Non Sequitur

Stop everything. Let me get this straight.  I despise conspiracy nuts. I’m not sure what it is about them. Maybe it’s the wild eyed assertions. Maybe it’s the fact that they are more interested in the conspiracy than the event itself. Or maybe its just the defeatist attitude that we don’t actually understand anything.  Yes, there have been conspiracies in the past. Some which we know of and some which we don’t and never will. That’s life on the blue marble.

 My problem is this, if you have a penchant for following the half baked logic that is at the heart of the common conspiracy, it never ends. Nothing is real.

• There was no Apollo 11 moon landing.
• The Jews run the planet
• Humanity is actually under the control of shape-shifting alien reptiles, who require periodic ingestion of human blood to maintain their human appearance.
• Paul McCartney died in a car crash in late 1966, and was replaced by a lookalike prior to the recording of St Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

and the current favorite: 

• The attacks of 9/11 were masterminded from start to finish by the Bush administration, desperate for a reason to finish the first Gulf War.

 Where can you go with this view of the world? Not very far. By definition, a good conspiracy theory has very little factual basis, because lots of things have been covered up and the evidence has been destroyed. That’s good for the theorists, because it gives them total creative control over their fantasies, and they can liven up the story without anyone demanding explanation. The best theories even have a certain poetry to them, a symmetry that somehow unloads some manner of meaning onto an event. Like for example the idea that the Titanic was built, celebrated and deliberately sunk as an elaborate demonstration of the truth of Robert Burns’ famed line:

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.	1

The sad truth is that this theory is correct. 

Who was behind this calamitous re-enactment of poetic truth is known only to the perpetrators, who covered their tracks with exquisite care. That said, it has come to light in recent years to a few inquisitive minds that it was in fact The International Association of Poetic Scholars that was behind this dreadful act, who, coming into a century of declining interest in poetry, faced losing their prized careers. In an act of desperation, they moved to orchestrate one of the first major disasters of the 20th century.

One of the members, now only known as Morris, as an old man decided to take the cruise and die as a martyr to his cause. He is rumoured to have asked his companions as he boarded the towering vessel;

“What would you think if this was really happening?”

 

~ by coimheadai on September 19, 2007.