Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Tuesday, October 23, 2007)

Hey kids, have you ever wanted to be a conspiracy theorist but did not think you were cool enough? Well here are some of the things you’ll need to get started on a life of questioning authority in our amazing new Conspiracy Theorist Home Starter Kit.

What you’ll need to get started is:

10. A fawning quality in which you are dazzled by mathematical equations you can’t disprove, ignoring the fact that it’s usually much simpler math that describes daily reality. “Oh, the angle of bullet entry! Ugh! I can’t argue with that. You win, conspiracy man!” You will be particularly susceptible to nonsense phrases such as “Objects do not fall into the path of most resistance at anything close to freefall speed.”

9. An ability to question things you see with your own eyes. “Well, I’m almost positive I drove to work on the San Diego Freeway. But who am I to say that there is such a thing as a San Diego Freeway? Isn’t that kind of arrogant of me?” You must also be dumb enough to confuse this sort of doubt with critical thinking, when it is actually better known as either nihilism or by an even better name you can find in the DSM IV manual: paranoid schizophrenia.

8. A worldview in which everybody acts like a pre-programmed automaton and runs around Energizer Bunny-like following orders. “Well, I can’t argue that George Bush is a rich man, and so it’s likely everything he does is dictated by a hard-wired drive to accrue more money to himself at all times, (when he’s not eating, I guess), especially by deploying troops (also acting without any kind of anima or soul) to accumulate vast large quantities of oil for himself. Yes, I guess I can’t argue with that kind of reasoning.”

7. An ability to pick the most complicated answer to any question. “Well, I came home and found garbage all over my floor, so obviously several teams of NSA people came in here searching through my stuff but managed to do it without leaving fingerprints on the window or crowbar indents on my door, so it’s likely they made a similar break-in to my superintendent’s house to get his key, and obviously they muffled my dog and somehow managed to leave his paw prints all around the garbage can so I wouldn’t think it is what it really is.”

6. A tendency to see every action by people in power only for how it affects you personally without seeing it in the context of many other players on the stage of life. “Obviously Alan Greenspan raised interest rates to ruin our economy and discredit Bill Clinton, who I voted for.” Or “Obviously Greenspan is doing it because he belongs to an institution covered in ancient Illuminati symbols that is trying to control our every move, specifically by ruining my small-cap stock portfolio.”

5. A willfully ignorant and almost religious faith that somebody in power could control a series of events from start to finish, such as the demolition of a building and all the directions the debris flies in. “Did you notice that when they demolished the Sands in Atlantic City, it fell over to its side? I’m almost willing to bet an invisible plane crashed into it.”

5. a. … even though God himself, were he ever to have existed, would have done a pretty piss-poor job of controlling things start to finish, since he created men who don’t even believe in Him anymore.

5. b. … and especially when that belief requires the collusion of a horribly slow-moving bureaucracy. Take this timeline of events here here: “A judge in Washington okayed a mandate to get a warrant from several law enforcement agencies who had the orders signed by their officers in triplicate and then it went back to the judge who said it must be then shared with members of a special committee of the Congress chaired by 100-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond who first wanted to analyze the need for such a mandate, and who collaborated with others before signing off on the order, and after that it went back to the judge and he approved the order, and then it went back to the law enforcement officials who had to get the money for the project approved by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office, and then they had to go buy the materials for the project by taking out a government bid to get the concession, and after they finally got the materials, they had to wait for the right kind of hurricane to hit the city of New Orleans, and that’s when they moved in with Navy Seals to the disaster zone and planted the explosives that would break the levees and kill all the black people.”

4. A suspicion that any two people who ever belonged to the same club that would not have you as a member are now doing the work of that club to cause you bodily grievous harm. “I believe that since Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan both had bank accounts at Chase Manhattan, then it must be Chase that is responsible for the 1898 Spanish-American War.”

3. An inability to recognize that even though facts are messy, truth is not. “I just can’t believe that compressed air would shoot out the sides of the World Trade Center during collapse, so I’ve decided to not believe that two huge planes slammed into the buildings at all even though they were captured on videotape doing so in front of tens of thousands of witnesses after being hijacked by people who have confessed and who had attacked us before anyway and who had manifestly stated political motives for doing so.”

2. A childlike ability to ascribe hateful acts only to the people you hate. “Well, there were no fingerprints on the gun Kurt killed himself with, so I’d bet on my life that Courtney Love did it, because, even though he was suicidal, Courtney’s such a horrible bitch, isn’t she?”

1. And finally, and more importantly, to be a great conspiracy theorist, sooner or later, you’re going to have to learn to hate the Jews. “Well, you know they did kill Jesus, and they always do get what they want, likely because they have always turned the wheels of history. They do always seem to be hiding in the wings somewhere when this shit goes down.”

So enjoy the kit, kids. And don’t blow yourself up.