The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  In 1991, Todd released a tape from prison, claiming that he had been railroaded by Senator Strom Thurmond. (The senator, Todd explained, was upset that Todd had exposed him as “the highest ranking Mason in the world.”)89 Three years later, when a Christian visiting from Britain interviewed him, Todd declared that he was a witch again. “Raised up in Wicca, you never lie,” he declared. “Christians break their word. All I ever saw for 18 years was Christians breaking their word. . . . I waited five years for Christians to help. I went back to Wicca.” Not that he was pro-Illuminati now. “Wiccans see the Illuminati as Jews and Christians,” he said.90

  By 2005, Todd was calling himself Kris Sarayn Kollyns and suing the South Carolina Department of Mental Health for failing to “provide him with medical and psychological treatment” for gender identity disorder.91 A 2006 suit accused several state employees of insulting his Wiccan beliefs and confiscating the women’s undergarments he liked to wear. The judge ruled against him, declaring that the “plaintiff could pose a serious security threat by changing and being half-clothed in his homemade women’s underwear while in plain view of other residents in the program.”92 Finally, in November 2007, Todd died.

  Todd had traveled a long way since that evening in Chambersburg, from Christian survivalist to cross-dressing witch. But by this time Todd the man and Todd the legend had been completely divorced. There were rumors that he was still alive, that he had been killed way back in 1979, that he had been released from prison in 1994 and assassinated the same day; there were rumors that the imprisoned rapist was an imposter, and there were rumors that Todd had been framed. When a viewer on YouTube mentioned Todd’s criminal record, another viewer replied:

  Never heard about setting up???Of course they just maded upp stories like rape etc. and Illuminati is really well known for doing that.Look at Eminen for example,after he braked up with the high ups he got arrested and look at DXM..Even worse!!!

  So wake upp ffs!!!93

  9

  OPERATION MINDFUCK

  We should be grateful that we live in a culture so insulated from true horror it can afford to play with fear as entertainment.

  —Grant Morrison1

  In 1969, The East Village Other was the trippiest paper in New York: a kaleidoscopic combination of absurdist headlines and psychedelic graphics that made The Village Voice look as stuffy as The New York Times. The actual articles could be pretty freaky too: outré stuff about LSD and UFOs, sex and revolution. And conspiracies.

  In the spring and summer of ’69, EVO published an interview with an alleged defector from the Minutemen, a man who claimed the group was in league with America’s intelligence agencies and that a violent right-wing revolution would be attempted “before 1972.”2 It ran an occult advice column that touched on Rosicrucianism and Theosophy. It printed a two-part interview with Mark Lane. And in the June 4 issue, it included this diagram:3

  June 4, 1969, East Village Other

  The chart appeared with no editorial explanation, but savvy readers surely inferred that the graphic was satiric. “The Combine” was a reference to Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “Saint Yossarian” to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the “Cthulhu Society” to the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. As we’ve seen, some people have trouble separating Lovecraft’s fiction from reality, but the Kesey and Heller fan bases had never displayed such a problem. Even if you didn’t recognize the literary allusions, you probably knew how absurd it was to claim that anarchists ran the Bank of Hong Kong or that Chairman Mao controlled the Jesuits, the Democrats, and the Mafia. “Mark Lane, Special Agent in Charge” was a nice touch too. The chart was a joke. Obviously. Right?

  Then again, conspiracy buffs are certainly capable of asserting bizarre connections and mixing pieces of pop culture into their theories, as John Todd would soon be demonstrating in churches across the country. Instead of taking this as satire, you might decide it was the work of a sincere kook. You might even take a hit from your roommate’s bong and decide to believe the thing. The East Village Other was a hippie paper. Its readers were willing to entertain all sorts of unusual ideas. If you bought the Minutemen story, why not take another step into Conspiracyville and buy this one too?

  As it happened, the chart really was a joke, the brainchild of a band of pranksters called the Discordians. The Discordians, particularly a quietly influential writer named Robert Anton Wilson, were pioneers of the ironic style of American conspiracism, a sensibility that treats alleged cabals not as intrigues to be exposed or as lies to be debunked but as a mutant mythos to be mined for metaphors, laughs, and social insights. “A certain class of reader values bizarre and paranoid theories precisely because they are bizarre and paranoid,” the novelist Thomas M. Disch once observed. Disch didn’t approve, but he understood. “They must see themselves not as liars, or even romancers, but as poets,” he wrote.4

  From Swift to Orwell, dystopian writers have exaggerated social trends they dislike, forging those artful distortions into satires. Conspiracy folklore does the same thing for the same reason, except that most of those dystopians believe in the worlds they’ve invented. But the ironists don’t necessarily believe them. In the ironic style, the most interesting thing about a conspiracy theory isn’t that it might or might not be true; it’s that it constructs a story out of the everyday truths we only hazily perceive. As the cultural critic Mark Dery said of a certain sort of Lovecraft fan, the ironists like to “have their critical distance and eat it, too, believing as if rather than believing in.”5

  As the ironic style was emerging, so too was a second sensibility. In the past, people adopted the conspiracy theories peculiar to their own ideologies or social circumstances. If you were worried about Communist subversion, you did not naturally progress to fearing the Pentagon. But in the heat of the 1960s and ’70s, something new was appearing: a focus on conspiracy in itself, an appetite for “conspiracy research” that transcended the standard Left/Right barriers. With time this interest would become a full-fledged subculture. That subculture wouldn’t be a mass phenomenon until the 1990s, but it was around as early as the 1970s, when it became possible to read publications with such names as Conspiracies Unlimited and Conspiracy Digest.

  In 1995, Michael Kelly would call this outlook fusion paranoia. It was a frame of mind, he wrote, that “draws from, and plays to, the left and the right” but “rejects that bipolar model for a more primal polarity: Us versus Them.”6 It would have horrified the man to think it, but in a way the hidden father of fusionism was Richard Hofstadter. Once the idea came into common currency that a “paranoid style” linked the country’s conspiracy theorists, it was just a matter of time before some of those theorists would embrace the insult and explore the ideas other paranoids were proposing. In denouncing conspiracy thinking, Hofstadter helped to remake it.

  The fusionists, unlike the ironists, are dead serious. Or at least they’re serious when they aren’t also being ironists: It is fairly easy to switch from one mode to the other, and some writers managed to straddle the boundary between the two. With the “conspiracy” category in place, an earnest interest in conspiracies could turn ironic, or vice versa.

  The ironists love to construct elaborate paranoid visions, some so baroque that they make that EVO diagram look like a simple pie chart. Sometimes these creations are just jokes, and sometimes they’re something more: Like a spiritual seeker who plunges into different religious rituals without embracing any faith as the literal truth, the ironist can appreciate conspiracy theories as a makeshift mythology. Occasionally that mythology will be so transfixing that he will lose his sense of irony and start to believe it.

  The ironic style emerged in the 1960s, but its roots stretch back far earlier. Three influences were especially important in shaping the ironists’ outlook: the Forteans, the political pranksters, and a church dedicated to the worship of chaos.

  We’ll start with the Forteans. Charles Fort, born in Albany in 1874, was a writer obsesse
d with anomalies. He spent years in the New York and London libraries, assiduously gathering reports that seemed to confound established theories: tales of poltergeists, of monsters, of blood and worms and fish and frogs falling from the sky. He was full of dark and playful hypotheses to explain those accounts. Most famously, he proposed that we are the property of an extraterrestrial force that guides the world through some “cult or order” of human beings who “function like bellwethers to the rest of us.” As for why the aliens find us useful, Fort wrote:

  Pigs, geese, and cattle.

  First find out that they are owned.

  Then find out the whyness of it.7

  You shouldn’t assume that Fort literally believed that thesis. He liked to try on ideas for the hell of it, and he wasn’t afraid to be deliberately outlandish. “I conceive of nothing,” he explained, “in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”8 The point of his books wasn’t to advance any particular oddball theory. It was to show the gaps in the mainstream theories, the ways inconvenient irregularities are shunted aside so our belief systems can stay intact. On the surface, Fort may sound like a mad poet reading the Weekly World News. But lurking below the lyrical strangeness of his books, you’ll find an impish philosopher of science.

  After Fort died in 1932, an eccentric platoon of writers kept the Fortean tradition alive. One of them was John Keel, a reporter who chased tales of flying saucers and paranormal creatures. Keel’s writing was by turns funny and frightening, as if someone had crossed a slapstick comedy with the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft; it suggested a world plagued by conspiracies that would never make sense to human minds because the forces behind them were not human themselves. There has always been a strain in the ufological literature that feels like the theater of the absurd: the Wisconsin man who claimed that an alien had given him pancakes, or the woman in Italy who insisted that spacemen had stolen her flowerpot. Most saucer buffs preferred to brush past such surrealist stories, but Keel thrived on them.

  Keel played with Fort’s idea that the human race is the property of some unseen power, suggesting in one book that Earth was, to quote his title, a Disneyland of the Gods. If “you give it just a little thought,” Keel noted, “you will realize that billions of people have understood and believed this very thing for thousands of years. This belief is the foundation of all our great religions.”9 His best-known book is probably 1975’s The Mothman Prophecies, a compulsively readable piece of Fortean New Journalism in which the author investigated the odd phenomena reportedly besetting the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966 and ’67: strange yarns about cattle mutilations, Men in Black, a gigantic winged creature called the Mothman, and more.

  At times Keel sounds as though he’s describing a Bizarro World COINTELPRO: visits from inhuman agents, strange phone calls, a mysterious imposter claiming to be Keel’s secretary. While Black Panthers and SDS activists were having their telephones tapped, the people of Point Pleasant, by Keel’s account, were experiencing incidents like this:

  Every night when she returned home from work at 5 o’clock her phone would ring and a man’s voice would speak to her in a rapid-fire language she could not understand. “It sounds something like Spanish . . . yet I don’t think it is Spanish,” she complained. She protested to the phone company, but they insisted they could find nothing wrong with her line. . . .

  When you unscrew modern telephone earpieces you will often find a small piece of cotton which serves as a cushion for the magnet and diaphragm. You shouldn’t find anything else. But when I opened this woman’s handset I was startled to find a tiny sliver of wood. She said no one, not even the repairmen, had ever opened up her phone before. The wooden object looked like a piece of matchstick, sharpened at one end and lightly coated with a substance that looked like graphite. Later I showed it to telephone engineers and they said they’d never seen anything like it before. I put it in a plastic box and stored it away. Years later while visiting a magic store in New York (sleight of hand is one of my hobbies), I glanced at a display of practical jokes and discovered a cellophane package filled with similar sticks. Cigarette loads! Somehow an explosive cigarette load had gotten into that Point Pleasant telephone! Who put it there, when, how, and why must remain mysteries.

  Soon after my investigation, the woman’s phone calls ceased. Maybe I exorcised the phone by removing the stick.10

  That was typical of Keel, who sometimes seemed serious but at other times might be suspected of pulling his readers’ legs.11 At other moments, you might suspect that someone was pulling his leg. Gray Barker, a writer who published supposedly true stories about UFOs while privately calling saucers “a bucket of shit,”12 was doing his own snooping in Point Pleasant while Keel was there. Barker, who had more or less launched the legend of the Men in Black in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, had a propensity for hoaxes, and he apparently decided to start prank-calling his competitor. Keel’s book mentions that “a few of the ego-tripping characters in ufology” were prone to “placing prank calls,”13 but the author seems oblivious to the fact that Barker was one of them:

  At 1 A.M. on the morning of Friday, July 14, 1967, I received a call from a man who identified himself as Gray Barker from West Virginia. The voice sounded exactly like Gray’s softly accented mellifluous own, but he addressed me as if I were a total stranger and carefully called me “Mr. Keel.” At first I wondered if maybe he hadn’t been out celebrating. The quiet, familiar drawl told me that he knew I wrote for newspapers and he had just heard about a case which he thought I should look into. It was, he said, similar to the Derenstein case. Gray and I had visited Woodrow Derenberger together so I knew this was not the kind of mistake he would make.

  Around that time I had received a number of reports from people in the New York area who had been receiving nuisance calls from a woman who identified herself as “Mrs. Gray Barker.” I knew that Gray was not married but when I mentioned these calls to this “Gray Barker” he paused for a moment and then said, “No, Mrs. Barker hasn’t been calling anybody up there.” He returned to his recital of an absurdly insignificant UFO sighting near West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. It was not the kind of incident that would have inspired a long-distance call. Later I did try to check it out and found all the information he gave me was false.

  We talked for about ten minutes and throughout that period “Gray” sounded like a man under duress . . . as though someone was holding a gun to his head. I tricked him several times with different meaningless references and by the time I hung up I was definitely convinced that this man was not the real Gray Barker.

  An hour later my phone rang again and a young man said, “Gray Baker has been trying to reach you . . . he asked us to give you this number and to please call him.” He recited a number that was identical to my own except for the last digit.

  There were more calls from strangers that night, and more pointless messages from Gray Baker.

  The next day I called Gray long distance and he denied having placed the call, naturally.14

  He would, wouldn’t he?

  In private Keel suspected that at least some of the stuff Barker was feeding him wasn’t true. In one letter to the prankster, he wrote: “Let’s stop all this happy horseshit.”15 James Moseley, another ufologist with a history of hoaxing, later recalled that his pal Barker “was delighted that Keel was reporting all sorts of ‘persecutions’ and paranoia.”16 At one point Barker wrote a letter to Moseley and sent it to Keel instead, as though he had accidentally addressed the envelope inaccurately; it was filled with mysterious comments seemingly designed to make Keel paranoid.17

  University Books, 1956

  “The diehard fanatics who dominated sauceriana during the early years were a humorless lot,” Keel wrote in Mothman, “and Gray’s mischievous wit baffled and enraged them. At times it baffled me, too.”18

  Barker’s playful deceptions bring to mind the second wellspring of
the ironic style: the pranksters—most notably, a prankster named Paul Krassner, who launched a magazine in 1958 called The Realist.

  The Realist’s great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were truthful and which were jokes, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe.19 With time Krassner would make that a matter of policy: “The Realist never labels an article as either satire or journalism,” he wrote in 1991, “in order not to deprive you the pleasure of discerning for yourself whether it’s actually true or metaphorically true.”20 But the practice didn’t begin as a deliberate attempt to confound people. Krassner had simply assumed that everyone would be able to tell the satiric from the sincere. When it turned out that many readers found that difficult, he didn’t look for ways to clear up the confusion; he looked for ways to have fun with it.

  The result was one of the most infamous hoaxes of the 1960s. “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” published in 1967, posed as a series of outtakes from William Manchester’s popular account of the JFK assassination, The Death of a President. Krassner’s piece began with a true story: When LBJ had been competing with Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination, he had called his rival’s father a Nazi sympathizer. The article went on to describe the president’s infidelities, which were well known in journalistic circles but had not yet been reported, and then it grew steadily less reliable, concluding with a scene of Lyndon Baines sticking his Johnson in the president’s throat wound. It is a testament to Krassner’s literary skill—or the average reader’s gullibility, or LBJ’s unpopularity—that many people were fooled. When Krassner met Daniel Ellsberg, the famous leaker confessed that he had believed the Johnson story. “Maybe it was just because I wanted to believe it so badly,” he said.21