Shadows for Breakfast

Getting through life one conspiracy after another

by Wes Biggs

I got a flyer from the John Birch Society last year, announcing a talk by some esteemed conspiracy theorist or other. "Now, in 23 minutes, you can understand a century of nonsense," it read. Good idea, I thought. Maybe I can drop that history course, I thought.

JBS theories (if you can call them that) read like Duchovnyite scripture. History is complicated, they insist, but only because it's so full of people covering their own conspiratorial tracks. There's one big conspiracy that subdivides into a bunch of others and they all interact to make the world the way it is today and that's why you're so poor, fat, stupid and ugly. It's that simple. Oh, and get out there and vote for Buchanan while you're at it.

I used to follow these things closely. I found my own copy of Gary Allen's "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" and stayed up all night unlocking the secrets of the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, back to their foundations at the hands of Karl Marx and the Illuminati and probably the Jews because they've got to be involved somehow if it's going to be a good conspiracy theory.

Most of it is true, at least in principle. There are a number of powerful multinational institutions which often serve to protect the interests of multinational corporations and American/Anglo hegemony without regard for the proletariat.

There are rich families who often serve their own interests under the guise of diplomacy and statesmanship. There are little men in gray suits who spend their days determining how their corporations can finagle their way into trade agreements which are more, shall we say, mutually beneficial.

There are people selling other people and people using other people everywhere you look. There are subconscious appeals to the more base instincts. There are teams of sponsored psychologists bent on controlling my mind, or at least as much of it as they understand, which is probably significantly more of it than I do.

But there are only one real conspiracy in the world today, and that's the conspiracy of stupidity. In real life, people are too stupid to carry out any kind of conspiracy on a global level, and much, much too stupid to keep a conspiracy going for centuries, like the John Birch Society claims they have done. Most people can barely program a VCR, international jet-set members included. And it's stupidity that's got us into all the problems of the modern world, not some master plan handed down for generations.

The JBS and its subscribers, including Sen. Jesse Helms, claim that official institutions like this university conspire not to teach things the way they really are. I don't think that's true. If it only takes 23 minutes to explain all the nonsense they want explained, then there's a good chance that everyone just slept through that part of class.