agency panic” that postmodernity engenders) now emerges, via what he calls a “postmodern transference,” in the intentional work of a conspiratorial individual or powerful collective will. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, 13. 26. As Michael Rogin has written on the ﬁlm’s obsessive fear of gays, “Homosexual contagion is at once source and result of the killing, making the spread of alternative sexualities one more disaster for which Kennedy’s death is to blame” (Michael Rogin, “JFK: The Movie,” American Historical Review 97, no. 2 [April 1992]: 505). 27. The conspiracy’s challenge to the neat bourgeois divisions in Garrison’s life is an element of the more general threat that conspiracy represents. Victoria Pagán has similarly found “boundary violations” that preoccupy ancient Roman conspiracy narratives; conspiracy involves, and frequently requires, breaching divisions and borders between public and private and among gender, race, and class as it seeks to control the entirety or some integral part of the world. The conspiracy is thus doubly guilty. Not only does it threaten the political order, it also threatens the social order of things by involving and manipulating the division upon which society is built. Victoria Emma Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 124–25. 28. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner make this point with regard to the liberal pessimism of 1970s “paranoid” thrillers such as The Parallax View, Executive Action, and All the President’s Men. They argue further that the sole solution these ﬁlms propose—liberal reform—proved a failed one, and the crisis of legitimacy that Hollywood ﬁlms of the 1970s articulated was harnessed by the New Right in its project of dismantling New Deal social programs and governmental regulation. See Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 95–105. 29. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 353. 30. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 3.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

|

321

31. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” 356; Denning, Cover Stories, 152. 32. For Caruana’s full account of her authorship and her relationship with Roberts, see her recent memoir, The Gemstone File: A Memoir (Victoria, B.C., Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2006). Secondary sources include an annotated version of the Key itself, see Jim Keith, ed., The Gemstone File (Atlanta, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1992), as well as the far less skeptical account in Gerald A. Carroll’s Project Seek: Onassis, Kennedy and the Gemstone Thesis (Carson City, NV: Bridger House Publishers, 1994), which includes a quasi-liturgical parsing of the document. The summary of the Gemstone File and the Skeleton Key’s history that follows comes from these sources. 33. Brussell is proﬁled in a chapter titled “There Is No Word for Rational Fear” in Jonathan Vankin’s Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 86–101. 34. The ﬁle’s provenance is complicated, as Caruana’s explanation in her memoirs makes plain. Although Caruana had a ﬁle of correspondence, Mae Brussell’s ﬁle was more complete. But Brussell and Caruana, who had been collaborators, had a falling out and Brussell left copies of her ﬁle at her death with others. Caruana was ﬁnally able to purchase one of those sets of copies from the bookseller who had purchased one of Brussell’s copies. Caruana, Memoir, 14–20. 35. Jim Keith, “Interview with Stephanie Caruana,” in Keith, The Gemstone File, 46. 36. From the January 1972 entry of “A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File,” in Keith, The Gemstone File, 26. 37. “A Skeleton Key,” 6. 38. “A Skeleton Key,” 7. 39. “A Skeleton Key,” 30. 40. Keith, “An Interview with Stephanie Caruana,” 43. 41. Caruana’s recent memoir offers signiﬁcant historical details about Roberts’s life as well as her own, and includes copies (largely illegible) of original pages from the File, but reproduces the same Key that she had circulated decades before, albeit with some more recent annotations. Caruana, The Gemstone File: A Memoir. 42. Caruana, The Gemstone File: A Memoir, 22. 43. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 37. 44. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 87–88. Another, equally important, relationship deﬁning narrative speed is between what Seymour Chatman has confusingly called “discoursetime,” “the time it takes to peruse the discourse,” and “story-time,” which is similar to what Genette calls “duration.” In media in which different “readers” or audience members can move at their own pace, as with print and as opposed to ﬁlm and television (notwithstanding the ability to fast-forward videotapes), the act of reading through particular parts more quickly and slowly will clearly affect the “speed” of the narrative. See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 62–63. 45. I use the term “trajectory” and the metaphor of plotting points within a larger system that is at once chaotic and, at a larger level, ordered to suggest not only Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping” but also the fascinating connections made between narrative theory and chaos theory in Kenneth J. Knoespel’s essay “The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order,” in Chaos and Order, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 100–122.

322

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

46. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzatti (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), 133–36. 47. A. J. Greimas and Joseph Courtès, “The Cognitive Dimension of Narrative Discourse,” New Literary History 7 (1976): 433–47. 48. Greimas and Courtès, “The Cognitive Dimension of Narrative Discourse,” 439. 49. Greimas and Courtès, “The Cognitive Dimension of Narrative Discourse,” 440–42. Michael Denning uses Greimas’s distinction between the “cognitive” and the “pragmatic” in his analysis of the British spy novel, arguing that the spy novel foregrounds the former with its emphasis on information and the uncovering of secrets over physical actions (Denning, Cover Stories, 135–36). 50. Gary Crowdus, “Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview with Oliver Stone,” Cineaste 19, no. 1 (May 1992): 26–27. 51. In an odd and ironic moment in the annotated screenplay, we learn that one of the names that Ferrie rattles off in this scene, Jack Youngblood, is “ﬁctitious”— that is, unlike those characters in the ﬁlm who are composites of “real” witnesses (such as Willie O’Keefe, the gay prostitute whom Garrison interviews in prison), this name has no relationship whatsoever to the “real.” In this conspiracy ﬁlm, even the most paranoid character has paranoid fantasies. See Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause Books, 1992), 91. 52. The annotated screenplay, however, does attempt to support most of Ferrie’s assertions. See Sklar, JFK, 90–94. 53. Art Simon, Dangerous Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 216. 54. Janet Staiger has argued that JFK’s attempt to articulate an authoritative representation is largely recognized as such by contemporary viewers, who themselves recognize that “the movie is a subjective version of the past, created through shots put together by some agent.” Therefore, she contends, it constitutes part of the larger struggle to produce a satisfying narrative resolution to the tragedy of the assassination. Extending Staiger’s argument, one could assert that the ﬁlm’s ultimate incoherence could simply be a triumphant representation of the inability to resolve the historical argument—though I doubt that that was Stone’s intent. See Janet Staiger, “Cinematic Shots: The Narration of Violence,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 52–53. 55. For a brief historical account of theoretical discussions of closure in narrative theory, see Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 83–88. Martin argues that an “open” narrative form with no, or at least an ambiguous, closure dates back at least to the nineteenth-century novel. Further, he argues against polemical attempts by those such as J. Hillis Miller (in, for example, “The Problematic of Ending in Narrative,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 [1978]: 3–7) who claim that resolution is impossible. Martin writes: “Even if a philosopher succeeded in convincing the world that all talk and thought of beginnings and ends is a delusion, the source of the delusion, its universality, and its mode of operation would remain to be explained” (86). 56. A. Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History (Tucson, AZ: Publius Press, 1985), 8 (emphasis in original). 57. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 58. Barthes makes a similar observation: “[T]he problem is to maintain the enigma in the initial void of its answer; whereas the

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

|

323

sentences quicken the story’s ‘unfolding’ and cannot help but move the story along, the hermeneutic code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations) in the ﬂow of the discourse; its structure is essentially reactive, since it opposes the ineluctable advance of language with an organized set of stoppages.” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 75. 58. Conspiracy Theory was directed by Richard Donner and written by Brian Helgeland. 59. Series creator Chris Carter has said about the show’s use of strange items culled from news stories: “If there’s anything current or topical, I try to use it as an element inside of a bigger story” (“Episode Guide: The Erlenmeyer Flask,” Cinefantastique [October 1995]: 58). On the show’s use of conspiracy theories and especially UFO sources: “I’m taking what is in the current UFO literature about Roswell and MJ-12 [allegedly a secret committee of military, intelligence, and academic elites that controls the “truth” about alien contact]—these are all things I didn’t make up—and letting the X-Files explain it further” (quoted in Paula Vitaris, “Filming the Fox Show That Has Become a Horror and Science Fiction Sensation,” Cinefantastique [October 1995]: 78). See also Tim Appelo, “X Appeal,” Entertainment Weekly, March 19, 1994, 58, 61, for Carter’s discussion of the “real-life” inspiration for series episodes. 60. Brian Lowry, The Truth Is Out There: The Ofﬁcial Guide to the X-Files (New York: HarperPrism, 1995), 2. 61. “Anasazi,” written by Chris Carter with a story by Carter and David Duchovny, directed by R. W. Goodwin, originally aired on May 19, 1995. 62. Dana Kennedy, “The X-Files Exposed,” Entertainment Weekly, March 10, 1995, 20. 63. “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” written by series creator and executive producer Chris Carter, directed by coexecutive producer R. W. Goodwin, was originally broadcast on May 13, 1994. 64. “Fallen Angel,” written by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, directed by Larry Shaw, originally aired on November 19, 1993. 65. First implied in “The Host,” written by Chris Carter, directed by Daniel Sackheim, and originally aired on 23 September 1994, X initially appears on screen in “Sleepless,” written by Howard Gordon and directed by Rob Bowman, originally aired on October 7, 1994. 66. Original novels based on the series and “novelizations” of episodes are published by imprints of HarperCollins, News Corporation’s book division. Songs in the Key of X (Warner Brothers, 1996) is a compilation of songs “inspired” by the series. The ofﬁcial magazine, comic book, and trading cards of the X-Files are published by the Topps company. “Ofﬁcial” X-Files conventions have been held throughout the country. One held in San Francisco in February 1996 (convened at the Nob Hill Masonic Center—ironic, given the position that Masons hold in many conspiracy theories) included numerous compendiums of clips from the series, trivia contests, an “ofﬁcial” prop gallery, a “blooper” reel, and appearances by some of the actors who portray relatively marginal recurring characters and by series creator Chris Carter. Other than the personal appearances, crowds were most interested in the merchandise booths, which were well stocked with photos, posters, and T-shirts. 67. “The Truth,” written by Chris Carter, directed by Kim Manners, originally aired May 19, 2002.

324

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

68. As of July 2007, a second X-Files movie was being planned for a Summer 2008 release, to be directed by series creator Chris Carter (based on a script he was co-writing), and with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson “on board” to return as Mulder and Scully. Kimberly Nordyke, “TCA: 2nd ‘X-Files’ pic is close,” Hollywood Reporter (posted July 16, 2007), http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ hr/content_display/television/news/e3ic7afa8afcc16ac33df4034d718276179 [last accessed March 29, 2008]. 69. Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988); Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America (1991), written and directed by Craig Baldwin; Richard Condon, Winter Kills (New York: Dial, 1974); its ﬁlm adaptation (1979) was written and directed by William Richert. The story behind the adaptation’s production and subsequent withdrawal from release is ﬁlled with intrigue; see Richard Condon, “Who Killed Winter Kills?” Harpers (May 1983): 73–80. Other Condon political conspiracy novels (as opposed to organized crime novels based on the Prizzi family—though I recognize that this distinction makes little sense) of note include, most obviously, The Manchurian Candidate (New York: New American Library, 1959) on mind control and anticommunism, and Death of a Politician (New York: Ballantine, 1978) on Nixon. The Parallax View was directed by Alan J. Pakula. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner criticize the ﬁlm for its refusal to make its protagonist, Joe Frady (played by Warren Beatty), into a sympathetic hero, for its curiously detached affect, and for its depressing resolution that leaves Frady dead and the Parallax Corporation of private assassins victorious (Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica, 98–101). By contrast, see Jameson’s attempt to read The Parallax View’s doubling of hero and conspiracy and the ﬁlm’s cynical, ironic detachment from Frady’s investigation of and resistance to the Parallax Corporation as an allegory of postmodernity (Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 55–66). 70. Maria Nadotti, “An Interview with Don DeLillo,” Salmagundi (fall 1993): 94. 71. John A. McClure, “Postmodern Romance: Don DeLillo and the Age of Conspiracy,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 2 (spring 1990): 353. 72. Craig Baldwin, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America (New York: Ediciones La Calavera, 1991). 73. Frow, Marxism and Literary History, 146–47. 74. Dana Polan describes the duality of narrative structure in American cinema of the 1940s: “Power here is the power of a narrative system especially—the power that narrative structure speciﬁcally possesses to write an image of life as coherent, teleological, univocal; narrative, then, is a power to convert contingency into human meaning. Paranoia here will ﬁrst be the fear of narrative, and the particular social representations it works to uphold, against all that threatens the unity of its logical framework” (Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 12). 75. Patrick O’Donnell, “Engendering Paranoia in Contemporary Narrative,” Boundary 2 19, no. 1 (1992): 204.

5. Plotting the Rush 1. Deluxe edition (Austin, TX: Steve Jackson Games, 1991). 2. Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2004), 115.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

|

325

3. Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes (New York: Paragon House, 1991). 4. Adam Parfrey, ed., Apocalypse Culture (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1990), back cover. 5. Parfrey, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Apocalypse Culture, ed. Parfrey, 8. 6. Jonathan Vankin, “The Gemstone File and Me,” in The Gemstone File, ed. Jim Keith (Atlanta, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1992), 107. 7. Ray Allen Billington, Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study in the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 8–9, 12–13; Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 19–23. 8. Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 80–83; Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 13–15; Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 178. 9. Goldberg, Enemies Within, 41–51. 10. On the rise of the conspiracy fanzine and independent publishing industries, see Claire Birchall, “Conspiracy Theories and Academic Discourses: The Necessary Possibility of Popular (Over)interpretation,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 67–76, 68–70. 11. Chapter 7 discusses 9/11–focused Web sites in depth. Examples of general conspiracy sites include the somewhat tongue-in-cheek www.disinfo.com [last accessed August 31, 2007] and the more serious http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/ (focusing on the Illuminati) [last accessed August 31, 2007] and http:// www.theinsider.org (focusing on the New World Order) [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 12. http://www.shout.net/~bigred/Links.htm [last accessed August 31, 2007); www.conspiracyplanet.com [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 13. http://www.thenewamerican.com/; www.larouchpub.com; http://a-albionic. com/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 14. www.davidicke.com [last accessed August 31, 2007]; http://www.aci.net/ kalliste/homepage.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 15. This statement appears at the top of all e-mails CTRL sends out. For an archive of its messages and information about subscriptions, see http:// www.mail-archive.com/ctrl&at;listserv.aol.com/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]. During the 1990s, a list called Conspiracy Nation (originally called Conspiracy of the Day) circulated approximately one message per day, sent by Redman to subscribers. It continues to exist on the Web at http://www.shout.net/~bigred/ cn.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 16. Examples include the Web site for Paranoia Magazine, http:// www.paranoiamagazine.com/ [last accessed August 31, 2007], and the British journal Lobster, http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]; Steamshovel Press, which has stopped print publication, has retained its Web presence at http://www.steamshovelpress.com/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 17. Descriptions of Conspiracycons include Skylaire Alfvegren, “The Latest Word: 1st Annual Conspiracy Con,” Steamshovelpress.com, available at http://web.archive. org/web/20030402095316/http://www.steamshovelpress.com/latestword8.html [last

326

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

accessed August 31, 2007]; Gary Singh, “One Big Conspiracy,” Metro (Silicon Valley, CA), May 25, 2005, http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.25.05/ alleys-0521.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 18. For example, when Oliver Stone made a surprise cameo appearance at the Second Annual Midwest Symposium on Assassination Politics, held in Chicago in April 1992, he was met with a rush of reverent attendees seeking to get his autograph and to talk with him about the recently released JFK. Yet, as had been clear throughout the proceedings whenever JFK or Stone’s name had been mentioned, many of those at the conference also resented the fact that the mainstream media and much of the general public seemed to assume that he represented the cause and theories of Warren Commission critics. Some were particularly disturbed at what they saw as his ﬁlm’s wild and speculative presentation of the evidence and events surrounding the assassination, as well as his virtual canonization of the problematic ﬁgure of Jim Garrison. 19. Assassination Review Board, Final Report of the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (1998), 7, available at http:// www.archives.gov/research/jfk/ review-board/report [last accessed August 31, 2007]. The “JFK Act” was passed as Public Law No. 102-526, § 2(a), 106 Stat. 3443 (1992), and codiﬁed as a note to 47 U.S.C. § 2107 (2000). 20. On the transformation of social movements that exist outside of the mainstream as challengers into those that have gained “acceptance” and reap certain advantages, including signiﬁcant concessions from the state, see Clarence Y. H. Lo, “Communities of Challengers in Social Movement Theory,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 224–47, 230. 21. This is not to suggest equivalence between the academic and conspiracy communities. Conspiracy theorists frequently cling incessantly to their understanding of the past and predictions of the future, modifying and protecting their theories to meet the challenge of new evidence, and they refuse to reconsider their hypotheses and theories in the way that careful research programs do. Steve Clarke, “Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorizing,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32, no. 2 (2002): 131–50, 136. 22. For more on the concept of “collective identity” as a shared status built on an “individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution,” see Francesca Polleta and James M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 283–305, 285. 23. Stan Weeber and Daniel G. Rodeheaver, Militias in the New Millennium: A Test of Smelser’s Theory of Collective Behavior (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), 58–59. 24. Robert Anton Wilson, with Robert Shea, Illuminatus! (New York: Dell, 1975). Further references to this trilogy appear in parentheses in the text and are based on the 1988 Dell edition, which collected the three novels in one trade paperback. 25. Two USENET news groups, alt.illuminati and alt.discordia, are forums for Wilson fans and Discordians, and the trilogy receives prominent mention in the New Hacker’s Dictionary. Jargon File, http://www.ccil.org/jargon/ (posted July 25, 1996) [last accessed September 1, 2007]. 26. The 1991 editions of all three novels were published by Roc (New York). Three collections of nonﬁction essays and aphorisms are Cosmic Trigger: The Final

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

|

327

Secret of the Illuminati (New York: Pocket, 1977); Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (Scottsdale, AZ: New Falcon, 1991); and The Illuminati Papers (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1990). 27. Neal Wilgus’s The Illuminoids (Santa Fe, NM: Sun Books, 1978) serves as a quasi-historical companion to Illuminatus!, providing similarly bemused descriptions of the “real” history of secret societies and political paranoia. 28. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, 148; The Illuminati Papers, 19. Both Einstein and James Joyce appear as central characters in Wilson’s novel Masks of the Illuminati (New York: Timescape/Pocket Books, 1981), in which they act as scientiﬁc and literary interpreters of a convoluted story of conspiracy and manipulation. 29. Wilson, The Illuminati Papers, 2. 30. That is, one of the John Dillinger quintuplets, all of whom survived the shooting of a different man in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago. 31. “Malaclypse the Younger” (Kerry Thornley), Principia Discordia (Avondale Estates, GA: IllumiNet Press, 1991), 00074 [sic]. On the relationship between Illuminatus! and Principia Discordia, see Principia, vi–x. 32. Collected in Wilson, The Illuminati Papers, 114–15. 33. National Insecurity Council (Michael Litchﬁeld), It’s a Conspiracy! (Berkeley: EarthWorks Press, 1992). 34. Cameron Tuttle, The Paranoid’s Pocket Guide (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997), provides a similar tongue-in-cheek gloss on everyday life, describing such sources of worry as the Illuminati, government wiretapping, the perils of “sex and dating,” and plane travel. Compact, handy, poking fun at the ISBN and UPC code on its own back cover (the phrase “I am not a number” sits proudly next to both), and well merchandised (in its ﬁrst months of publications it was being placed right by the cash register in some bookstores), the book seems destined for bathroom reading in thousands of homes across America. In it, conspiracy theory is merely part of a “guide” that warns its reader to carry it “at all times, since you never know when you’ll get stuck in trafﬁc or trapped in an elevator. . . . And remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that someone isn’t out to get you” (7). 35. “Turn Left: Make Your Own Conspiracy Theory,” http://www.cjnetworks. com/~cubsfan/conspiracy.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. A very humorous and clever site that existed during the 1990s tracked different conspiracies as though they were competing teams in a sports league, tracking recent news events to see which conspiracy team currently “leads” the “National Conspiracy League.” Interestingly, this site served as an ironic counterpart to the site noted in chapter 6 that quite seriously tracks current events to estimate the proximity of the rapture. 36. Dave Itzkoff, “For One Smart Aleck, It Was This or Dentistry School,” New York Times, April 23, 2006. As of mid-2007, the cartoon is widely available on the Internet via YouTube and Google Video. 37. For a full description of the FBI raid, see Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (New York: Bantam, 1992), esp. 133–39. 38. A short-lived but critically acclaimed computer game named Majestic also utilized conspiracy theories (speciﬁcally, ufological theories). See Janelle Brown, “Paranoia for Fun and Proﬁt,” Salon.com, http://archive.salon.com/tech/ feature/2001/08/10/majestic/index.html [last accessed April 8, 2008]; David Kushner, “So What, Exactly, Do Online Gamers Want?,” New York Times, March 7, 2002. 39. Wilson, The Illuminati Papers, 20.

328

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

40. “Illuminati Game Rules Booklet” (Austin, TX: Steve Jackson Games, 1991). A new “collectible card game,” called “Illuminati: New World Order,” was produced in December 1994, with a very similar premise and somewhat altered rules. See Brett Brooks, “It’s Time to Take Over the World Again,” Game Shop News 34 (October 21, 1994): 1. 41. Although the majority of games are played in person and at one time, some games of Illuminati are conducted through the mail and over electronic mail. 42. Flying Buffalo, a company based in Scottsdale, Arizona, offers a “play by mail” service for Illuminati players. For a description, see Flying Buffalo, “Illuminati,” http://www.ﬂyingbuffalo.com/illumin.htm [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 43. Nigel D. Findley, GURPS Illuminati (Austin, TX: Steve Jackson Games, 1992). Parenthetical page references in the text refer to this book. 44. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5. 45. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33 (emphasis in original). 46. François Roustang, “How Do You Make a Paranoiac Laugh?” Modern Language Notes 102, no. 4 (1987): 707–18, 711. 47. Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light (London: Routledge, 1988), 243. 48. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 49. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 19. 50. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 20, 25. 51. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 202. 52. Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997), 2–8. 53. The seminal text outlining these allegations is Gary Sick, October Surprise (New York: Times Books, 1991). 54. For a full account of the Hamiltons’ charges and the intricacies of the Inslaw case, see James Ridgeway, “I Hate Meeses to Pieces,” Village Voice, September 22, 1992, 19–20. 55. David Dastych, “Promisgate: World’s Longest Spy Scandal Still Glossed Over,” Canada Free Press, http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/dastych013106. htm (posted January 31, 2006) [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 56. Jerry Seper, “Senate Panel Plans Probe of FBI’s Internal Security,” Washington Times, June 15, 2001, A1. These allegations were repeated nearly a year later in a column by right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin, “Who is Janis Sposato?,” townhall. com, http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2002/03/20/who_is_ janis_sposato (posted March 22, 2002) [last accessed August 31, 2007]. An even more baroque set of allegations appeared in Michael Ruppert’s From the Wilderness newsletter and is reprinted in his book Crossing the Rubicon (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers), 152–74. 57. U.S. v. INSLAW, Inc., 113 Bankruptcy Reporter 802 (District Court of the District of Columbia, 1989), afﬁrming In re Inslaw, Inc., 88 Bankruptcy Reporter 484 (Bankruptcy Division of the District of Columbia, 1987). 58. U.S. v. Inslaw, Inc., 932 F.2d 1467 (District of Columbia Circuit, 1991). 59. Thomas and Keith, The Octopus, 124.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

|

329

60. See William H. Freivogel and Steven Casmier, “Inslaw Allegations Rejected,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 18, 1993, 15A. On the results of the most recent decision in the Inslaw litigation, a determination by a federal claims court exonerating the federal government, see “CFTC v. Free Speech; DOJ Didn’t Steal,” National Law Journal, August 18, 1997, A10. 61. Debra Gersh, “Justice Dept. Report Says Journalist’s Death Was Suicide,” Editor and Publisher, July 17, 1993, 9–10. 62. “Inslaw Revisited,” Wired, November 1995, 86. 63. Inslaw v. United States, 40 Federal Claims Reporter 843 (1998). 64. The information that follows is based on the following sources: Stephen Pizzo, “The Long Arm of Lew?” Mother Jones, May–June 1993, 14; John Connolly, “Dead Right,” Spy, January 1993, 56–65; Phil Linsalata, “The Octopus File,” Columbia Journalism Review (November–December 1991): 76; James Ridgeway and Doug Vaughn, “Who Killed Danny Casolaro?” Village Voice, October 15, 1992, 31; Michael K. Grifﬁn, “A Conspiracy Far Worse Than Watergate,” St. Louis Journalism Review (October 1992): 1; Kim Masters, “What Killed Danny Casolaro?” Washington Post, August 31, 1992. 65. See “House Judiciary’s Inslaw Report” (unsigned editorial), Washington Post, September 8, 1992, A20; Eric Reguly, “House Committee Racks Inslaw Conspiracy Theory,” Financial Post, August 18, 1992, 12. 66. John Connolly, “Dead Right,” Spy, January 1993, 59. 67. Chip Berlet, “Big Stories, Spooky Sources,” Columbia Journalism Review (June 1993): 67–71. Berlet accuses Casolaro of basing many of his inferences on information from the Christic Institute and the LaRouche organization. 68. Printed as “Behold a Pale Horse: A Draft of Danny Casolaro’s Octopus Manuscript Proposal,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Portland, OR: Feral House, 1993), 169–72. 69. For a full discussion of the problems of the investigation into Casolaro’s death, see Connolly, “Dead Right.” Judge Bua’s report dismissing charges against the Department of Justice in the Inslaw case concludes that there is no credible evidence supporting anything other than that Casolaro committed suicide. See Gersh, “Justice Dept. Report Says Journalist’s Death Was Suicide.” 70. See Kenn Thomas, “The Octopus Conspiracy: Fictional Tale or Factional Trail?” Steamshovel Press 6 (winter 1992): 32. 71. Thomas, “The Octopus Conspiracy;” Kenn Thomas, “The Promis Threat: An Octopus Slouches toward Mena, Arkansas, Area 51 and the International UFO Congress in Las Vegas,” Steamshovel Press 7 (1993): 32–35. See, generally, Thomas and Keith, The Octopus. 72. Ben G. Price, “Outlaws and Inslaw,” in The Gemstone File, ed. Keith, 176. 73. Dave Emory, originally broadcast on KFJC on August 11, 1991. Transcribed from side A of “For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Death of Joseph Daniel Casolaro,” a cassette tape series available through Emory’s Archives on Audio. 74. Thomas, “The Octopus Conspiracy,” 29. 75. The host is named as Paul DeRienzo in the transcription posted to alt. conspiracy, and available at a number of ﬁle archives throughout the Internet. This was posted on alt.conspiracy on February 17, 1992, as “The Casolaro Murder Feds’ Theft of Inslaw Software, Part XI.”

330

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

76. Kenn Thomas, “Behold A Pale Horse: A Draft of Danny Casolaro’s Octopus Manuscript Proposal,” in Secret and Suppressed, ed. Keith, 169–72. 77. Virginia McCullough, interviewed by Paul DeRienzo on WBAI-FM, New York, September 20, 1991, posted on alt.conspiracy on 17 February 1992 as “The Casolaro Murder Feds’ Theft of Inslaw Software, Part XXII.” 78. Thomas, “The Octopus Conspiracy,” 32. 79. “alt.conspiracy” was, and remains, a news group that was distributed during this period on USENET, a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that originated in 1979 and is distributed by a web of servers and accessible to individual users via their Internet Service Provider. “Usenet,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENET [last accessed August 31, 2007]; Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick, “Infoenclosure 2.0,” Metamute, http:// www.metamute.org/InfoEnclosure-2.0 [last accessed August 31, 2007], posted January 29, 2007. News groups were precursors to contemporary interactive Web pages, and are composed of messages (known as “posts”) sent by individual users through the site from which they connect to USENET. Signiﬁcantly for alt. conspiracy, the preﬁx “alt.” refers to a speciﬁc “hierarchy” for groups that discuss “alternative ways of looking at things.” Alt.conspiracy was by no means the largest or most popular USENET news group, but it was a relatively busy one: it was the 130th most popular out of 3,121 in the monthly USENET survey of July 1994, which estimated that ninety-eight thousand people had at least browsed through the alt. conspiracy message index once during the month. Of the USENET gateways that report in this survey, 64 percent received alt.conspiracy, a relatively high proportion for a news group in the “alt.” hierarchy, whose news groups tend to be banned from some systems because of their controversial subject matter (Brian Reid, “USENET Readership Summary Report for July 1994, news.lists [posted August 4, 1994]). 80. “Re: Wackenhut et al.,” alt.conspiracy (posted February 29, 1992). 81. See, for example, Kenn Thomas, “Casolaro’s Octopus,” disinformation, http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id901/pg1/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]; “Danny Casolaro and the Octopus,” totse.com, http://www.totse.com/en/ conspiracy/casolaro/index.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]; “Danny Casolaro,” Obscurantist, http://obscurantist.com/oma/casolaro-danny/ [last accessed April 2, 2008]. 82. Thomas and Keith, The Octopus, 158–61; Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, 153–54, 159. 83. Thomas and Keith, The Octopus, 150–57. 84. E-mail from Glenn Campbell to UFOmind list, September 16, 1999, available at http://www.ufomind.com/misc/1999/sep/d16-001.shtml [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 85. To an extent, the 9/11 “truth movement” has the semblance of a speciﬁc agenda in its call for the release of all government information relating to the 9/11 attacks, an issue that I discuss in detail in chapter 7.

6. The Prophetic Plot 1. Hal Lindsey, with C. C. Carlson, The Terminal Generation (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1976), 185.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

|

331

2. A 1994 U.S. News and World Report poll found that a relatively large percentage of respondents believe that current fundamentalist Christian beliefs in biblical prophecy are literally true, and more than half believed that some world events in the twentieth century fulﬁll biblical prophecy, while a 2006 Pew Research Center survey found that approximately one-third of respondents believed the Bible to be literally true. Jeffrey L. Sheler, “The Christmas Covenant,” U.S. News and World Report, December 19, 1994, 62; Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “Many Americans Uneasy with Mix of Religion and Politics,” August 24, 2006, Section IV, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=1084 [last accessed August 31, 2007]; George Gallup and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the Nineties (New York: Macmillan, 1989). The one-third ﬁgure is remarkably consistent across polls and over time. See Frank Newport, “OneThird of Americans Believe the Bible is Literally True High Inverse Correlation between Education and Belief in a Literal Bible,” Gallup News Service, May 25, 2007, http://www.galluppoll.com/content/default.aspx?ci=27682 [last accessed August 31, 2007]. Although the ability of such polls to index religious and political beliefs precisely is inherently suspect, these kinds of polls at least demonstrate the importance of conservative Protestantism in the United States. See Steve Bruce, Pray TV: Televangelism in America (London: Routledge, 1990), 184–89. 3. K. L. Woodward, “The Final Days Are Here Again,” Newsweek, March 18, 1991, 55. 4. “The Rapture Index,” http://www.novia.net/~todd/ [last accessed June 5, 1997]. The site has now moved to http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 5. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 8–9. 6. One recent example of this was the events in Korea surrounding the prediction by Lee Jang Rim, a Seoul-based Korean pastor, of a rapture of Christians on October 28, 1992. See “World Fails to End; Korean Cult Is Stunned,” Louisville Courier-Journal, October 29, 1992, A10. 7. Richard Rees uses the suggestive term “popular historiography” in relation to conspiracy theories and particularly the popular obsession with the Kennedy assassination. See Richard Rees, “Conspiracy Theory: Popular Historiography and Late Capitalism,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association, Louisville, Kentucky, March 1992. 8. Religious historian Martin Marty has made a particularly effective case for the study of movements such as fundamentalism that can go beyond the often simplistic prejudices of academics and intellectuals against them. See Martin Marty, “Explaining the Rise of Fundamentalism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 28, 1992, A56. 9. Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 6–7. 10. Lee Quinby, “Coercive Purity: The Dangerous Promise of Apocalyptic Masculinity,” in The Year 2000: Essays on the End, ed. Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 154–65, 156. 11. Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991). See Frank Rich’s columns “Bait and Switch,” New York Times, March 2, 1995, A25; “The Jew World Order,” New York Times, March 9, 1995, A25; “New World Terror,”

332

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

New York Times, April 27, 1995; and Michael Lind’s “Calling All Crackpots,” Washington Post, October 16, 1994, C1, C5; and “Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory,” New York Review, February 2, 1995, 21–25. For a general discussion of this exchange between Rich (a liberal editorial New York Times columnist), Lind (a former friend and employee of such conservative luminaries as William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol and now a centrist-liberal freelance writer), and Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed (at the time the executive director of the Christian Coalition, the conservative political organization that Robertson founded), see Gustav Niebuhr, “Pat Robertson Says He Intended No Anti-Semitism in Book He Wrote Four Years Ago,” New York Times, March 4, 1995, A10. 12. See Rich, “The Jew World Order” (comparing Robertson to Farrakhan); and Rich, “New World Terror” (holding Robertson partially responsible for the rise of the militias and the Oklahoma City bombing). 13. Lind, “Rev. Robertson’s Grand International Conspiracy Theory,” 23. 14. This chapter will not refer speciﬁcally to the prophetic biblical texts used by eschatologists; my focus here is on a cultural, rather than liturgical, analysis of popular eschatology. Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), Timothy P. Weber’s Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1982, enlarged ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Robert Fuller’s Naming the Antichrist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), place current and historical American eschatology more within the context of the original biblical texts, and also discuss a greater number of eschatological texts. Stephen O’Leary’s Arguing the Apocalypse also surveys a more extensive array of eschatological texts, focusing especially on their rhetoric. Bernard McGinn’s Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994) offers a more global and comprehensive history of religious obsession with the Antichrist. All of these books offer far more historical and liturgical detail than I can in this chapter. My interest is more tightly focused on eschatology as a cultural practice that is related and analogous to secular conspiracy theory. 15. George Marsden, a prominent historian of Christianity in America, deﬁnes fundamentalism as a subset of evangelicalism that is more militant in its opposition to liberal theology and changes in contemporary cultural values. It is also important to note that evangelicals, and to a lesser degree fundamentalists, come from a wide variety of Protestant denominations, ranging from Pentecostals and Baptists to Presbyterians and Episcopalians. There is thus a range of beliefs and religious practices among evangelicals (though less so among fundamentalists), and this chapter generally concerns the more conservative among them. See George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 1–6. 16. Paul A. Carter provides a particularly forceful argument along these lines. See Paul A. Carter, “The Fundamentalist Defense of the Faith,” in Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920s, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1968), 179–214. 17. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 4–5. 18. Nathan O. Hatch, “Evangelicalism as a Democratic Movement,” in Evangelicalism and Modern America, ed. George M. Marsden (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984), 71–82. Institutionally, contemporary conservative

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

|

333

Protestantism is based less on denominational difference than during other eras, although divisions between, say, Pentecostals, who believe that glossolalia, or “involuntary” speaking in tongues during moments of “anointment” in the Holy Spirit, is evidence of a work of grace, and Baptists such as Jerry Falwell, who shun glossolalia, are quite important. Rather, the basic unit of contemporary Protestantism is the individual believer, and the strongest loyalties of many Christians are to speciﬁc preachers. Larger national and international denominations and conventions provide some hierarchy, but there is little structure holding together individual churches and larger ministries of those who use the mass media to reach believers. 19. Hatch, “Evangelicalism,” 162–68. 20. Ernest R. Sandeen, The Origins of Fundamentalism: Toward a Historical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 8. 21. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 55–57; Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 130–32. 22. Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 234–36. As Martin Marty has argued, contemporary Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism are practiced within the mobile and afﬂuent lifestyles of postwar America. They have been adopted within and adapted to suburban lifestyles and values of spiritual and material success, and offer help and resolutions to contemporary personal, professional, and social problems. See Martin Marty, A Nation of Believers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 23. The political economic and public policy circumstances for the contemporary rise of mass-media religion begin with the 1960 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decision allowing broadcast television stations to sell time to religious programmers rather than to give it away, thus leading to the domination of those denominations that could show proﬁt through broadcasts. Religious broadcasters have often been in the forefront of the development of new distribution systems, including the use of UHF in the 1970s, and satellite and cable delivery systems in the 1980s and 1990 (see Bruce, Pray TV, 29–31). As there were no restrictions for religious broadcasters on the amount of commercial time, and religious broadcasters face a much more favorable tax situation compared to commercial stations and networks, conservative Christian broadcasting had and continues to have a relatively favored economic and political position in the marketplace (52–53). See also Quentin J. Schultze, “The Mythos of the Electronic Church,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987): 249. 24. For example, Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network adapted some of the conventions of secular entertainment and information programming for Robertson’s news/talk/religious show the 700 Club (and ultimately renamed the entire network “Family Channel”) in order to reach a larger audience (Stewart M. Hoover, Mass Media Religion [Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988], 84). 25. Hoover, Mass Media Religion, 87. See also Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 46, 66. 26. Stewart M. Hoover, “The Meaning of Religious Television: The 700 Club in the Lives of Its Viewers,” in American Evangelicals and the Mass Media, ed. Quentin J. Schultze (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990), 236.

334

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

27. In addition, as one study of the Moral Majority has argued, many of those fundamentalists who do engage in electoral and issue-oriented politics do so with ambivalence both about the importance of politics relative to spiritual struggles and about the likely success of their actions (Clyde Wilcox, Sharon Linzey, and Ted G. Jelen, “Reluctant Warriors: Premillennialism and Politics in the Moral Majority,” Journal for the Scientiﬁc Study of Religion 30, no. 3 [1991]: 245–58). 28. Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right, 190. For an example of an attempt by a then-budding member of the New Right to build alliances with the New Christian Right, see Dinesh D’Souza’s biography of Jerry Falwell, Falwell: Before the Millennium (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1984). D’Souza clearly identiﬁes his own dislike for what he would later term the “illiberalism” of academia and the media with what he sees as the fundamentalists’ degradation: “So fundamentalists withdrew from involvement with secular institutions of American life to prepare for the end. They were helped along by liberal spurs. Fundamentalist educators were kicked out of the universities. The media proclaimed fundamentalism intellectually discredited. . . . They were outcasts, shoved out of society, not because of low birth or skin color, but because of alleged stupidity” (29). 29. Christopher Quinn, “Christian Zionists stand ﬁrm as friends to Israel,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 23, 2008; Michael D. Shear, “Catholic Groups Angry With McCain Over Endorsement,” Washington Post, February 29, 2008; Deborah Solomon, “Megaminister: Questions for the Rev. John Hagee,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 23, 2008. 30. See, for example, Paul T. Coughlin, Secrets, Plots & Hidden Agendas: What You Don’t Know About Conspiracy Theories (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), which offers an evangelical Christian’s criticism of eschatology as a type of paranoid conspiracy theory. 31. Rodney Clapp, “Overdosing on the Apocalypse,” Christianity Today, October 28, 1991, 26; Edwin Yamauchi, “Updating the Armageddon Calendar,” Christianity Today, April 29, 1991, 50–51; David Neff, “Apocalypse When?” Christianity Today, December 17, 1990, 15. Christianity Today does not itself espouse a speciﬁc type of millennialist view, and has published an extended debate/discussion between various types of premillennialists (including a pre-, mid-, and post-tribulationalist), as well as a post- and an amillennialist. It began its introduction to this debate in this way: “Few doctrines unite and separate Christians as much as eschatology. For although we agree that Christ indeed will return to Earth, we differ on the when and how” (Christianity Today Institute, “Our Future Hope: Eschatology and Its Role in the Church, Christianity Today, February 6, 1987, 1-I). 32. Charles B. Strozier, Apocalypse: On the Subject of Fundamentalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 116–25. Some believers, such as those described touring Israel in search of the landmarks of the end time in Grace Halsell’s Prophecy and Politics (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1986) and those living without fear near a hydrogen bomb assembly plant in A. G. Mojtabai’s Blessed Assurance (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1986), shape their everyday lives and beliefs around the thought and assurance of a coming rapture. Others might include the imminent return of Christ as part of their general structure of beliefs without thinking about it or by following the voluminous literature, ﬁlms, and television or the ministries and preachers that center on the end time.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

|

335

33. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 18–29; Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 3–4; Gabriel Fackre, The Religious Right and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 88–95; Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 7–11. Indeed, the narratives of many science-ﬁction and horror novels and ﬁlms, as well as nonﬁctional accounts of impending environmental, social, and economic disasters, share a number of elements with popular eschatology, and they appeal to the same secular audience as Hal Lindsey’s work. Michael Barkun persuasively argues that although the texts of religious and secular nonﬁction accounts of a coming apocalypse are signiﬁcantly divergent in a number of ways, they share a tendency to organize the contemporary in relation to the apocalypse and within a social pessimism that has become increasingly pervasive in the postwar era. In fact, I would postulate there are many who read both secular and religious apocalyptics (though perhaps at different points in their lives) and that the “bifurcated enterprise” that Barkun describes may not be as bifurcated as it circulates within popular common sense. See Michael Barkun, “Divided Apocalypse: Thinking about the End in Contemporary America,” Soundings 66 (September 1983): 257–80. 34. Sara Diamond analyzes the relationship between fundamentalism and the far right in Spiritual Warfare (Boston: South End Press, 1989). Paul Boyer provides some important historical connections between anticommunism and prophecy (When Time Shall Be No More, 152–80). A prominent example of this relationship is Pat Robertson’s The New World Order. 35. Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875–1982, enlarged ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 9. 36. Robert G. Clouse, “The New Christian Right, America, and the Kingdom of God,” Christian Scholar’s Review 12, no. 1 (1983): 3–4. 37. The term “dispensationalism” comes from a very precise reading and periodization of human history. According to these teachings, all of which arise from a speciﬁc set of hermeneutical principles for the reading of the Bible, God deals with human beings in successive dispensations, or periods of time, in which humanity is tested according to a speciﬁc revelation of the will of God. Each dispensation terminates in judgment—for example, the fall from Eden, the ﬂood—because of humanity’s continual failure. This systematic periodization of human history provides a speciﬁc set of eras in which man’s relation to God can be understood, and the overall trajectory of human history across these eras does not progress or change. In each dispensation, humans make the same kinds of mistakes and fail the same kinds of tests. For a much fuller accounting of the differences among premillennialists, see Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 9–12. 38. Clouse, “The New Christian Right, America, and the Kingdom of God,” 4. 39. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 40. Tuveson, Redeemer Nation, 50–55. 41. For a discussion of the strong and complex response that contemporary Adventists have had to the popular success of Lindsey’s popular eschatology,

336

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

see Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-Day Adventism and the American Dream (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 52–55. 42. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 16, 26–36. 43. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 52. As Weber argues, premillennialism’s success in the period before, during, and after World War I was also a result of the fact that premillennialists’ explanations of current events and predictions for the future were remarkably accurate. In reaction to their success, however, some premillennialists began to go too far, foreshadowing many current popular eschatologists by speculating about the precise date of Christ’s return and the rapture (105–14). 44. “Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (Matt. 25:13), and “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matt. 24:42). 45. An example of Dominion Theology is Pat Robertson, with Bob Slosser, The Secret Kingdom (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1983). The strongest recent summation of the Reconstruction movement is Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991). For a particularly critical and insightful account of the relationship between such postmillennial movements and conservative politics, see Diamond, Spiritual Warfare, 134–41. 46. Clouse, “The New Christian Right, America, and the Kingdom of God,” 10. 47. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 112–13. 48. Hal Lindsey, with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (New York: Bantam, 1970), 170. Parenthetical page references in the next section refer to this work. 49. For a general discussion of Lindsey and his career, see O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 134–71, and Wojcik, The End of the World As We Know It, 37–59. 50. By 1999, LGPE had sold 35 million copies. Chris Hall, “What Hal Lindsey Taught Me About the Second Coming,” Christianity Today, October 25, 1999, 84. 51. Lindsey’s The Terminal Generation (1976) and The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (New York: Bantam, 1981) seem primarily aimed at persuading believers and nonbelievers that the world is moving quickly and inexorably toward apocalypse, whereas The Rapture (New York: Bantam, 1983) gives a detailed description of the scriptural account of that moment in the end times, and The Road to Holocaust (New York: Bantam, 1989) is an extended and often bitter argument against postmillennialism and particularly against Christian Reconstructionists. 52. Robert Fuller explains how Lindsey and others shifted the attention of their prophetic readings from the Soviet Union to the Middle East at the end of the Cold War. Fuller, Naming the Antichrist, 154–60. 53. Voice-over narration for the opening credit sequence of Jack Van Impe Presents, aired July 4, 2007 via http://www.jvim.com/tv/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]. In that show, Rexella claims that the show airs in 247 countries. 54. Jack Van Impe Presents, aired June 26, 1992, Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). 55. This Week in Bible Prophecy, aired June, 21 1992, TBN. 56. On dispensationalism’s ongoing interest in the European Community in the period after World War II, see Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 275–78.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

|

337

57. Jack Van Impe Presents, aired June 19, 1992, TBN. 58. Jack Van Impe Presents, airdates of June 20, 2007; July 4, 2007, http:// www.jvim.com/tv/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 59. The Hal Lindsey Report, June 29, 2007. 60. http://www.prophecyupdate.com/prophecy_news.htm [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 61. http://www.bible-prophecy.com/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 62. http://www.raptureready.com/index.php [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 63. http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 64. http://www.raptureready.com/rap13a.html [last accessed August 31, 2007]. 65. Glenn W. Shuck, Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4–10. Conservative evangelicals and publishers catering to them did not embrace the novel until the mid-1980s, when the Christian romance and thriller became the two genres that broke through to mass audiences. Paul C. Gutjahr, “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader-Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America,” Book History 5, no. 1 (2002): 209–36. 66. As I explain below, the Left Behind series introduces a relatively large number of characters across its sixteen novels; but each novel focuses on a small universe of characters on the side of good and evil (and in-between). 67. Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 48–70; Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 7. 68. Frank E. Peretti’s This Present Darkness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1986) was the ﬁrst breakthrough commercial success in the Christian thriller genre, but was focused narrowly on the supernatural struggle between God and Satan in the small college town of Ashton rather than on the rapture and a global apocalypse initiated by a nefarious conspiracy. For a discussion of Peretti’s place as one of the top evangelical/fundamentalist novelists, see Erling Jorstad, Popular Religion in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 143–45; and Niebuhr, “The Newest Christian Fiction Injects a Thrill into Theology.” The ﬁrst edition of this book discussed This Present Darkness in some detail, but I have instead added an analysis of the even more successful novel Left Behind. 69. Bob Summer, “Religion Is His Business,” Publishers Weekly, September 21, 1992, 46; Ephraim Radner, “New World Order, Old World Anti-Semitism,” Christian Century, September 13, 1995, 844. 70. Robertson’s The New World Order also contains such implicit anti-Semitism and explicit bigotry against non-Western religions. This, as well as the connections between his thought and that of earlier, more “secular” conspiracy theorists, is apparent in his unquestioned citation of the work of Nesta Webster, a relatively well-known early twentieth-century British conspiracy theorist who considered The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be a legitimate document and saw Jews as leaders of a master plot to take over the world. See Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924). 71. Pat Robertson, The End of the Age (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1995). On Robertson’s turn to postmillennialism and the relationship between that turn and his political activism and aspirations, see O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 184–98.

338

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

The End of the Age was enormously successful within Christian publishing. See Sara Diamond, “Political Millennialism within the Evangelical Subculture,” in Strozier and Flynn, The Year 2000, 206–7. 72. On Robertson’s political intent for the novel, see Diamond, “Political Millennialism within the Evangelical Subculture,” 206–7. 73. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995). Glenn Shuck offers a relatively comprehensive history of the series, as well as a summary of all of its novels. Shuck, Marks of the Beast, 10–16. 74. On LaHaye’s politics and biography, see Melani McAlister, “Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Fundamentalism’s New World Order,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 773–98, 780–81. On the relationship between the two authors and their respective politics and their relationship as co-authors, see Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: “Left Behind” in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 30. 75. A growing body of literature suggests additional reasons for the novels’ success. In an excellent study of Left Behind’s readership and their practices, Amy Johnson Frykholm observes the novels’ role within the everyday lives of evangelical Christians, with all their lives’ complexity and variation in Rapture Culture. She argues that the novels’ action attracts both male and female readers—something that distinguishes this genre of Christian popular literature from others, which have largely female readership—but that the books are understood above all as part of social networks of Christians who share them with each other and with friends and acquaintances who are not born again. Although they work as a means to frighten and discipline believers, however, she found scant evidence that the books had any widespread success in converting unbelievers. Frykholm, Rapture Culture, 40, 47, 151, 164–65; see also Gutjahr, “No Longer Left Behind,” 221–23. Melani McAlister argues that the series presents a quite contemporary vision of evangelical Christianity that is “more sophisticated, more multicultural, and certainly more consciously ‘modern’ than anything that has come before.” McAlister, “Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular,” 778. Andrew Strombeck agrees with McAlister and argues further that the novels’ success is attributable in part to its presentation of the Tribulation Force as a neoliberal social movement that reﬂects the politics and lifestyles of the novels’ middle class evangelical readership. Andrew Strombeck, “Invest in Jesus: Neoliberalism and the Left Behind novels,” Cultural Critique 64 (fall 2006): 161–95. 76. The game is called Left Behind: Eternal Forces and is available at http:// www.leftbehindgames.com/ [last accessed April 3, 2008]. 77. Peter Yoonsuk Paik smartly makes the similar argument that Christian readers are torn between the Schaudenfreude of enjoying the death and destruction of unbelievers during the tribulation and their identiﬁcation with members of the Tribulation Force who, like the readers, live marginalized and embattled lives as outsiders in a secular world. Peter Yoonsuk Paik, “Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalyptism,” Postmodern Culture 14, no. 1 (September 2003). 78. Glenn Shuck argues that part of the novels’ pleasure is that they reveal the eternal reward that Christians will gain after they have been forced to experience the feeling of being “left behind” by secular humanist modernity. After the rapture, the secular humanist majority will be left behind. Shuck, Marks of the Beast, 18.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

|

339

79. Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, “Anxieties of Inﬂuence: Conspiracy Theory and Therapeutic Culture in Millennial America,” in Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 258–86, 282. 80. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 51. 81. Randall Balmer and Lauren Winner, Protestantism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 86–87; Frykholm, Rapture Culture, 119. 82. See Diamond, Spiritual Warfare, 24–25; Gershom Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (New York: Free Press, 2000). 83. McAlister, “Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular,” 791–92. 84. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 84, 150, 173; Lindsey, The 1980s, 139–58. 85. Timothy LaHaye, The Battle for the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1980), 218–19; Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 227–28. Lindsey himself never fully resolves this dilemma; in his book-length attack on Christian Reconstructionists, published in 1989, he warned against any Christian “political revolution” or party, although he does admit that it is proper to inﬂuence politics and to vote. He argues that although the Bible “gives no hope of taking over this present world-system and establishing a Theocratic Kingdom on Earth,” Christians can and should “save souls and transform lives of converts into citizens of God’s spiritual kingdom” (Lindsey, The Road to Holocaust, 278). The controversy surrounding President Ronald Reagan’s apocalyptic beliefs during his 1984 reelection campaign provides an interesting, if not particularly enlightening, discussion of the issues surrounding politicians who espouse apocalyptic beliefs. See, for example, Gene Krupey, “The Christian Right, Zionism, and the Coming of the Penteholocaust,” in Apocalypse Culture, 2d ed., ed. Adam Parfrey (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1990), 286–98; Wills, Under God, 144–51; Larry Kickham, “The Theology of Nuclear War,” Covert Action Information Bulletin 27 (spring 1987): 9–17; “Critics Fear That Reagan Is Swayed by Those Who Believe in a ‘Nuclear Armageddon,’” Christianity Today, December 14, 1984, 48–49; Hendrik Hertzberg, “The End Is Nigh,” New Republic, November 12, 1984, 50; Richard N. Ostling, “Armageddon and the End Times,” Time, November 5, 1984, 73; “Reckoning with Armageddon,” New York Times, October 5, 1984, 12. 86. Shuck, Marks of the Beast, 182. 87. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 210–11. 88. Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xv. 89. Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 21. 90. LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, 214. 91. In Joanna Brooks’s words, this is a reading in which the text plays a “providential role,” positioning the reader “on the text’s terms, on the text’s times” (Joanna Brooks, “Calling All Radicals: Reading Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth,” paper presented at Discerning the Right conference, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, March 1996, 8). 92. John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Christianity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 55 (emphasis in original).

340

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

93. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 25–26. 94. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 369. 95. Richard Johnson and his coauthors in the Popular Memory Group of the Birmingham School have described this process operating in working-class popular history and memory. In this sense, popular eschatology displaces the local and tangible aspects of such remembrances and interpretation of the past for the global and spiritual concerns of prophecy. See Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method,” in Making Histories: Studies in History Writing and Politics, ed. Richard Johnson et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 205–52. 96. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 270, 421–22. 97. Ernesto Laclau, New Reﬂections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 89–93.

7. A Failure of Imagination 1. This quotation comes from “partial transcript” of this interview, available from “AZ Radio Host Deconstructs Popular Mechanics’ 9/11 Disinfo Researcher,” http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060826165457842 (posted August 26, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 2. James Risen, “Congress Seeks F.B.I. Data On Informer; F.B.I. Resists,” New York Times, September 6, 2002; Mike Allen, “Bush Seeks to Restrict Hill Probes of Sept. 11,” Washington Post, January 30, 2002, A-12. The Joint Inquiry limited its investigation to the work of the intelligence agencies, and issued its report in mid-December 2002; a ﬁnal version, with the beneﬁt of more declassiﬁed materials, was released in July 2003. See Craig R. Whitney, “Introduction,” in The 9/11 Investigations (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), ix–xxxii, xxiii–xxv. The ﬁnal version is available at www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_rpt/911rept.pdf [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 3. These requirements appear in § 605 of the statute, Pub. L. No. 107-306, § 601 et seq., 116 Stat. 2383, 2408–2413 (2002). I have written a much extensive and detailed account of the 9/11 Commission’s design and operations, which appears in “Designing Transparency: The 9/11 Commission and Institutional Form,” Washington and Lee Law Review, 65 (forthcoming, 2009). 4. David Firestone, “Kissinger Pulls Out as Chief Of Inquiry Into 9/11 Attacks,” New York Times, December 14, 2002. 5. Not everyone holds the Warren Commission in such low regard. For a defense of the Warren Commission that blames Attorney General Robert Kennedy above all for the ﬂaws in its report, see Max Holland, “After Thirty Years: Making Sense of the Assassination,” Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (1994): 191–209. 6. Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 25. 7. Carol Morello, “Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet,” Washington Post, October 7, 2004, B1. 8. The Pearl Harbor analogy has signiﬁcant conspiratorial overtones, given theories that President Franklin Roosevelt had allowed the Japanese attack to

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

341

succeed despite having pre-attack intelligence in order to prod public opinion in favor of joining the Allies in World War II. For competing accounts of Pearl Harbor, see Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), which offers an account similar to the ofﬁcial one for 9/11, that bureaucratic and strategic ineptitude caused the Navy’s failure to anticipate the attacks, and John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (New York: Anchor Reprint, 1992), which argues that Roosevelt knew about the attacks in advance but decided not to share that information with naval personnel at Pearl Harbor. 9. Edward Wyatt, “National Book Awards Finalists Include 9/11 Commission Report,” New York Times, October 13, 2004. 10. Joanna Glasner, “Free Content Still Sells,” http://www.wired.com/techbiz/ media/news/2004/09/64828 (posted September 20, 2004) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 11. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in the weeks prior to the Report’s release in July 2004 found that a majority of those surveyed, and nearly equal percentages of self-identiﬁed Democrats (61 percent), Republicans (62 percent), and independents (60 percent), approved of the job the Commission had done, while a much smaller percentage of each category disapproved (24 percent of Democrats and Republicans and 26 percent of independents). Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, “9/11 Commission Has Bipartisan Report,” http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=851 (posted July 20, 2004) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 12. Morello, “Conspiracy Theories Flourish.” 13. In addition to paying more attention to the most prominent theories and theorists, I will focus more on published books than on materials available on the Internet, on the assumption that the former are more likely to be available over the long term. Because the Internet has proven to be an enormously important means to circulate information, however, I will not avoid Web pages. Indeed, Loose Change, which I discuss at the end of this chapter, has been mostly viewed via streaming video, and much of the community-related materials I cite is from Web sites. 14. I would predict that within a few years—perhaps even while this manuscript has been in production—a number of new academic and trade books will offer a comprehensive analysis of these theories and of the 9/11 truth movement. 15. The most prominent published book that responds critically to 9/11 conspiracy theories is an extended version of reporting and analysis originally published in the magazine Popular Mechanics: Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts, ed. David Dunbar and Brad Reagan (New York: Hearst Books, 2006). Debunking Web sites include http://www.debunking911.com (last accessed August 20, 2007), http://www.911myths.com (last accessed August 20, 2007), and http://internetdetectives.biz/case/loose-change (last accessed August 20, 2007). Each of those sites offers links to other debunking sites. 16. For example, the Commission did not identify Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet as bearing a signiﬁcant amount of blame for his failures of leadership in the years and months prior to the attacks, but an internal report issued by the Inspector General of the CIA has done so. Mark Mazzetti, “C.I.A. Lays Out Errors It Made Before Sept. 11,” New York Times, August 22, 2007. The report was originally completed in 2005, but was classiﬁed until 2007. Scott Shane and

342

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

James Risen, “Internal Report Said to Fault C.I.A. for Pre-9/11 Actions,” New York Times, August 26, 2007, A1. 17. To be fully forthcoming, I ﬁnd that James Ridgeway’s The 5 Unanswered Questions About 9/11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005) offers the best critique of the Commission’s Report—at once identifying the political, institutional, and ideological limits within which the Commission worked and asking well-grounded questions about the extent of the federal government’s and military’s failures on and before 9/11 that the Commission failed to report fully. Jack Bratich offers an entirely different account of the 9/11 Truth Movement in “Going Global: 9/11, Popular Investigations, and the Sphere of Legitimate Dissensus,” which appears as a chapter in his book Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). Bratich seeks to identify and defend the truth movement’s challenge to the dominant, consensus political rationality of contemporary neoliberalism, as well as to explain the movement’s potential articulation to, if not as, a left political project. His approach eschews evaluation of the movement’s claims, as well as those of the 9/11 Commission and other state and mainstream private actors that offer the dominant explanation of the attacks. Instead, he critiques the “conspiracy panic” that has engulfed not only elected ofﬁcials and the mainstream media but also the “gatekeeper left” (from The Nation to Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn), all of whom denounce the truth movement’s irrationality and paranoia—a denunciation, Bratich argues, that itself is used by conservatives and centrists to attack the left. Refusing to identify his own position with respect to the competing claims about 9/11 and relying instead on an ongoing contextualization of the movement’s arguments and a thoroughgoing critique of how the state and establishment left discursively dismiss those arguments, Bratich seems to adopt an unqualiﬁed agnosticism about the movement’s claims. But the movement’s ongoing independent investigations and debates, along with its challenge and resistance to the dominant explanation, sufﬁce to establish for Bratich its competing and at least equally legitimate regime of truth. As this chapter and book make plain (and as Bratich rightly concludes from the earlier edition of this book), I am not as sanguine as he that the movement’s singleminded absorption with ﬁnding an elusive truth about 9/11 lends itself to political linkages with the left beyond a shared, generalized hatred of the Bush administration and a deep skepticism about the exercise of state power. 18. What follows is a very brief summary of The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, authorized ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). 19. David Ray Grifﬁn, The New Pearl Harbor (updated ed., Northampton, MA: 2004), xxiii–xxiv. 20. John Gravois, “A Theory That Just Won’t Die,” National Post, July 28, 2006. 21. Michael Powell, “The Disbelievers: 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Are Building Their Case Against the Government From Ground Zero,” Washington Post, September 8, 2006, C1. Grifﬁn has also described evidence that the ofﬁcial account is incorrect as “irrefutable.” Gravois, “A Theory That Just Won’t Die.” Grifﬁn’s work has otherwise been described as “painstakingly scrupulous, . . . calm and . . . consistently wellreasoned, making his analysis undeniably compelling” by international law scholar Richard Falk in a foreword to one of Grifﬁn’s books. Grifﬁn, New Pearl Harbor, vii. 22. This is not a comprehensive summary, nor is it a detailed one. The most signiﬁcant absence in this discussion is of theories that claim the administration

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

343

merely “let it happen on purpose;” instead, in the parlance of the truth community, I am discussing only those theories positing that the administration “made it happen on purpose” which have come to dominate the community’s discussions. To elaborate on this distinction, in 2004 David Ray Grifﬁn described the different possible theories in this way: in the “let it happen” theories, some part or parts of the government (the intelligence agencies, the military, and/or the White House) had either vague or speciﬁc knowledge of the attacks before they occurred and let them happen; and in the “make it happen” theories, some parts of the government were actively involved in planning, and perhaps even carrying out the attacks. Grifﬁn, New Pearl Harbor, xxi–xxii, 5. The “let it happen” theories no longer circulate in any signiﬁcant way in the truth community. I discuss some of the competing “make it happen” theories in more detail over the course of the chapter; I am ignoring others—such as the theories surrounding the collapse of World Trade Center building 7—because of space constraints. A reasonably good, more comprehensive summary of the range of theories can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 23. See, for example, James H. Fetzer, “Thinking about ‘Conspiracy Theories’: 9/11 and JFK,” in The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America, ed. James H. Fetzer (Peru, IL: Catsfeet Press), 43–74, 44. 24. Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 11. 25. Grifﬁn, New Pearl Harbor, 145–46. Joseph Firmage offers an analogous chart that lists all of the relevant facts surrounding 9/11, either generally accepted by the ofﬁcial account and conspiracy theorists or disputed, and notes that while the ofﬁcial conspiracy theory’s explanations of these facts are almost entirely “suspicious,” the strongest alternative conspiracy theory (“make it happen on purpose,” or as he calls it, “create a new reality”) can explain all these facts in a “sensible” manner. Joseph P. Firmage, “Interesting Facts and Theories about 9/11,” in The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America, ed. Fetzer, 101–42. 26. Webster Grifﬁn Tarpley, Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 4th ed., 2007), 333–43. 27. Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2004), 4. 28. For example: “Informally, we can safely state that half of all Americans now suspect that the 9/11 attacks were ‘an inside job.’” The Report of the Citizens Commission on 9/11 (Spring Lake, ID: Idaho Observer Newspaper, n.d.), 19. It is unclear what the word “informally” is intended to mean here. 29. A poll released in May 2007 by the online company Rasmussen Reports found that 22 percent of the American public, disproportionately self-identiﬁed Democrats, answered afﬁrmatively the question “Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?” Rasmussen Reports, “22% Believe Bush Knew About 9/11 Attacks in Advance,” http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/ politics/22_believe_bush_knew_about_9_11_attacks_in_advance (posted May 4, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. A Zogby poll taken in May 2006, commissioned by 9/11 truth organizations, found signiﬁcant numbers of respondents agreed with statements suggesting that the Bush administration “exploited” the 9/11 attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq and that the 9/11 Commission “concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their ofﬁcial explanation” of the attacks. The results

344

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

of the poll are available at http://www.911truth.org/page.php?page=zogby_2006 [last accessed August 20, 2007]. And an October 2006 poll by the New York Times / CBS News found that 28 percent of those polled thought the Bush administration was “mostly lying” about what it knew prior to the 9/11 attacks, and 53 percent though the administration was “hiding something”—a marginal but noticeable gain from four years earlier, when the same poll found 16 percent said the administration was mostly lying and 56 percent said it was hiding something. New York Times / CBS News October 5–8, 2006 poll, available from 31. http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/ fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/13469 [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 30. A 2004 poll commissioned by organizations within the growing 9/11 truth movement and taken by the Zogby polling organization found widespread skepticism among New Yorkers: nearly half of New York City residents, and 40 percent of New York state residents, agreed to some extent with the statement that some leaders “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and . . . consciously failed to act.” http://www.zogby.com/search/ReadNews. dbm?ID=855 [last accessed August 20, 2007]. A Scripps-Howard poll conducted in July 2006 found 16 percent of respondents considered it “very likely” and 20 percent found “somewhat likely” that “[p]eople in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.” Thomas Hargrove and Guido H. Stempel III, “Anti-government Anger Spurs 9/11 Conspiracy Belief,” Scripps-Howard News Service, http://newspolls.org/story.php?story_id=55 (posted August 2, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; see also http://newspolls.org/ question.php?question_id=716 [last accessed August 20, 2007] (full results for speciﬁc questions). 31. Between early 2006 and mid-2007, Bush’s approval ratings were at or below 40 percent, and the percentage of respondents who disapproved of him has been more than 10 percent greater than the percentage who approved of him; indeed, for most of 2007, his approval ratings have been signiﬁcantly below 40 percent and his disapproval has been above 60 percent. PollingReport.com, “President Bush—Overall Job Rating in Recent Polls,” http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob. htm [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 32. This is a question of poll result interpretation, as well as of how the questions are drafted. The Rasmussen poll cited above, for example, might only have found that respondents considered President Bush’s brieﬁng about al Qaeda’s plans to commit terrorist attacks—reported on in detail in the 9/11 Commission Report—sufﬁcient to warrant an afﬁrmative answer. Follow-up questions asked in the Scripps-Howard poll cited above show signiﬁcantly large drop-offs in afﬁrmative answers to speciﬁc allegations made in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Only 12 percent of respondents found it somewhat or very likely that a cruise missile rather than a plane hit the Pentagon, and only 16 percent found it somewhat or very likely that the collapse of the twin towers was the result of secretly planted explosives—and only 6 percent found either proposition very likely. Many of the poll questions inquiring about whether the president knew about the attacks beforehand could easily have solicited positive responses from people who were persuaded that the intelligence warnings reviewed by the 9/11 Commission constituted sufﬁcient notice to put the administration on guard. 33. In addition, 28 percent of respondents expressed some doubt as to whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin, and 23 percent thought Oswald was either paid,

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

345

under orders, or persuaded to participate in the assassination by an unspeciﬁed group. Paul B. Sheatsley and Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and Behavior,” Public Opinion Quarterly 28, no. 2 (summer 1964), 189–215, 204. 34. Peter Kihss, “Kennedy’s Death Found Exploited,” New York Times, February 1, 1964. 35. On early European belief in a conspiracy, see Robert H. Estabrook, “Europeans Skeptical on Kennedy’s Death,” Washington Post, December 17, 1963. For a characteristic example of elite and mainstream media opinion of the Warren Commission report, see Anthony Lewis, “Panel Unanimous: Theory of Conspiracy by Left or Right Is Rejected,” New York Times, September 28, 1964, 1. Besides Lewis’s warm embrace of the report in the midst of a news article putatively announcing its release, the article is eerily reminiscent of the reviews of the 9/11 Commission Report forty years later. Lewis commended the report for its “thoroughness” and the active participation by the seven-member commission, called the commission a “dispassionate fact-ﬁnder,” and praised the report’s “genuine literary style.” “The very detail of the narrative is fascinating,” Lewis explained, “and there are many moving passages.” He went on: “A reader of the report is struck again and again by the series of events that had to fall into place to make the assassination possible. Over a period of years, so many men could have done so many things that would have changed history.” “The question now,” he warned presciently, “is whether the report will satisfy those, especially abroad, who have insisted that there must have been a conspiracy in the assassination.” See also a follow-up story the next day in the Times, Drew Middleton, “Findings Widely Publicized—Left Tends to Doubt Them, Right To Accept Them,” New York Times, September 29, 1964, 29. 36. See, for example, “New Questions on Assassination,” New York Times, November 27, 1966; “Assassination: Controversy Builds Anew,” Christian Science Monitor, November 23, 1966. 37. Louis Harris, “66% See Conspiracy in Kennedy Slaying,” Washington Post, May 29, 1967, A2; Charles Roberts, “Early Conﬁdence in Warren Report Turned to Doubts by Fall of 1966,” Washington Post, April 3, 1967, A1. 38. Although they do so in quite different ways, Jodi Dean and Peter Knight identify a radical historical break between the past and contemporary conspiracy practice and belief. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 69–78; Knight, Conspiracy Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 74–75, 115–16. Jack Bratich’s emphasis on contemporary conspiracy panics, or the discursive efforts to exclude radical views from the realm of political rationality, correctly identiﬁes that the establishment left’s widespread, almost coordinated response to 9/11 conspiracy theories is in fact distinct from earlier historical moments. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics, 130–31. 39. Mark Jacobson, “The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll,” New York Magazine, March 27, 2006. 40. James Cox, “Conspiracy Theories Say Israel Did It,” USA Today, September 28, 2001, 14A; Warren Richey, “Muslim Opinion Sees Conspiracy,” Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 2001, 1; Josh Tyrangiel, “Did You Hear About . . . ,” Time, October 8, 2001, 77. 41. Eric Hanson and Jon Tevlin, “Urban Legends Surround Terrorism,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, September 28, 2001, 1E; Amy Harmon, “The Search

346

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

for Intelligent Life on the Internet,” September 23, 2001, New York Times, Sect. 4, p. 2; Paul Lashmar, “Conspiracy Enthusiasts—Some Blame Jews, Others Bush,” Independent on Sunday, September 23, 2001, 7; Dexter Filkins, “As Thick as the Ash, Myths are Swirling,” New York Times, September 25, 2001, B8. A few postings in October 2001, one by Jim McMichael titled “Muslims Suspend the Laws of Physics,” apparently inspired others to begin their own investigations. See “The History of 9/11 Conspiracies,” http://911guide.googlepages.com/history [last accessed September 1, 2007]. 42. Sherman Skolnick, “The Overthrow of the American Republic,” Parts 1 and 2, http://www.rense.com/general14/skolnick.htm (posted September 23, 2001) [last accessed August 20, 2007] and http://www.rense.com/general14/theoverthrow2.htm (posted October 9, 2001) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 43. Jones had been active well before 9/11; on his local success in Austin, see Lee Nichols, “Psst, It’s a Conspiracy: KJFK Gives Alex Jones the Boot,” Austin Chronicle, December 10, 1999. Prior to his growing fame from his 9/11-related activism, he received national attention when he inspired an attempt to ﬁlm ceremonies held at the Bohemian Grove in northern California, a secret retreat for the wealthy and powerful that has long been a target of conspiracy theories. Peter Fimrite, “Masked Man Enters, Attacks Bohemian Grove,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 2002, A18. 44. See, for example, Carol Brouillet’s remembrances at http:// www.communitycurrency.org/index.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 45. Michael I. Niman, “9/11 Conspiracy Tales,” Humanist, March/April 2002, 18; James Rosen, “The Cyber Blame Game: After Sept. 11, Conspiracy Theories Abound on Web,” Sacramento Bee, January 22, 2002, A9. 46. Max Berley, “Plot Development,” The New Republic, April 22, 2002, 16; Bruce Crumley, “The French Correction: America Behind 9/11!,” Time, May 20, 2002, 6; Johann Hari, “Who Really Downed the Twin Towers?” New Statesman, April 22, 2002, 22. The English translation is 9/11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002). 47. Alan Riding, “Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot: Conspiracy Theory Sells in France; France Gripped by ‘Conspiracy’ Best Seller: Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot,” New York Times, June 22, 2002, A1. 48. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Freedom: How and Why America Was Attacked September 11, 2001 (Joshua Tree, CA: Tree of Life Publications, 2002); Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11 (Oro, Ont.: Global Outlook, 2002). 49. Jarrett Murphy, “The Seekers: The Birth and Life of the ‘9-11 Truth Movement,’” Village Voice, February 21, 2006. One activist claims that “the ﬁrst nationwide 9/11 skeptics coordinated action” occurred in Kansas City in November 2003. Jan Hoyer, “How I Got Involved with 9/11 Truth,” http://digitalstyledesigns. com/pages/about.htm (n.d.) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 50. Harriet Chiang, “With 9/11 in the News, Conspiracy Buffs Gather,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 2004. The ﬁnal schedule for the San Francisco conference appears at http://www.communitycurrency.org/InquiryProgram.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]; a description of the Toronto conference appears at http://911inquiry.org [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 51. Video Web streams of the “Omission Hearings” can be found at http:// www.911busters.com/911-Commission.html [last accessed August 20, 2007], and a

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

347

transcript of the conference is available from www.orbstandard.com/PDF/ 9-11-Omission-Hearings.pdf [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 52. On Pentagon Strike, see Morello, “Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Internet;” on Loose Change, see this chapter’s ﬁnal section. 53. I know of no survey that has been conducted of 9/11 conspiracy Web sites, but a quick glance at some of the most comprehensive links pages from organizational Web sites gives a sense of the staggering number of them. See, for example, “Endorsed Websites,” 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/links. php [last accessed August 20, 2007]; the myriad of links available at “news,” 911blogger.com, http://911blogger.com/ [last accessed August 20, 2007] (in a frame on the left-hand side of the Web page), as well as the numerous Web logs that are agglomerated on that site at “blogs,” 911blogger.com, http://911blogger. com/blog. 54. “911Truth.org: An Overview,” 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/ article.php?story=20061014120445472 (August 26, 2004) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 55. Paul Deslauriers (compiler and editor), “9/11 Truth Community Hub Manual,” 911Truth.org, http://www.911truthgroups.org/Articles/tabid/1307/ articleType/ArticleView/articleId/87/911-Truth-Community-Hub-Manual.aspx (May 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 56. An illustrative example is the effort to construct a regional network of truth groups from the already-formed local groups in New England and the mid-Atlantic region. See “Welcome to Northeast 9/11 Truth,” http://ne911truth.org/ [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 57. David Ray Grifﬁn, The 9/11 Commission: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, MA: 2005). By the time of the ﬁfth anniversary of 9/11, New Pearl Harbor claimed sales of over 100,000 copies without a review in a major newspaper. Michael Powell, “The Disbelievers: 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists Are Building Their Case Against the Government From Ground Zero,” Washington Post, September 8, 2006, C1. 58. Powell, “The Disbelievers.” 59. Grifﬁn, The New Pearl Harbor, xvii–xviii. Eric Hufschmid, author of the book Painful Questions and then the video documentary that followed from it, Painful Deceptions, tells a similar tale: He was a software designer from Santa Barbara who immediately accepted the ofﬁcial account and mocked conspiracy theorists. “Then I started looking at it. It was obvious something was wrong at the time. They looked like they’d been blown up.” Then, after being ignored by experts from whom he sought explanations for the anomalies he could see in video footage and photographs that indicated that the Pentagon was not hit by a passenger plane and the plane collisions did not cause the World Trade Center towers’ collapse, he began his research (Murphy, “The Seekers”). Whether Hufschmid is honest in this personal narrative might be called into question by his Web site, which includes content that is virulently anti-Semitic and denies the Holocaust; after he had played a key role as an early 9/11 conspiracy theorist (he is cited prominently in Grifﬁn’s books and in the documentary 9/11 Mysteries), many in the truth movement allege that he is in fact an agent provocateur. See the various Web pages on his Web site http:// www.erichufschmid.net/index.html [last accessed September 1, 2007]; for the truth movement’s response, see, for example, “Eric Hufschmid Loses His Mind!” discussion

348

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

on Let’s Roll! Forums, http://www.letsrollforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=123 32&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 [last accessed September 1, 2007]. 60. John Gravois, “Professors of Paranoia? Academics give a scholarly stamp to 9/11 conspiracy theories,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2006, A10. 61. The paper was originally posted to the Internet in November 2005 and is now available for download from the Journal of 9/11 Studies, an online journal originally started by the Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Dr. Steven E. Jones, “Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse?,” Journal of 9/11 Studies 3 (September 2006), http://www.journalof911studies.com/ [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 62. Alan Feuer, “500 Conspiracy Buffs Meet To Seek the Truth of 9/11,” New York Times, June 5, 2006; John Gravois, “Professors of Paranoia? Academics Give a Scholarly Stamp to 9/11 Conspiracy Theories,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 23, 2006, A10. 63. Jim Marrs, The Terror Conspiracy (New York: Disinformation), xi–xiv. 64. Webster Grifﬁn Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press, 4th ed., 2007), 6. 65. Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2004), 8–17. Ruppert claims that he has been targeted for harassment by the CIA and the mainstream left, and has been threatened physically and had his ofﬁces attacked as a result (298–304). 66. Jones is described in detail at his Web site, http://www.infowars.com/ alexjones.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]. His documentaries on the Bohemian Grove, an annual exclusive meeting of elites in northern California, and Yale’s secret Skull & Bones society are called, respectively, Dark Secret: Inside Bohemian Grove and The Order of Death and are described at http://www.infowars.com/bg1.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 67. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror, 9. 68. Ruppert’s theory relies on the concept of “peak oil,” which holds that more than half of earth’s oil reserves have been tapped, and that the resulting economic and political crisis will lead the “rulers of the American empire” to ﬁght for scarce resources, control demand for oil through “engineered recessions and wars that break economic resources,” repress dissent while maintaining legitimacy, and “[k]ill off enough of the world’s population so that they can maintain control after oil supplies have dwindled to the point of energy starvation.” The 9/11 attacks were thus a key element in the strategy to manage the peak oil crisis, enabling both imperialistic wars for oil and the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian state. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, 20. Ruppert’s epic book and conspiracy theory also connect the following to the peak oil crisis and 9/11: Vice President Cheney’s secretive National Energy Policy Development Group (43–45); the extraordinary prescience of the conspiracy ﬁlm Three Days of the Condor, which (from the perspective of the mid1970s) based its plot on the geopolitical struggle over depleted resources (49); the CIA’s alleged drug dealing (62–68); the disputed 2000 election (the result of which, he argues, was dictated by the conspiracy’s need to capture oil resources, which Bush and Cheney were more likely to agree to than Gore) (109); the theft of the PROMIS software and, as a footnote, the murder of journalist Danny Casolaro, all of which I discussed in Chapter 5 (152–74); the alleged assassination of Paul Wellstone in a plane crash (279–90); allegations about an “October Surprise” that enabled

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

349

Ronald Reagan to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election (451–53); and allegations that then-governor Bill Clinton aided CIA drug running (459–60). 69. Marrs, The Terror Conspiracy, 148–49. At the furthest end of implausible speculative claims is David Icke, a British writer who connects the 9/11 attacks to his existing body of work on the Illuminati and the ruling families whose long-existing bloodlines connect the present to the secret societies of ancient time, and, ultimately, to the extraterrestrial reptilians who in fact control the controllers. David Icke, Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster (Wildwood, MO: Bridge of Love Publications, 2002). Another speculative theory that is much more widely accepted in the truth movement holds that no planes hit the Twin Towers. Morgan Reynolds, an academic who had served as chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor during George W. Bush’s ﬁrst term, claims that videos of the collision between the planes and the WTC towers show “impossible physics” and a “butter-smooth entry,” which indicates that “someone tampered with the pixels.” Morgan Reynolds and Rick Ratjer, “Some Holes in the Plane Story,” in The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America, ed. Fetzer, 143–70, 163. 70. For a history of the organization, written by its founder, see James Fetzer, “Wikipedia: What It Doesn’t Say,” http://www.911scholars.org/ArticlesWikipedia. html (n.d., probably mid-2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. A less formal listing of “professors” (not all of those listed are in fact academics, much less tenured or tenure-track academics) who have publicly questioned the ofﬁcial 9/11 account, some through active involvement in one of the ofﬁcial “Scholars” groups or by simply signing an on-line petition, appears at http://patriotsquestion911.com/ professors.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]. The Web site also lists members of other professions who have raised conspiracy concerns about 9/11, including military, intelligence service, and law enforcement ofﬁcials, engineers and architects, pilots and aviation professionals, and entertainment and media professionals. 71. Mike Mosedale, “The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much,” [Minneapolis] City Pages, June 28, 2006. 72. State legislatures led the efforts to discipline or ﬁre two of the three academics, one of whom is a tenured professor (the other is a part-time instructor). Scott Brooks, “UNH Stands Behind 9/11 Prof,” Manchester (NH) Union Leader, August 29, 2006, A1; Jodi S. Cohen, “Teacher’s 9/11 Views Irk Lawmakers: Legislators Want U. of Wisconsin to Fire Instructor of Class on Islam,” Chicago Tribune, August 2, 2006, C-3. In Jones’s case, his own institution placed him on leave as a result of his 9/11-related work, and he ultimately agreed to an early retirement beginning in January 2007. Jane R. Porter, “Brigham Young U. Puts Physicist on Leave Over Statements About 9/11,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2006, 13; Will Sullivan, “BYU Takes on a 9/11 Conspiracy Professor,” U.S. News & World Report, September 11, 2006; Tad Walch, “BYU Professor in Dispute over 9/11 Will Retire,” Deseret News, October 21, 2006. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some suggested that Jones’s troubles might have been caused by “a certain Mormon presence in the FBI and the CIA.” Sullivan, “BYU takes on a 9/11 conspiracy professor.” 73. This is reﬂected especially on Michael Ruppert’s Web sites, which attacks the “pod people” who hypothesize the existence of “pods” lodged on Flight 175 (see “Pod People Hijack the 9/11 Truth Movement,” http://www.oilempire.us/pod.html) [last accessed August 20, 2007] and those like David Ray Grifﬁn who suggest that something other than a plane crashed into the Pentagon (see “David Ray Grifﬁn: Still

350

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

Promotes ‘No Plane’ Hoax, Trusts Holocaust Deniers,” http://www.oilempire.us/ grifﬁn.html) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 74. Scholars for Truth and Justice, “The Destruction of the World Trade Center,” http://stj911.org/hypotheses/alternative.html (n.d.) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 75. James H. Fetzer, “Scholars: On Its First Anniversary,” November 25, 2006, http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/ScholarsAnniversary.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]. To encourage interaction and respect among researchers holding different theories, Fetzer planned a conference in the summer of 2007 called “The First Scholars for 9/11 Truth Conference: The Science of 9/11: What’s Controversial, What’s Not,” which would mediate disputes over the methods by which the towers fell. Announcing the conference, Fetzer wrote: “My hope is that by subjecting each others’ research to rigorous but collegial criticism, the attention-getting controversial aspects of 9/11 research may be turned into a beneﬁt, rather than a distraction, in the larger process of seeking and exposing the truth about 9/11 and gaining an adequate scientiﬁc understanding of how all of this was done.” http:// 911inquiry.org/911scholars_conf_2007.htm [last accessed August 20, 2007]. On the acrimony that developed between the two organizations, and especially between Jones and Fetzer, see Jim Fetzer, “More in Sorrow Than in Anger,” http://911scholars. org/SorrowAnger.html (January 4, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; “Jim Fetzer Responds to Steve Jones,” http://911scholars.org/FetzerRespondsJones.html (December 9, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. Conﬂicts within local organizations demonstrate many of the same dynamics as these high-proﬁle splits within national organizations, but can also occur as a result of more speciﬁc concerns. In early 2007, for example, the NY911Truth organization split apart over charges of ﬁnancial impropriety and control over the organization’s administration and e-mail lists. “We Are NY911Truth,” “We Are Change” Web site, http://www.wearechange. org/ny911truth/index.html (March 26, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. In response, the NY911Truth organization posted on its Web site the statement, “Group Clariﬁcation: NY 911 Truth is not afﬁliated with CHANGE or NYC 911 Truth, which often holds meetings claiming they are us. We regret their attempts to confuse the public. This is the site where actual NY 911 Truth events and activities are listed.” “NY 9/11 Truth,” http://www.ny911truth.org/ [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 76. Jim Hoffman, “The Pentagon No-757-Crash Theory: Booby Trap for 9/11 Skeptics, http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pentagontrap.html (revised version, November 15, 2004) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 77. See, for example, truth911.net, “COINTELPRO—Has 9/11 Truth been inﬁltrated?,” posted December 1, 2006, http://www.911blogger.com/node/4765 [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 78. “Disinformation: Infiltration, Misinformation, Disruption,” http:// www.truthmove.org/content/disinformation/ (n.d.) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 79. Emanuel Sferios, “9/11 Five Years Later: What Have We Accomplished? An Assessment of the 9/11 Truth Movement,” http://www.septembereleventh.org/ ﬁve_years_later.php (posted September 11, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; Joel Skousen, “Debunking the Debunkers,” World Affairs Brief, February 14, 2005, available at http://www.rense.com/general62/deun.htm [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 80. For a summary, see “Personal Attacks Against Jim Hoffman,” http:// 911research.wtc7.net/re911/adhominem.html (revised version, December 28, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007].

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

351

81. Victoria Ashley, “Steven E. Jones, A Physics Professor Speaks Out on 9-11: Reason, Publicity, and Reaction,” http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/jones/ StevenJones.html (version 1.0, January 14, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; see also “Information Warfare: Ideas as Weapons in the Era of Deception,” 9-11 Review, http://911review.com/infowars.html (revised February 25, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007] (describing the no-planes theories as “poison pills that have no basis in evidence and serve to discredit evidence-based research about the core facts of the attack through guilt-by-association”). 82. “Two Movements: The 9/11 Truth vs. 9/11 Speculation Movements,”TruthMove, http://www.truthmove.org/forum/topic/250 (n.d.) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; 83. For a description of the organizer (who was removed from his position after his Holocaust revisionism was revealed), see Stephen Lemons, “Liar’s Poker: Eric Williams and the Chandler 9/11 conference,” Phoenix New Times blogs, http:// blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2007/02/liars_poker_eric_williams_and.php (February 26, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; for a worried response to this news from within the truth movement, see Devler’s Blog, “Eric D. Williams: 9/11 Accountability Conference Director and Holocaust Revisionist!?,” http:// www.911blogger.com/node/5916 (February 1, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]; and for an example of how this association between 9/11 conspiracy theories and holocaust denial was then used by someone opposed to the truth movement, see “Phoenix 911 Denier’s Conference,” 911 Truthiness Blog, http://www.motorsportsartist.com/911truthiness/?p=54 (February 2, 2007) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 84. Michael C. Ruppert, “Hey Charlie Sheen, Wake Up! There Are Good Reasons Why 9/11 is Having Its 15 Minutes of Fame Now – Look at Who’s In the Spotlight,” From the Wilderness, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/033006_charlie_ sheen.shtml (March 30, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 85. On the fear of surveillance, see, for example, Paul Joseph Watson, “9/11 Truth Movement Needs Legal Action Group,” Prison Planet.com, http:// www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2006/120906legalaction.htm (September 12, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 86. Christopher Hayes, “9/11: The Roots of Paranoia,” The Nation, December 25, 2006, 11; Matthew Rothschild, “Enough Conspiracy Theories, Already,” The Progressive, October 2006, 39; Terry J. Allen, “The 9/11 Faith Movement,” In These Times, July 2006, 45; Alexander Cockburn, “The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts: How They Let the Guilty Parties of 9/11 Slip Off the Hook,” Counterpunch, September 9–10, 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09092006.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]; Noam Chomsky, “9-11: Institutional Analysis vs. Conspiracy Theory,” ZNet Blogs, http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2779 (posted October 6, 2006) [last accessed August 20, 2007]. The institutional left’s spurning of the truth movement has caused the latter signiﬁcant frustration, which its members take out in letters to the magazines and comments on Web sites. The Nation claims to have received more mail “than almost any Nation article in memory” for Christopher Hayes’s critical article, while as of early August 2007, the 2006 In These Times article critical of the 9/11 truth movement had attracted over 1900 comments on the magazine’s Web site, many of them abusive denunciations of the article’s author. “Letters: 9/11: The Jury’s Still Out,” The Nation, February 5, 2007, 2; http://www.inthesetimes.com/

352

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

article/2702/ [last accessed August 20, 2007]. See also John McMurtry, “Explaining the Inexplicable,” in The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America, ed. Fetzer, 221–89, 279 n. 40 (complaining about censure by Michael Albert and the radical left Z Magazine group for failing to employ the structural, institutional analysis that the left favors). 87. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 25, 29–30. Citations to this book that follow in this section will be in parentheses in the text. 88. Gail Russell Chaddock, “A Key Force Behind the 9/11 Commission,” Christian Science Monitor, March 25, 2004, 3. 89. Mimi Hall, “9/11 Commission Seeking out the Spotlight,” USA Today, May 18, 2004, 15a. 90. The professions from which the Commissioners were to be chosen included “government service, law enforcement, the armed services, law, public administration, intelligence gathering, commerce (including aviation matters), and foreign affairs.” Pub. L. No. 107-306, §§ 601(b)(1)–(3), 603(a). 91. Seven of the eleven commissioners (including both Max Cleland, who resigned as Commissioner to take a position in the Export-Import Bank, and Bob Kerrey, who replaced him, as well as Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, Timothy Roemer, Slade Gorton, and James Thompson) had been elected ofﬁcials, all but two of them in the U.S. Congress. (Kean and Thompson had served as governor.) Of the remaining four commissioners, John Lehman had served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, while Jamie Gorelick, Richard Ben-Veniste, and Fred Fielding had all served as attorneys in prominent positions either for presidents, important Congressional committees, or, in Ben-Veniste’s case, as chief of the Watergate Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Ofﬁce, and at the time of their nomination, all three were partners in the Washington ofﬁces of major law ﬁrms. 92. May, “When Government Writes History.” 93. On the suspicion with which the victims’ families viewed Zelikow, see Kristen Breitweiser, Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow (New York: Warner Books, 2006), 145–51; Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 27–28, 98. Zelikow would later return to the administration as counselor to Secretary of State Rice when she moved over to head the State Department during Bush’s second term; although while there, he earned a reputation as a contrary, realist voice in an administration that had adopted an interventionist, neoconservative foreign policy following 9/11. Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger, “Rice’s Counselor Gives Advice Others May Not Want to Hear,” New York Times, October 28, 2006, A1. Not everyone agreed that Zelikow was a contrarian; for an argument that he was, more than anything, a Rice loyalist, see Observer, “Zelikow’s Days as a True Believer,” Financial Times, November 29, 2006, 14. He also established some degree of independence from the Bush administration and, by implication, Rice: he delivered a speech while he was in the State Department to the Washington Institute on Near East Policy that “alarmed pro-Israel groups” by arguing in favor of American efforts to push for a resolution to Arab-Israeli conﬂict, and shortly thereafter resigned his position under Rice; and after his resignation he gave a public address in which he strongly criticized the administration’s torture policy. Glenn Kessler, “Close Adviser to Rice Plans to Resign; The Sometimes Controversial Zelikow Leaving at a Challenging Time for Secretary,” Washington Post, November 28, 2006, A4; Stuart Taylor Jr., “How Not to Make Terrorism Policy,” National Journal, June 2, 2007.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

353

94. Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission (New York: Twelve, 2008), 145–46, 169–74. The book fails, however, to demonstrate that but for Zelikow’s involvement, the Commission’s ﬁnal report would have offered a less partisan and more thorough account of the attacks; moreover, Shenon frequently concedes throughout the book that if Zelikow was entirely a puppet of the White House, he frequently worked against his master’s interests by hiring an excellent, professional staff (86), pushing hard to declassify documents and limit redactions of the Commission’s ﬁnal report (408–10), and ultimately allowing the ﬁnal report to note that the Commission uncovered no ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, a key contention for the Bush administration’s efforts to support the war in Iraq (380). 95. 9/11 Commission Report, xvi. 96. In order for the Commission to issue a subpoena, either the (Republicanappointed) chairman and (Democrat-appointed) vice chairman must have agreed to authorize its issuance, or six Commission members must have voted for issuance, which would by deﬁnition mean that at least one appointee from each party would vote in favor. See Pub. L. No. 107-306, § 605(a)(2)(A)(i). This requirement extended to the Commission’s authority to forward facts about a recalcitrant witness to a United States attorney, which required a majority vote of commissioners. §605(a)(2)(B)(ii). 97. Dan Eggen, “9/11 Panel Issues Third Subpoena; New York Told to Turn Over Tapes of Emergency Calls,” Washington Post, November 21, 2003, A16. 98. See also Tom Nugent, “Inside the 9/11 Commission: Tim Roemer, ’79, spent two years on the 9/11 Commission. He discusses what it was like to play a key role in the high-pressure, high-visibility public hearings,” @UCSD: An Alumni Publication, January 2005, http://alumni.ucsd.edu/magazine/vol2no1/features/commission.htm [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 99. An example of the political world in which the Commission operated: Attorney General John Ashcroft, attempting preemptively to defend himself against charges of inattention to terrorism, selectively declassiﬁed and released memos suggesting that Commissioner Jamie Gorelick had contributed to the attacks’ likelihood by implementing a wall against communication between the CIA and the FBI during the Clinton Administration, when she worked as a Deputy Attorney General. This led to calls by Republican members of Congress and conservative journalists for her resignation from the Commission, at once suggesting both that the Commission was partisan and that it was simply part of Washington’s rough and tumble political scene. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 194–203. 100. See also May, “When Government Writes History.” 101. Dan Eggen, “9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon,” Washington Post, August 2, 2006, A3. For a more sympathetic portrayal for NORAD’s performance on 9/11, see Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Vanity Fair, September 2006, 262. 102. Bob Woodward, “Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice,” Washington Post, October 1, 2006, A17; Philip Shenon, “Sept. 11 Panel Wasn’t Told of Meeting, Members Say,” Washington Post, October 2, 2006. The same brieﬁng was reportedly also given to Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at Rice’s request. Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel, and John Walcott, “Rumsfeld, Ashcroft said to have received warning of attack,” Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, October 2, 2006.

354

|

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

103. Jim Dwyer, “Part of 9/11 Report Remains Unreleased; An Inquiry Is Begun,” New York Times, October 30, 2004; the earlier versions and a brief explanation of the two different versions are available at http://www.archives.gov/ research/9-11-commission/ [last accessed August 20, 2007]. See also statement of Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, “Emerging Threats: Overclassiﬁcation and Pseudo-Classiﬁcation,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations of the House Committee on Government Reform, 109th Congress (March 2, 2005). 104. 9/11 Commission Report, xv. 105. For an institutional account of the Commission’s Report, see Oz Frankel, “The 9/11 Commission Report as a Chapter in the History of the Book,” paper delivered to the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, Minneapolis, MN, July 2007. 106. 9/11 Commission Report, 1. 107. On the Commission’s stylistic choices for its Report, see Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 272–74, and Ernest May, “When Government Writes History: A Memoir of the 9/11 Commission,” New Republic, May 23, 2005. 108. Alison Young, “Images in the Aftermath of Trauma: Responding to September 11th,” Crime Media Culture 3 (2007): 30–48. 109. The Commission’s unwillingness to assess individual blame proved to be its most controversial decision among its academic critics. See Charles Perrow, “Organizational or Executive Failures?,” Contemporary Sociology 34 (2005): 99–107; Richard Posner, Preventing Surprise Attacks (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littleﬁeld, 2005), 85–86, 103–8; and Joshua Rovner and Austin Long, “The Perils of Shallow Theory: Intelligence Reform and the 9/11 Commission,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence (2005), 609–37. 110. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 327–46. 111. Grifﬁn’s New Pearl Harbor, which was published during the Commission’s investigation, indicates both the movement’s hopes and skepticism about the Commission’s work, and many of his criticisms about the Commission’s operations and personnel appeared ﬁrst in this earlier book before being reiterated in his book that focused solely on the Commission’s Report. Grifﬁn, New Pearl Harbor, 149–56, 166–67, 192–96. The anger and bitterness with which 9/11 conspiracy Web sites and, later, books have met the Commission’s Report indicates just how much the community initially invested in the Commission, and how the Commission’s general refusal to consider conspiracy theories and the evidence upon which they are based frustrated the community. 112. The ﬂoat was created by San Francisco Bay Area activists and was used for their protest marches. A series of photographs taken during a January 2007 march through San Francisco is available at http://www.communitycurrency.org/9-11.html [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 113. David Ray Grifﬁn, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005). Parenthetical page citations in this section refer to this book. 114. Grifﬁn, The 9/11 Commission Report, 284–86. 115. New York Times reporter Philip Shenon’s The Commission, which claims to offer an “uncensored history” of the 9/11 Commission and to document Zelikow’s close and ongoing ties to the Bush administration, might be seen as conﬁrming

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

|

355

Grifﬁn’s arguments (which Grifﬁn had made prior to the publication of Shenon’s book). As Grifﬁn notes in his review of the book, however, Shenon characterizes Zelikow’s motives as merely pro-Republican partisanship, support for his friends in the Bush administration, and an attempt to cover up and support the work he had previously performed for the administration. Grifﬁn declares Shenon’s book to be “great” for uncovering the Zelikow–Bush administration connection, but a “terrible failure” for refusing to see that connection as a means to cover up the administration’s role in the attacks, as well as for refusing to consult Grifﬁn’s own work in debunking the Commission’s Report. “David Ray Grifﬁn on Philip Shenon’s book, The Commission,” 9/11blogger.com, http://www.911blogger.com/node/14450 [last accessed April 10, 2008]. 116. Marrs, Terror Conspiracy, 156. 117. Grifﬁn alleges that the president appointed Zelikow when the statute creating the Commission vested that power in the chairman (in consultation with the vice chairman). See Grifﬁn, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 284) Pub. L. No. 107-306, § 607(a). Kean and Hamilton describe the choice as theirs. Without Precedent, 27–28. Jim Marrs claims that Bush appointed Hamilton, but the statute vested that power in the Democratic leader in the Senate, who at the time was Tom Daschle, who indeed appointed Hamilton after George Mitchell, former Democratic senator from Maine, resigned at the same time and for the same reason as Henry Kissinger resigned the chairmanship. See Marrs, Terror Conspiracy, 154; Pub. L. No. 107-306, § 603(a)(2); Without Precedent, 12. All of these are mere details, of course. 118. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, 450. 119. Fetzer, “Thinking About ‘Conspiracy Theories,’” 48–55; Marrs, Terror Conspiracy, 150–52. 120. Peter Dale Scott, “The JFK Assassination and 9/11,” in The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America, ed. Fetzer, 195–220. Scott, an emeritus English professor at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, is a leading conspiracy researcher whose earlier book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) solidiﬁed his position as a preeminent academic with ties to the conspiracy community. 121. See, for example, the mission statement of 911truth.org, which lists exposing “the ofﬁcial lies and cover-up,” promoting and providing reporting and research, seeking “justice and redress” for those harmed and wronged on 9/11, advancing insight into the conspiracy that organized 9/11 and other social and political ills, and ultimately “to end . . . the regime that made 9/11 happen; and to replace the system that made 9/11 necessary.” Missing from these missions is any further governmentsponsored effort to investigate the attacks. http://www.911truth.org/article.php? story=20061014120445472#mission [last accessed August 20, 2007]. Some Web sites, such as the patriotsquestion911.com site, still call for a new independent and impartial investigation, but these are rarer today than they were in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 Commission and the release of its Report. “Patriots Question 9/11-Responsible Criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report,” http:// patriotsquestion911.com/#NewInvestigation [last accessed August 20, 2007]. 122. This information on Avery and Loose Change is based on “Loose Change Website–Version 2.0–Company,” http://www.loosechange911.com/company. htm#dylan [last accessed September 1, 2007]; Jonathan Curiel, “The Conspiracy

356

|

NOTES TO AFTERWORD

to Rewrite 9/11: Conspiracy Theorists Insists the U.S. Government, not Terrorists, Staged the Devastating Attacks,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 3, 2006. E-1; Farhad Manjoo, “The 9/11 Deniers,” Salon.com, June 27, 2006, http://www.salon.com/ ent/feature/2006/06/27/911_conspiracies/ [last accessed August 31, 2007]; Ed Pilkington, “‘They’re All Forced to Listen to Us,’” The Guardian (U.K.), January 26, 2007, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1998430,00.html [last accessed August 31, 2007], Nancy Jo Sales, “Click Here for Conspiracy,” Vanity Fair, August 2006. 123. A new version of the ﬁlm, Loose Change Final Cut was released in late 2007, after the manuscript for this book had been submitted to the publisher. This section is based upon the “Recut” version of Loose Change Second Edition. Although Final Cut appears to differ considerably from the version of the ﬁlm discussed here, the ﬁlm had its greatest impact in its second edition and during the 2005–6 period, when interest in 9/11 conspiracies and the truth movement appeared to peak. 124. B. Ruby Rich, “Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 108–15. 125. Debunking 9/11 Myths, ed. David Dunbar and Brad Reagan. For examples of Web sites, see Mark Roberts, “Loose Change Guide,” http://www.loosechangeguide. com/LooseChangeGuide.html [last accessed September 1, 2007]; Internet Detectives Group, “Loose Change—Internet Detectives,” http://internetdetectives.biz/case/ loose-change [last accessed August 20, 2007]. “Screw Loose Change,” a Web log operated by Pat Curley, chronicles news about the ﬁlm and the truth movement generally. http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/ [last accessed September 1, 2007]; see also Stephen Lemons, “The Yoda of 9/11,” Phoenix New Times, http:// www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2007-08-09/news/the-yoda-of-9-11/ (posted August 9, 2007) [last accessed September 1, 2007]. 126. Michael B. Green, 9-11Research, “Loose Change: An Analysis,” http:// 911research.wtc7.net/essays/green/loose_change.html (posted August 3, 2005) [last accessed, August 31, 2007]. 127. Manjoo, “The 9/11 Deniers.”

Afterword 1. Andrew MacDonald [William Pierce], The Turner Diaries (Arlington, VA: National Vanguard Books, 1978). 2. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 79; James Coates, Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right (New York: Noonday Press, 1987); Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood (New York: Free Press, 1989); David A. Neiwert, In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Paciﬁc Northwest (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1999), 57–59; and James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, 2d ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995). 3. For examples of similar—though not “ﬁctional”—texts, see the historical and current tracts from white racist groups collected in Extremism in America, ed. Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 115–90. An exemplary study of the racist right is Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist

NOTES TO AFTERWORD

|

357

Right, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); see also the discussion of the racist right and works referenced in chapter 2. 4. James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). On the use of The Turner Diaries as a recruiting tool for Soldier of Fortune readers, see Philip Lamy, Millennium Rage (New York: Plenum Press, 1996), 129–30, and Gibson, Warrior Dreams, 212–13. On the use of The Turner Diaries by one white supremacist terror group as a treatise on terrorist tactics, see Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Silent Brotherhood (New York: Free Press, 1989), 174. 5. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 141. 6. This is one of the bases for Jon Beasley-Murray’s trenchant critique of Ernesto Laclau’s theoretical work on populism, as well as of the adoption of Laclau’s work by cultural studies scholars as a basis for their championing of popular resistance. Beasley-Murray argues that the concept of hegemony that underlies Laclau’s conception of populism both universalizes populism within an abstract, ahistorical frame and has abandoned the study of the state and power in favor of an ill-conceived obsession with “hegemonic struggle” from below. See Jon Beasley-Murray, “On Populist Reason,” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006), 362; Jon Beasley-Murray, “Peronism and the Secret History of Cultural Studies: Populism and the Substitution of Culture for the State,” Cultural Critique 39 (1998), 189. Unlike Beasley-Murray, however, I think Laclau’s approach to populism does not preclude a more historical and institutional consideration of populism and its relation to the state—although I would agree with Beasley-Murray that it does require one to commit both to a Gramscian theory of hegemony and a descriptive claim that this theory continues to explain contemporary politics, two commitments that he rejects. In addition to my discussion in chapter 7 of the 9/11 Commission, I am pursuing a larger project to reconsider the administrative and legal concept of “transparency” as a means to study how the state and the contemporary neoliberal economic order respond to popular democratic challenges to the state’s legitimacy. For an early version of this project, see Mark Fenster, “The Opacity of Transparency,” Iowa Law Review 91 (2006), 885. 7. John Fiske, “Cultural Studies and the Study of Everyday Life,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 161; John Fiske, “Popular Discrimination,” in Modernity and Mass Culture, ed. James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 115; John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987), 358. 8. John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 191–216. 9. Regina Austin, “Beyond Black Demons and White Devils: Antiblack Conspiracy Theorizing and the Black Public Sphere,” Florida State University Law Review 22 (1995), 1021. A rare quantitative social science study on belief in conspiracy theory, performed in southwestern New Jersey in April 1992, found that blacks (and to a lesser degree Hispanics) believed in conspiracy theory to a greater degree than whites. See Ted Goertzel, “Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” Political Psychology 15, no. 4 (November 1994): 731–42. 10. Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

358

|

NOTES TO AFTERWORD

11. Michael Eric Dyson, “Haunted by Conspiracy,” New York Times, January 27, 1995, A15. 12. Angela P. Harris, “Vultures in Eagles’ Clothing: Conspiracy and Racial Fantasy in Populist Legal Thought,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 10 (2005): 269. 13. Fiske, Media Matters, 192. 14. Fiske, Media Matters, 216. 15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 124. 16. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 124. 17. Jack Z. Bratich, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 114–21. 18. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 130–40. 19. Jodi Dean also makes this argument quite powerfully and persuasively in Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 163. 20. This point is also made by Austin, “Beyond Black Demons and White Devils,” 1039–44, and, more thoroughly, by Bratich, Conspiracy Panics, 114–17. 21. For a discussion of the ideological processes of articulation and closure within “chains of equivalence,” see Ernesto Laclau, “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology,” Modern Language Notes 112 (1997): 320. 22. The assumption that The Turner Diaries and similar literature are pitched to white working-class readers, and especially to rural males, is made in Joel Dyer, Harvest of Rage (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 150–51. 23. This critique should not be read as an attempt to demonstrate Fiske’s “relativism,” in the sense that one scholar recently blamed the rise of Holocaust revisionism as at least in part the result of poststructuralist theory’s presumed assault on truth. See Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1993), 17–19. Rather than being relativist—indeed, Fiske would ﬁrmly assert that black counterknowledge is a search for a truth that is deeply hidden but may still be recoverable—his theory suffers from ill-deﬁned terms and concepts that are resistant to speciﬁc historical and social contexts. 24. On the appropriation of “white” conspiracy theories by blacks, see Peter Noel’s account of vendors at meetings of the United African Movement in Harlem who sold white far-right–wing author A. Ralph Epperson’s The Unseen Hand (Tucson, AZ: Publius Press, 1985) alongside black nationalist books. Peter Noel, “No Whites Allowed,” Village Voice, March 18, 1997, 50, 53. 25. The Nation of Islam sponsored a widely discredited study claiming that Jews have dominated the African slave trade and exploited blacks throughout American history. On the study and its refutation, see Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1998) and Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). On the long history of anti-Semitism in the Nation of Islam, see Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999). 26. Martha F. Lee, “Nesta Webster: The Voice of Conspiracy,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 3 (2005): 81–104. Webster, a leading British conspiracy theorist whose writings on the near-omnipotence of secret societies have long been inﬂuential among the John Birch Society and other far-right–wing groups, bridled against traditional gender roles.

NOTES TO AFTERWORD

|

359

27. Matt Wray, “Apocalyptic Masculinities,” paper presented at Discerning the Right conference, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, March 1996, 21. 28. Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xx–xxii. 29. See Richard Dellamora’s use of Kantian notions of the sublime to describe responses to the AIDS epidemic, which he characterizes as a combination of fascination and paralyzing dread. This response, he argues, enables the assertion of regressive constituted authorities, yet can also motivate organized efforts to understand the conditions that produce the sublime itself (Apocalyptic Overtures [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994], 14–16). 30. See Angela Harris’s comparison and contrast of critical race theorists in legal academia to the protagonists of conspiracy ﬁction. Angela P. Harris, “Afterword: Other Americas,” Michigan Law Review 95 (1997): 1158.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

700 Club (television show), 203, 220, 333 n.24 9/11 Commission, 233–38, 246; account of 9/11 attacks, 238–39; comparison to Warren Commission, 234–36, 242, 244, 264, 267, 268; concern about 9/11 conspiracy theories, 234–35, 256, 268; efforts to appear legitimate, 255–56; elite composition of, 257–58, 266, 352 n.91; history of, 255–64; investigation by, 258–60, 352 n.96; public reception of, 235–36 9/11 Commission Report, 235, 246, 260–68, 278; ﬂaws of, 238, 354 n.109; narratives in, 260–64 9/11 conspiracy theories, 233–78, 280; belief in, 243–45, 341 n.11, 343–44 n.29, 344 n.30, 344 n.32, 344–45 n.33; books, 160; critique of 9/11 Commission, 246–47, 264–68, 278; debunkers of, 238, 269, 341 n.15, 356 n.125; early versions of, 245; interpretive practices of, 239, 266–67; leftist critique of, 43–44, 46, 254, 342 n.17, 351 n.86; motives of conspirators, speculation about, 241, 265–66; narratives of, 266–67; rhetoric of, 241–43; summary of, 239–41; Web sites about, 245,

247–49. See also 9/11 truth movement 9/11 truth movement, 106–07, 245–55, 278, 288; conferences, 248–49, 250, 254, 350 n.75; debates within, 251–55; fear of inﬁltration by agents provocateurs, 252–54; local activism in, 247–48, 350 n.75. See also Scholars for 9/11 Truth; Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice 911truth.org (Web site), 247, 355 n.121 A-albionic Research, 98, 160 abortion and anti-abortion protest, 55–56, 87 Adams, Ken, 73 Adorno, Theodor, 315 n.36 Agassi, Joseph, 312 n.3 Ahmed, Nafeez, 246 Aho, James, 56–57, 70 AIDS conspiracy theories. See HIV/ AIDS conspiracy theories Albert, Michael, 45 All the President’s Men, 108, 125 American Jewish Committee, 74, 75, 77. See also Stern, Kenneth American Revolution, 9, 54 anti-Catholicism, 33, 159 anti-Semitism, 56, 78, 89, 108, 200, 283, 287

361

362

|

INDEX

Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (“AEDPA”), 66–67, 80, 81, 309 n.34 Apocalypse Culture, 155, 156 Arditi, Benjamin, 86, 88 Aryan Nations, 308 n.17 Ashcroft, John, 272, 353 n.99, 353 n.102 assassinations: Kennedy, John F., vii, 43, 60, 106, 108, 127, 129–30, 169–70, 172, 179, 189, 243–44, 280, 345 n.35; Kennedy, Robert, 127, 189, 244; King, Jr., Martin Luther, vii, 127, 130, 244, 282; Malcolm X, 282 Austin, Regina, 295 n.30, 357 n.9 Avery, Dylan, 269, 275, 277–78. See also Loose Change (ﬁlm) Bailyn, Bernard, 294 n.22, 295 n.27 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 328 n.48 Baldwin, Craig, 121, 151–53 Bale, Jeffrey, 295 n.29 Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), 100, 188 Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), 188, 318 n.7 Barkun, Michael, 296 n.28, 307 n.13, 311 n.50, 335 n.33 356 n.2, 356–57 n.3 Barr, William, 185 Barruel, Abbé Augustin, 165, 295 n.25 Barthes, Roland, 123–25, 322–23 n.57 Baucus, Max, 63 Baudrillard, Jean, 315 n.31 Bay of Pigs, 130 Beam, Louis, 76 Beard, Charles A., 27, 49 Beasley-Murray, Jon, 357 n.6 Bell, Daniel, 33, 299 n.36 Ben-Veniste, Richard, 260, 352 n.91 Berlet, Chip, 44–48, 89, 187; compared to Richard Hofstadter, 45; criticism of 9/11 conspiracy theories, 44 Berubé, Michael, 314 n.22 Bewes, Timothy, 328 n.52 biblical prophecy. See eschatology Bin Laden, Osama, 184, 238, 259, 267, 273, 274, 278 Birchall, Claire, 291 n.1, 325 n.10

Bob Roberts (ﬁlm), 119 Bohemian Grove, 250, 346 n.43, 348 n.66 Bordwell, David, 318–19 n.12 Boyer, Paul, 204, 231, 335 n.34 “Brady Bill,” 55, 75 Branch Davidians, 55 Branigan, Ed, 318 n.10 Bratich, Jack, 285, 342 n.17 Brennan, William, 309 n.31 Brezhnev, Leonid, 131 Brian, Earl, 184–86 Briggs, Charles, 291 n.1 British Round Table, 97 Brooks, Jack, 185 Brooks, Joanna, 339 n.91 Brooks, Peter, 133, 142 Brown, Dan, 5–7 Brown, David S., 298 n.28 Brown, James (BATF agent), 64–66 Brown, Willie, 272, 274 Bruce, Steve, 331 n.2, 333 n.23 Brussell, Mae, 129, 130, 183, 321 n.33 Bryant, Robert M. (FBI agent), 64–66 Bua, Nicholas J., 185 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), 64–66 Burkett, Larry, 219–21. See also Illuminati, The (novel) Bush, George Herbert Walker, 72, 97, 99, 102, 104 Bush, George W., 25, 104, 233, 241, 243, 245, 247, 248, 254, 258, 259–60, 265, 266, 272, 276, 277, 344 n.31 Canovan, Margaret, 42 Carmichael, Virginia, 318 n.11 Carroll, Gerald A., 321 n.32 Carter, Chris, 323 n.59 Carter, Jimmy, 183 Carter, Paul A., 332 n.16 Caruana, Stephanie, 129–32, 321 n.32 Casolaro, Danny, 125, 162, 182–94; conspiracy community’s interpretation of, 187–88; conspiracy community’s relationship to, 192–94; conspiracy narrative, within, 189–92 Castro, Fidel, 130, 271 Catholic Church, 5–7

INDEX

Cawelti, John G., 319 n.12 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 2–4, 65, 102, 130, 187, 242, 245, 260, 293 n.8 Chancellor Manuscript, The (novel), 125 Chatman, Seymour, 321 n.44 Cheney, Dick, 25, 254, 259–60, 265, 272, 277 Chenoweth, Helen, 57, 80 Chomsky, Noam, 45, 46, 254 Chossudovsky, Michel, 246 Christian Coalition, 15, 203 Christian Constitutionalists, 56–57, 70 Christian Identity, 15, 56, 57, 76 Christian Reconstruction, 209, 336 n.45, 336 n.51 Christianity Today (magazine), 204, 334 n.31 Christic Institute, 190, 301 n.62 Church Commission, 65 Church of the Sub-Genius, 155, 156, 164 Church’s Fried Chicken, 282 Civil War, American, 207 Clancy, Tom, 126 Clarke, John, 244 n.40 Clarke, Richard, 259, 271 Clarke, Steve, 296 n.33, 314 n.23, 326 n.21 Clinton, Bill, 52, 67, 69, 81, 93–94, 96–100, 102, 110, 111–12, 188, 280 Clinton, Hillary, 93, 104, 116 Clinton Chronicles, The (video documentary), 99, 103, 110, 112, 117 Clinton Death List, 100, 105, 114 Clouse, Robert, 209 Coburn, Davin, 233 Cockburn, Alexander, 254, 302 n.76 Cohn, Norman, 40 COINTELPRO, 10 Cold War, 28, 34, 37, 49, 85, 198 Collins, Robert, 298 n.28 Condon, Richard, 151, 324 n.69 conferences, conspiracy, 155–57, 161; 9/11 truth movement, 248–49, 250, 254, 350 n.75; Coalition on Political Association, 161; JFK Lancer, 161; Phenomicon, 155–57; Second Annual Midwest Symposium on Assassination Politics, 326 n.18

|

363

consensus history, 24, 27–30, 42 conspiracy, criminal, 312 n.4 conspiracy, and politics, 9–10 conspiracy “community,” 158–59, 162–63, 286 conspiracy media, 159–63; broadcast media, 160; computer mediated communication, 160–61; print media, 159–60 conspiracy narrative, 7, 118–54; agency within, 122; and desire, 142; and genre, 122–23, 225; and space, 134–35, 138; as comic emplotment, 123; as machinic assemblage, 135; as mechanistic explanation, 123, 199; as reﬂex, 101–02; as tragic emplotment, 124; as utopia, 128; classical, 122–25, 143, 153–54; closure in, 140–42; cognition in, 125–26, 128, 134, 146; excesses in, 138; ﬁctional, 122–24, 141; historical, 122–24, 140–41; history in, 120–21; incoherence in, 121, 133; movement in, 132–40; narrative pivot in, 124–25, 135–36, 137–40; simpliﬁcation in, 121, 122, 133; speed of, 133–35, 138; subversion of, 150–54; velocity of, 134–35, 142. See also 9/11 conspiracy theories; Casolaro, Danny; eschatology, popular; JFK (ﬁlm); X-Files, The (television series) Conspiracy Nation (Web site), 160 conspiracy theory: African-Americans’ beliefs in, 2–4, 10–11, 70–71, 357 n.9; affect in, 110, 113; and gender, 38–40; and laughter, 180; and pleasure, 110, 157, 177–78; and political activism, 285–89; and time, 103; as carnivalesque, 180–82; as correct, 10–11, 109; as cynicism, 179–80; as desire, 100–03; as endless, 103–05; as ideology, 107–09, 194; as marginal, 1–2; as paranoia, 8–9, 11–12; as paranoid style, 8, 23–42, 95–96; as pathology, 8–9, 11–12, 48, 50, 95, 109; as play, 157, 172–82; as political rhetoric, 10, 32; as populist logic, 84, 89–90; as transgressive, 181–82, 281; as

364

|

INDEX

conspiracy theory (continued) ubiquitous, 1; individual revelation, role of, in, 158, 183; international belief in, 291 n.1; left-progressive critique of, 42–48, 51, 85, 87, 254, 342 n.17, 351 n.86; politics of, 287–88, 342 n.17; race and, 280–87, 357 n.9 (see also conspiracy theory, African-Americans’ beliefs in); social scientiﬁc account of causes, 18–19 Conspiracy Planet (Web site), 160 conspiracy theory, interpretation of, 93–117; and time, 103–05; as abduction, 112–13; as desire, 100–03; as endless, 104–05; as ideological, 107–09; as investment, 111; as paranoid, 95–96; as political practice, 23–24, 83; as production, 110–15; as reﬂex, 101–02; and interpretive chain, 101–02; and interpretive frame, 100–01; details in, 105–07. See also 9/11 conspiracy theories; Casolaro, Danny; eschatology, popular Conspiracy Theory (ﬁlm), 142 Conspiracy Theory Research List (electronic mail group), 160 Contras, Nicaraguan, 2–4, 10, 188 Coughlin, Father Charles, 89 Council on Foreign Relations, 220 Courtès, Joseph, 135–36 crack cocaine, 2–4 Cuba, 271 cultural studies, 281 Cutler, Lloyd, 96–97, 111 Da Vinci Code, The (novel), 5–7, 10 Darby, John Nelson, 207 de Certeau, Michel, 319 n.18 Dean, Jodi, 292 n.3, 296 n.33, 296 n.39, 314 n.26, 345 n.38, 358 n.19 Dees, Morris, 74–81, 82, 310 n.42 Deleuze, Gilles, 110–11, 316 n.45, 316 n.47 Delillo, Don, 151, 153; Libra, 151; Running Dogs, 153 Dellamora, Richard, 359 n.29 Democratic Party, 25, 58, 73, 85

Denning, Michael, 128, 319 n.12, 322 n.49 Diamond, Sara, 335 n.34, 338 n.72 Dick, Philip K., 108 Discordianism, 156, 164; dispensational premillennialism, 202, 205–09, 335 n.37, 336 n.56; history of in the United States, 207–09. See also eschatology; eschatology, popular Dixon, Jeane, 204 Doctorow, E. L., 230 Dominion Theology, 209, 336 n.45 D’Souza, Dinesh, 334 n.28 Duke, Charles, 57, 79 Dunn, John, 26 Durham, Martin, 307 n.13 Durkheim, Émile, 25, 37 Dyrberg, Torben Bech, 301 n.56 Dyson, Michael Eric, 295 n.30, 358 n.11 Eco, Umberto, 112–15; Foucault’s Pendulum (novel), 112, 114–15 Edlam, John, 98 Edwards, Jonathan, 207 electronic mail, 160 Ellroy, James, 131 Ellsberg, Daniel, 130, 188 Emory, Dave, 186, 189 End of the Age, The (novel). See Robertson, Pat Enlightenment rationality, 9 Epperson, A. Ralph, 140–41, 358 n.24 eschatology: belief in, 197–98, 204–05, 331 n.2; beliefs of, 201–05; “futurist” and “historicist,” 208; relationship to fundamentalism, 203–05; types of, 205–06; versus modernist or liberal Protestantism, 201, 207; Zionism of, 226–27. See also dispensational premillennialism; eschatology, popular eschatology, popular, 197–232; and agency, 213–14, 219, 222, 224, 227; and conspiracy theory, 199–200, 209, 220–21, 225, 227–28; and everyday lives of believers, 226, 231–32; and political activism, 199, 227–28; as historiography, 198–99, 211–12, 228–32; as ideological, 230;

INDEX

as interpretive practice, 211–13, 230–31; as narrative, 211, 218–26, 228–29, 230; closure in, 221–22, 224; deﬁned, 198–99; ﬁction, 218–26 (see also Illuminati, The; Left Behind; Robertson, Pat); on Internet, 198, 217–18; on television, 214–18 (see also Jack Van Impe Presents; Hal Lindsey Report, The). See also dispensational premillennialism; eschatology European Union (EU), 216–17 extremism, fear of, 26–27, 35, 50 Falwell, Jerry, 97, 99, 209, 332–33 n.18, 334 n.28 Farrakhan, Louis, 200 Faubion, James, 310–11 n.46 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 242, 259, 260 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 55, 64–67, 80, 242 Federal Reserve Bank, 141, 312 n.68 federalism in American government, 9 Feinstein, Diane, 66, 246 Fetzer, James, 239, 251, 350 n.75. See also Scholars for 9/11 Truth Fiske, John, 281–87, 358 n.23 Fleischer, Ari, 270 Fletcher, Bob, 69 Ford, Gerald, 234 Ford, Henry, 159 fort-da, 106–07 Foster, Vincent, 93, 94, 99–100, 105, 106, 107 Foucault, Michel, 309 n.30 Frankfurt School, 32, 37 free speech, right of, 61–63 Freedman, Carl, 108 Freemen, 73, 306 n.11 Freud, Sigmund, 106 Fried, Yehuda, 312 n.3 Frow, John, 153, 319 n.16 Frykholm, Amy Johnson, 338 n.74, 338 n.75 Fuller, Robert, 336 n.52 fundamentalist Protestantism, 201–05; and mass media, 202–03; and

|

365

modernity, 202–03; and politics, 203–04; denominations in, 332–33 n.18; emphasis on individual experience in, 201–02 Gager, John, 229 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 115 Gandolﬁni, James, 267 Gemstone Files, 125–26, 129, 131–32, 135 gender, 38–39 General Electric, 173 Genette, Gérard, 133, 321 n.44 Gibson, James William, 357 n.4 Gilman, Sander, 39–40 Gingrich, Newt, 79, 86 Giuliani, Rudolph, 260 Goertzel, Ted, 357 n.9 Goldberg, Robert Alan, 296 n.35, 311 n.50 Goldwater, Barry, 24, 34, 35–36, 39, 86 Goodwyn, Lawrence, 297 n.1 Gorelick, Jamie, 352 n.91, 353 n.99 Goyette, Charles, 233 Grabbe, J. Orlin, 160 Graham, Katharine, 130 Gramsci, Antonio, 28–29 Greeley, Andrew, 7 Greimas, A. J., 135 Grifﬁn, David Ray, 240, 242, 248, 250, 265–67, 342–43 n.21, 349–50 n.73, 354 n.111, 354–55 n.115, 355 n.117 Grisham, John, 318 n.7 Gritz, Bo, 55, 305 n.7 Grossberg, Lawrence, 88, 110 Grosz, Elizabeth, 111, 314 n.21, 316 n.47 Guattari, Félix, 110–11, 316 n.45, 316 n.47 gun control, 69 GURPS Illuminati. See Illuminati role-playing game Gutjahr, Paul, 337 n.65 Habermas, Jürgen, 294 n.24 Hagee, John, 203–04 Hall, Jeffrey, 293 n.7 Hall, Stuart, 88, 311 n.54 Halsell, Grace, 334 n.32 Hamilton, Alexander, 27

366

|

INDEX

Hamilton, Bill and Nancy, 184–86, 192, 193. See also Inslaw Hamilton, Lee, 234, 255, 258, 263–64. See also 9/11 Commission Hanssen, Robert, 184 Harding, Susan, 339 n.79 Harris, Angela, 358 n.12, 359 n.30 Hartz, Louis, 28 Hatch, Nathan O., 332 n.18 Haupt, Nico, 254 Hayes, Christopher, 351 n.86 Hebdige, Dick, 180 Hermetic tradition of interpretation, 112–13 Higham, John, 42 Hill, Anita, 60 Hitchcock, James, 299 n.38 Hitchens, Christopher, 12, 16 Hitler, Adolf, 28 HIV/AIDS conspiracy theories, 282–84 Hoffman, Jim, 252 Hofman, Amos, 295 n.25 Hofstadter, Richard, 8, 23–42, 45, 47, 49–51, 53–54, 74, 83, 85, 87, 95, 108, 194, 280–81, 298 n.28, 298 n.29 (see also conspiracy theory, as paranoid style); Age of Reform, The, 30, 298 n.28; American Political Tradition, The, 29–30; and interest politics, 40–42; and political culture, 31–32, 48, 90; and status politics, 40–42; Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 30; Idea of a Party System, The, 298 n.29; Paranoid Style in American Politics, The, 8, 31–42; Progressive Historians, The, 28, 298 n.19 Holland, Eugene, 316 n.44 Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, 28 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 62 Homicide: Life on the Streets (television series), 143 Honig, Bonnie, 87 Hoover, Stewart M., 203 Hufschmid, Eric, 347 n.59 Hughes, Howard, 129–32 Hunt, E. Howard, 188 Hussein, Saddam, 99, 188, 198 Huyssen, Andreas, 38–39

Icke, David, 160, 349 n.69 Illuminati (Masonic group), 165 Illuminati card game, 155, 174 Illuminati role-playing game, 174–78, 179, 182 Illuminati, The (novel), 219–22, 224 Illuminatus! (ﬁction trilogy), 163–72, 179, 181, 182; interpretation in, 167–170; paranoia, notion of, 170–71; pleasure of conspiracy theory, representation of, 171–72 Inslaw, 184–87, 191 institutionalist critique of conspiracy theory, 45–46 Internet, 160–61, 172. See also 9/11 conspiracy theories, Web sites about; electronic mail; news groups, Internet Iran-contra, 104, 189 Iraq War, 198, 241, 248 It’s a Conspiracy! (humor book), 172, 173 Jack Van Impe Presents (JVIP) (television show), 215–17 Jackson, Robert, 61 Jameson, Fredric, 108, 120, 128, 230 Jefferson, Thomas, 27 Jenkins, Jerry, 219. See also Left Behind (novel and series of novels) Jensen, Joli, 300 n.44 JFK (movie), 43, 118–21, 144, 151, 161, 276–77; agency in, 126–28; criticism of, 118–19; master narrative, attempt to impose, in, 139–40; narrative movement in, 133, 136–40 Jim Crow laws, 10, 283 John Ankerburg Show (television show), 220 John Birch Society, 1, 15, 25, 36, 57, 97–98, 159, 160, 179, 216 John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, 162 Johnson, James, 70–73 Johnson, Richard, 340 n.95 Johnston, John, 316 n.43 Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, 234, 340 n.2

INDEX

Jones, Alex, 245, 246, 249–50, 346 n.43, 348 n.66 Jones, Steven, 248–49, 251–52, 253, 348 n.61, 349 n.72, 350 n.75 Kazin, Michael, 85 Kean, Thomas, 233–35, 255, 263–64, 265. See also 9/11 Commission Kelley, Brian, 295 n.28, 314 n.23 Keen, Ernest, 319 n.21 Keep, Christopher, 310 n.46 Keith, Jim, 155, 193 Kellner, Douglas, 320 n.28, 324 n.69 Kennedy, Edward, 130 Kennedy, John F., 45–46 Kennedy, Joseph, 129–30, 131 Kermode, Frank, 230 King, Larry, 93 Kissinger, Henry, 234, 265 “Kiwi Gemstone,” 129 Knight, Peter, 295 n.30, 296 n.33, 296 n.35, 296 n.38, 296 n.41, 345 n.38 Knoespel, Kenneth J., 321 n.45 Koernke, Mark, 72, 309 n.36 Kohl, Herbert, 61–64 Kopechne, Mary Jo, 130, 131 Korean War, 141 Kornbluh, Peter, 292 n.6 Kornhauser, William, 25 Krapp, Peter, 292 n.3 Ku Klux Klan, 57, 74, 76, 79, 282 Lacan, Jacques, 103, 105, 106, 314 n.21, 315 n.34, 316 n.47 Laclau, Ernesto, 84–85, 88, 231–32, 358 n.21, 315 n.34 LaHaye, Tim, 219, 225, 227. See also Left Behind (novel and series of novels) LaRouche, Lyndon, 44, 160, 183, 249 Lasch, Christopher, 298 n.25 Late Great Planet Earth, The, 209–14, 227; agency in, 213–14; calls for reader to interpret in, 211–14; eschatological narrative in, 210–11, 214 law-enforcement response to militias, 64–66 Le Bon, Gustave, 37

|

367

Left Behind (novel and series of novels), 224–26, 227, 229 Lemnitzer, Lyman, 271 Levin, Carl, 63 Levine, Robert S., 294 n.22 Lewin, Leonard C., 115–16 Lewinsky, Monica, 117 Libertarian Party, 57 Liberty Lobby, 188 Limbaugh, Rush, 97, 111, 216 Lind, Michael, 200, 331–32 n.11 Lindsey, Hal, 197, 199, 204, 209–16, 227, 335–36 n.41, 339 n.85; Hal Lindsey Report, The (television show), 215–16. See also Late Great Planet Earth, The Lipset, Seymour Martin, 35 Lipstadt, Deborah, 358 n.21 Lobster (magazine), 325 n.16 Loose Change (ﬁlm), 247, 265, 269–78; argument and method of, 275–76; disorienting effects of, 274, 278; interpretation of details in, 270–73; narrative in, 270; popularity of, 269–70; structure of, 276; versions of, 269, 356 n.125 Lowndes, Joseph, 311 n.57 Ludlum, Robert, 125, 153, 162 Lukacs, John, 311 n.49 Macdonald, Dwight, 38 Majestic (computer game), 327 n.38 Manchurian Candidate, The (novel), 169 Manglis, Millicent, 319 n.14 Mannheim, Karl, 32 Marcus, George, 318 n.5 Marrs, Jim, 249–50, 266, 317 n.46, 355 n.117 Marsden, George, 202, 332 n.15 Martin, Wallace, 322 n.55 Marty, Martin, 331 n.8, 333 n.22 Marx, Karl, 123 Marxist cultural theory, 108–09 Masons, 33 mass society, 26, 37–40 Mayssan, Theirry, 246 McAlister, Melani, 227, 338 n.74, 338 n.75

368

|

INDEX

McCarthy, Joseph, 35 McCarthyism, 24, 29, 39, 49, 104 McCain, John, 203–04 McClure, John A., 324 n.71 McGirr, Lisa, 301 n.55 McGovern, George, vii McKinney, Cynthia, 247 McNamara, Robert, 271 McVeigh, Timothy, 77, 78, 279, 307–08 n.17 Meese, Edwin, 183–86 Melley, Timothy, 296 n.33, 296 n.40, 320 n.25 Mena, Arkansas, 188 Merton, Robert, 32 Meyer, Eugene, 131 Michigan Militia, 55, 56, 57, 59, 68, 73 Militia of Montana, 55, 68–70 militias, 52–83, 200; and anti-Semitism, 56, 78; and conspiracy theory, 55–57; and race, 56, 70; and religion, 56; as local phenomenon, 306 n.9; as pathological Other, 53–54, 67, 74–79, 82–83; as populist movement, 52–53, 67–73; beliefs, 55–57; disciplinary approach to by Senators, 64, 66–67, 73; law enforcement approach to, 64–67; membership in, 304 n.2; social science studies of, 58–59; types, 54–58 Miller, J. Hillis, 322 n.55 Miller, Laura, 7 Miller, William, 207 Mills, C. Wright, 28 Mojtabai, A. G., 334 n.32 Moore, Michael, 276–77 Moral Majority, 203 Mormons, 56 Moscovici, Serge, 300 n.49 Mouffe, Chantal, 312 n.60, 315 n.34 MOVE, 82 Mumbo-Jumbo (novel), 164 Mussolini, Benito, 28

National Riﬂe Association (NRA), 57–58 Neale, Stephen, 123 New American (magazine), 57. See also John Birch Society New Christian Right, 203, 220, 225, 227 New Deal, 34, 85 New Left, 29, 34, 43–44, 49 New Right, 24, 86, 203 Newhill Christina E., 313 n.5 news groups, Internet (USENET), 330 n.79 Nicaragua, 2–4 Nichols, Terry, 307–08 n.17 Night Stalker, The (television series), 144 Nixon, Richard, vii–viii, 130, 234 North, Oliver, 293 n.7 North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), 242, 259, 260, 272, 273, 353 n.101 Nostradamus, 204 Novick, Peter, 298 n.22 Nunn, Sam, 185 Nussbaum, Bernard, 99

Nadel, Alan, 318 n.11 narrative pivot. See conspiracy narrative, narrative pivot in Nation of Islam, 358 n.25

Pagán, Victoria Emma, 320 n.27 Paik, Peter Yoonsuk, 338 n.77 Panizza, Francisco, 84 Parallax View, The (ﬁlm), 108, 125, 151

objet petit a, 105–06 October Surprise, 183, 186 O’Donnell, Patrick, 296 n.33, 296 n.42, 315 n.36 Ohio Unorganized Militia, 68 Oklahoma City bombing, 52, 57, 59, 67, 71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 279 O’Leary, Stephen, 337–38 n.71 Olson, Norman, 59–60, 69, 71 Onassis, Aristotle, 126, 129–32 Operation Northwoods, 271–72, 274, 278 Opus Dei, 5–6 One Step Beyond (radio show). See Emory, Dave Order, The, 279 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 188, 234, 244, 267

INDEX

paranoia, psychological conception of, 300 n.40, 300 n.48 Paranoia (fanzine), 188, 325 n.16 paranoid style. See conspiracy theory Parfrey, Adam, 155–57, 190 “Patriots,” 54–58, 77 Pearl Harbor, 340–41 n.8 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 112–13 Pentagon Papers, 130 Pentagon Strike (ﬁlm), 247 Peretti, Frank, 337 n.68 Perlstein, Rick, 299 n.37 Persian Gulf War (“Desert Storm”), 44, 72, 102, 188, 197–98 Peters, Pete, 76 Pierce, William, 77, 279, 281 Pigden, Charles, 295 n.28 Pike Commission, 65 Pipes, Daniel, 4–5 pluralism, political science conception of, 24, 25–27, 42 Polan, Dana, 324 n.74 political subjectivity, 128 Popular Mechanics (magazine), 233, 269, 341 n.15 Popular Memory Group, 340 n.95 popular political culture, 31–32, 48, 90, 279 populism, 83–90, 280–81, 283, 287; and conspiracy theory, 84, 89–90; and cultural studies, 281; and democracy, 87–88; and people/power bloc duality, 84–87, 193, 280, 281, 285, 288; and populist discourse, 9, 85–86; “authoritarian populism,” 88; historical contingency of politics of, 86–87; realist and symbolist approaches to, 49–51 Populists, 31, 34, 38, 85, 89, 294 n.23 Posse Comitatus, 56 Post, Jerrold M., 297 n.2, 300 n.48 postmillennialism, 205–06, 207, 208–09, 224 premillennialism. See dispensational premillennialism Princess Diana, conspiracies about death of, 291 n.1 Priory of Sion, 5–6

|

369

Progressive, The (magazine), 44 Progressive historians, 27, 31, 49 Progressives, 27, 31 Project for a New American Century, 272 PROMIS (computer program). See Inslaw Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 78, 159, 337 n.70 Public Discourse Project, 264 Pynchon, Thomas, 101, 103, 151; Crying of Lot 49, The (novel), 101, 103, 151; V (novel), 101 Quigley, Carroll, 97–99, 102, 105, 106, 111, 115 Quinby, Lee, 199, 359 n.28 Raab, Earl, 35 Rambo (ﬁlms), 126 Rapture Index, The (website), 198, 217–18 Reagan, Ronald, 10, 43, 88–89, 183, 188, 339 n.85 Reed, Ishmael, 164 Rees, Richard, 331 n.7 Reynolds, Morgan, 349 n.69 Reich, Wilhelm, 156 Reno, Janet, 75 Report from Iron Mountain, 115–16, 117, 317 n.46 Republican Party, 15, 25, 36, 57, 58, 73, 79, 85, 234, 281 Rhodes, Cecil, 97 Rice, Condoleezza, 257, 259, 260, 265, 270, 352 n.93 Rich, B. Ruby, 269 Rich, Frank, 200, 331–32 n.11 Riconosciuto, Michael, 186–87, 192 Ridgeway, James, 342 n.17, 356 n.2 Roberts, Bruce, 125–26, 129–32, 183 Robertson, Pat, 165, 200, 203, 219, 221, 222–24, 227; End of the Age, The (novel); 219, 222–24; New World Order, The, 200, 220–21, 335 n.34, 337 n.70 Robins, Robert S., 297 n.2, 300 n.48 Robbins, Tim, 119 Robison, John, 165

370

|

INDEX

Rogin, Michael 48–51, 298 n.25, 320 n.26 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 340–41 n.8 Rose law ﬁrm, 99 Rosenthal, A. M., 119 Ross, Andrew, 28, 300 n.42 Roswell, New Mexico, 188 Rove, Karl, 257 Roustang, François, 180 Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and siege of Weaver family cabin, 55, 64, 74–75, 83 Rumsfeld, Donald, 270, 277, 353 n.102 Ruppert, Michael, 249–50, 254, 266, 348 n.65, 348 n.68, 349 n.73 Russian Revolution, 141 Ryan, Michael, 320 n.28, 324 n.69 Saturday Night Live (television show), 172–73 San Jose Mercury News, 2–4 Sandeen, Ernest, 202 Santer, Eric, 303 n.83 Scaife, Richard Mellon, 99, 313 n.17 Schou, Nick, 292 n.5, 293 n.10 Scholars for 9/11 Truth, 240, 251–52, 349 n.70 Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, 251–52 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 303 n.83 Schrecker, Ellen, 301 n.55 Schultze, Quentin J., 333 n.23 Schumpeter, Joseph, 297 n.10 Scoﬁeld Reference Bible, 207 Scott, Peter Dale, 355 n.120 “Secret Team.” See Christic Institute Secret Three, The (children’s book), vii–viii, 280 secrecy, 7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 284–85, 303 n.83 Separation of powers in American government, 9 Seventh-Day Adventists, 207–08, 335–36 n.41 Shea, Robert, 164–65 Sheen, Charlie, 254 Shenon, Philip, 257, 353 n.94, 354 n.115 Shils, Edward, 297 n.13

Shuck, Glenn, 338 n.73, 338 n.78 Silverstein, Larry, 277 Simmel, Georg, viii, 37, 115 Simon, Art, 139 Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files, A, 129–32, 135, 150, 183, 189. See also Caruana, Stephanie; Gemstone Files; Roberts, Bruce Skolnick, Sherman, 99, 245, 302 n.68 Skull and Bones society, 102, 250, 348 n.66 Sloterdijk, Peter, 179 Southern Poverty Law Center, 74. See also Dees, Morris Soviet Union, 37, 39, 198 Specter, Arlen, 53, 59–62, 82 Spillane, Mickey, 131 Spinks, C. W., 112–13 Staiger, Janet, 318–19 n.12, 322 n.54 Stalin, Joseph, 28, 39 Stallybrass, Peter, 328 n.50 Stang, Ivan, 156 Starr, Kenneth, 117 Steamshovel Press (fanzine), 97, 188, 313 n.8, 325 n.16 Sterling, Bruce, 155 Stern, Kenneth, 74–81, 82 Steve Jackson Games, 173 Stewart, Kathleen, 339 n.79 Stockman, Steven, 80 Stone, Oliver, 1, 43, 118–21, 151, 161, 276–77, 326 n.18 Strombeck, Andrew, 338 n.75 Strozier, Charles, 204 Taft, Robert A., 34 Tarpley, Webster, 249–50 taxation, resistance to, 55, 69, 71–72 Tenet, George, 260, 341 n.16 Thatcher, Margaret, and “Thatcherism,” 88–89 Thief in the Night, A (ﬁlm), 219 Thomas, Clarence, 60 Thomas, Kenn, 97, 155, 188, 190, 191 Thompson, Hunter S., 274–76 Thompson, Keith, 107 Thompson, Kristin, 318–19 n.12 Thompson, Linda, 55, 305–06 n.7

INDEX

Thompson, Paul, 245 Thornley, Kerry, 156 Three Days of the Condor (ﬁlm), 162 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 27 Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America (ﬁlm), 121, 151–53 Trilateral Commission, 200 Trinity Broadcasting Network, 203 Trochmann, John, 68–70, 72 TruthMove, 253 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 27 Turner, Patricia A., 357 n.10 Turner Diaries, The (novel), 77, 279–81, 282, 286, 357 n.4 Tuskegee, Alabama, 283 Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 335 n.39 United Nations, 69, 225 United States Senate, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information, 52–54, 61–67 Unsolved Mysteries (television series), 144 USENET. See news groups, Internet Van Impe, Jack and Rexella. See Jack Van Impe Presents (television show) Vankin, Jonathan, 155, 157 Vatican, 98 Vietnam War, vii, 44, 45–46, 87–88, 130, 244 Viper Militia, 309–10 n.39 Virilio, Paul, 134 Waco, Texas, and raid on Branch Davidian compound, 55, 64–65, 74–75, 82–83 Wagner-Paciﬁci, Robin, 82 Walkerdine, Valerie, 315 n.35 Wall Street Journal editorial page, 93, 112 Wallace, George, 79, 86, 311 n.57 Walvoord, John F., 198

|

371

Warren Commission, 60, 119, 161, 234–35, 340 n.5. See also 9/11 Commission Washington Times, 112 Watergate, viii, 104, 130, 188, 244 Wead, George, 319 n.14 Weaver, Randy, 55. See also Ruby Ridge, Idaho Webb, Gary, 2–4 Weber, Max, 25 Weber, Timothy, 208, 336 n.43 Webster, Nesta, 165, 200, 358 n.26, 337 n.70 Weishaupt, Adam, 165 Wellstone, Paul, 251 Western Journalism Center, 99, 313 n.17 White, Allon, 328 n.50 White, Ed, 295 n.27 White, Hayden, 123–24, 229 Wilgus, Neil, 327 n.27 Williams, Raymond, 295 n.31 Wilson, Robert Anton, 157, 163–72, 173, 178. See also Illuminatus! (ﬁction trilogy) Winter Kills (novel and ﬁlm), 151 Wolfowitz, Paul, 272 Wood, Gordon S., 294 n.22, 295 n.27 Wray, Matt, 359 n.27 Wulff, Erich, 300 n.40 X-Files, The (television series), 120, 121, 143–50; and closure, 140, 146–50; “Erlenmeyer Flask, The” (episode), 145–48; “Truth, The” (episode), 149–50 Young, Alison, 354 n.108 Zelikow, Philip, 235–36, 257, 260, 265–66, 352 n.93, 354–55 n.115, 355 n.117 Žižek, Slavoj, 105, 109, 179–80, 314 n.24, 315 n.25, 316 n.46 Zukier, Hans, 319 n.15

This page intentionally left blank

Mark Fenster is a professor at the Frederic G. Levin College of Law at the University of Florida.