Posted by Conspiracy is: A combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible (especially in relation to treason, sedition, or murder); a plot. [Oxford English Dictionary]
As you navigate your quotidian path through “The Milieu of Alternative Facts,” are you having trouble avoiding “The Slough of Despond?” (And please help me here: Why has Kellyanne Conway yet to be lashed to the tracks at train time?) Feel like you’re in a fun house? False is now true unless it isn’t. It depends. Facts? Nuance? Straight talk, fair dealing and compromise? Fageda’bout‘em. Have you always looked to science? These days it’s protean and malleable. Tailor it to fit your own agenda. Or better yet just let it go. Cause and effect, scientific method? Sooo yesterday. And institutional mission and structure can, like Legos, be pulled apart and reassembled to suit.
And, then, the conspiracy theories! Legion! Trump churns’em out. They exhaust what little oxygen is left for factual, unbiased reporting. INCOMING! It’s a metaphor. Consider the mushroom. Consider mushrooms as conspiracy theories. Their underground, fungal hyphae spread far and wide at speed. Consider the tree as the Base. (Was ever a name more apt?) The hyphae penetrate the tree at the roots feeding theories to the tree. A symbiotic exchange of nutrients occurs. The theories flourish; the Base is charged and recharged. Indignant, you cry, “Where are the supporting facts, the evidence? Show me proof!” PUL-EASE! DON’T BE STUPID! THERE ARE NO FACTS! Really! Get with the program! You don’t need them. Makes things sooo much easier! Just tweet your theory and Don’s your uncle.
Conspiracy theories are a cottage industry in the Time of Trump. Currently “QAnon” is much with the people, on all sorts of merch, and in the news. I read about this a while back until I felt queasy and had to stop, so I have just scratched the surface of this insidious confection. But apparently if you take the hook, here is a small portion of the narrative you accept. A large and ever expanding group of Satan worshippers, pedophiles, lawyers, necromancers, car salesmen and other shady sorts are involved in a child sex trafficking ring operating out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. This large and ever expanding coven is made up of the rich and famous: politicians, financiers, company executives, military figures and generally A and high B listers to the left of Calvin Coolidge. To wit, the likes of Hilary, Barak, and George Soros are knee deep in it. But not to worry! Here comes President Trumpet mounted on the White Charger of Truth, Science, and Institutional Memory (see above). Apparently he was elected to ride into this fetid swamp (would it were LaBrea) and sort the whole thing out. (And where is Pogo when we need him?) I believe the end game includes something along the lines of mass arrests of perpetrators with possible incarceration at Guantanamo followed by the advent of the new Eden. Whew! And please be aware that here is only a pinch of the material that has been alleged as part of this theory about a non-existent conspiracy. It is also worth, albeit distressing, to note that these beliefs do not seem to preclude election to national office.
But, by no means have Donald and QAnon cornered the conspiracy market. There are, for instance, some conspiracies that actually exist and have been, at least to some extent, uncovered. Periodically one of our great mercantile institutions coughs up a hefty (if utterly inadequate) fine when poorly supervised managers have conspired to shake down the system for pelf with which to stuff their own accounts. In the process of taking unsanctioned chances they risk their clients’ financial futures, but, hey, as we say, “Whatever.” Or: Years ago King Carbon developed and then concealed science that strongly suggested our petroleum addiction would one day lead many of us to step off the front porch some morning into five feet of ocean that wasn’t there the night before. Said the pusher: “Keep your heads down, boys, shut up and keep drilling. Watch the money roll in.” Just business? No, indeed! Members of the A List conspired to sneak their children into top universities. A sleazy boutique business devoted its unsavory machinations to achieving just this goal. Lousy SAT scores? We use Rent-a-Mensa to re-take them for you. Extracurriculars? No worries. Be a champion gymnast with doctored film and a side order of varsity crew. And while we’re at it, at no extra cost, a brand new transcript with, wait for it, passing grades. “But wait; that’s not all…”
Conspiracy has been with us forever. Been with us since the very beginning of “us.” Keeping secrets, fooling people, executing plans counter to the agreed upon expectations of others, faith breakers lying through their teeth, murder, mayhem, insider trading – all ages old. To paraphrase Cole Porter, “Even eukaryotic bacteria in the brine did it.” Take a trip back in time and confirm for yourself that our distant ancestors were no slouches when it came to a plot.
“Sherman, set the Way Back Machine for the Mesolithic Stone Age,” a time when survival put a premium on group loyalty. The tribe was the club to join lest you wind up lunch for Cave Bears, party of four. And yet no sooner have we debarked than we encounter Sneaky Bob of the Mole tribe in a clandestine rendezvous with Sly Mel of the Shrew. What the hell is going on? Well, in the dark, velvet folds of the primeval night, we have stumbled on a plot that violates every element of the tribal code. Mole Bob is infatuated with Polly, a pretty and willing Mole. Mel wants his tribe to get in on the mastodon meat market maybe even corner it someday. The Moles are the pre-eminent hunters and Bob spills all their secrets about mastodon – where they are likely to be found, how to spot their spoor (not that difficult, actually), and how to hunt them. In return for taking no risk of death by tusk, Bob will get a quarter share of the first kill including a whole haunch, some sirloin and a big chunk of trunk. Now, Bob imagines, the tribe will have to acknowledge what a Big Man he is – killing a mastodon solo and bringing home enough meat for the tribe for a month. How can Polly resist him? They’ll make a passel of junior Moles and live happily ever after. Bob goes to the shaman, presents the meat and asks for Polly’s hand in coupling. Unfortunately for Bob, Mole Ron the Nosey was hiding in the cycads when the deal with Mel went down, and all has been revealed. But so much meat is cause for celebration and a stew of mastodon and Bob is set to simmer. The shaman gives Polly to Ron along with the large chunk ‘o trunk and life goes on.
Always we have conspired. From your school days you might recall the old “Et Tu… Affair” of 44. Very deep, dark doings: political paranoia, social unrest, a senatorial plot, Caesar gets a shiv in the ribs, Shakespeare gets a play, and the crime reverberates even now in somnolent, after lunch sophomore English classes. And there are plots galore you may never have heard about. For instance, have you heard of the lesser known peccadillo of Vice President Aaron Burr. He was, of course, the straight-up death of Alexander Hamilton. However, he is less often remembered, if at all, as the “Wanna-Be Emperor” of Mexico. John Wilkes Booth ring a bell? Guy Fawkes? Benedict Arnold? Yogi and the “pic-a-nic basket?” Wiley Coyote? The Black Sox? Throughout history plots abound. Plots galore! Safe to say people will always scheme for a piece of the mastodon.
In the face of an actual conspiracy, a rational conspiracy theory is a construction based on a body of observed phenomena and logical inference interpreted and consolidated as description of veiled even clandestine activities with a goal of some sort that won’t stand the light of day. But a fabricated “out of whole cloth” conspiracy theory, absent an actual underlying conspiracy, can take on a life of its own and can, like QAnon and given unbridled social media, spread uncontrollably far and wide. “Totally without any evidence, substantial or not, spread the word!” “X is secretly doing Y to Z.” Maybe it’s true. Or not. Or, no doubt it’s true, “Pass it on.” No one knows. Makes’em nervous. Titillating stuff. Gratifying. You can confirm what you always thought and wanted to believe. Along a spectrum, innuendo, rumor and bald faced lies join in the creation of unease, great anxiety, strong, angry emotion, and even (and we are presently seeing this) social unrest. Mr. Trump is constantly “on the spew,” advancing spurious conspiracy theories for which there is not a shred of evidence. Lately, of course, these have served his contention that the election was stolen from him. The voting machines were faulty. Ballots were tampered with. Dogs, cats and thousands of dead people voted, spurred on by the ghost of Hugo Chavez. Elmo, Bert and Ernie were seen dumping boxes of ballots into the East River. Accusations of conspiracy prefaced more visible activities. To establish a very thin glaze of verisimilitude the administration sends their laughably ludicrous lawyer puppets all over hell and gone to lodge legal claims based on brazen assertions (of course, there’s no evidence) of things that never happened. State legislators are dragged in and the Supreme Court as well. No one wants to play. He calls for recounts. No one wants to play. But through all of this, he stirs up at least the Base and probably millions more to the point that they fervently believe the election was stolen. They bite down hard on the hook Trump is casting. And so, the slight chance that the election might close the national chasm, even a little bit, slips by us.
Yes, Mr. Trump knows his purposes are more than ably served by creating a conspiracy simply by tweeting out endless, unbounded conspiracy theories. Well, now you and the whole family can play along at home with the brand new card game, Spot the Plot. And here’s how: Take a number of index cards and on each record a fact, any fact, and, remember, a fact no longer needs to be true. Each player draws five cards. Let’s imagine you drew the following cards:
1) The headlight dimmer switch cars was located on the steering column up until about 1927 when it was moved to the floor and was operated by the drivers left foot. In the seventies it was relocated back to the steering column again.
2) A few months ago due to a drop in voltage the Pope got stuck in a Vatican elevator on his way down to St. Peter’s Square to deliver the Angelus.
3) A man in Austria was able to remain in a glass box filled with 440 pounds of ice cubes for 2 hours, 30 minutes and 57 seconds. In doing so he beat his own 2019 record by 30 minutes.
4) Staff at a parochial school removed the Harry Potter series from the library shelves out of fear that reading them might cause the reader to “conjure evil spirits.”
5) A man crossing into the country from Mexico was stopped and searched. He was found to be transporting 154 pounds of frozen meat which he claimed was turkey ham. When it was discovered that the meat was actually bologna, it was impounded lest the foreign product introduce foreign diseases into the U.S. pork industry. The bologna was impounded; the bologna smuggler was released.
If you haven’t already guessed, the object of the game ( not available in stores) is to use the facts you are dealt to formulate a plausible (or not) conspiracy theory. Participants should feel free to use any and all available resources for researching the information on their cards. For example, you may not be familiar with the Angelus. Each player or group of players then Tweets their theory to the other players. The theories may then be judged using any scale, criteria or standards to which all players are amenable perhaps including such categories as plausibility, potential for causing civil unrest, capacity for fooling some of the people all of the time, etc. Have fun!