The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  The hoax was not, at its heart, about a conspiracy, but the penultimate paragraph had a paranoid touch. In the margins of the Manchester manuscript, Realist readers were informed, this handwritten note appeared: “Is this simply necrophilia or was LBJ trying to change entry wound into exit wound by enlarging?”22

  As Krassner strove to top his Kennedy piece, and as his personal interest in conspiracy theories grew, secret plots moved to the center of his hoaxes. He began to conceive of himself as an “investigative satirist,” detailing plots that didn’t exist in order to expose the deeper social truths that did.

  After Robert Kennedy’s death, the magazine announced that it would reveal “the rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology hierarchy.”23 The article hadn’t actually been written yet, but the title alone was enough to prompt the Church of Scientology to file a lawsuit against the magazine. That only encouraged Krassner to dig deeper, searching for facts that would give his tale the texture of authenticity. Soon he was assembling an elaborate story about Scientology, assassination, and intelligence agencies, with Charles Manson replacing Sirhan Sirhan at the center of the saga.

  You can see the ironic style coming into focus here. When Mae Brussell blamed an anticountercultural conspiracy for the Manson murders, she created fiction with mythic resonance but she thought she was exposing hard truths. Krassner skipped the hard truths except insofar as they helped him achieve that mythic resonance. Or at least that was his plan until he encountered Brussell along the way—but we’ll save that part of the story for later.

  Krassner wasn’t the only investigative satirist in The Realist’s stable. Writing under the pseudonym “Reginald Dunsany,” a lawyer named James Curry produced a piece claiming that Jim Garrison, the controversial New Orleans D.A. who was helming his own investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, had uncovered “a secret international terrorist ring more deadly than the Ochrana, GPU and Gestapo combined—the Homintern.”24 Several pages of allegations about an international homosexual conspiracy followed. Nearly four decades later, in his otherwise excellent study The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson would mistake Curry’s satire for an earnest piece of paranoid gay-baiting.25

  Outside The Realist’s efforts, the most notorious conspiracy hoax cum spoof of the 1960s was the Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. The book, published in 1967, presented itself as a leaked classified report produced by the Special Study Group, a conclave tasked with considering what Washington should do if a “general condition of peace” should break out.26 War is a social stabilizer, the purported panel concluded. It allows planners to judiciously burn off excess economic inventory, it channels “antisocial elements” into “an acceptable role,” it establishes “the basic authority of a modern state over its people,” and it helps “preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive.”27 The whole thing was written in a scathing parody of the prose found in a report from the RAND Corporation or some similar think tank. The book’s comic peak comes when the Special Study Group ponders other ways to fulfill war’s nonmilitary functions, including the creation of “fictitious alternate enemies.”28

  The jape was inspired by a newspaper headline: “Peace Scare Drives Market Down.” When the liberal journalist Victor Navasky saw that, he said to himself, “Peace? Peace is supposed to drive the market up.”29 Then he and some friends conceived the satire, which was classified as nonfiction when it entered the best-seller lists. The book’s primary author, Leonard Lewin, confessed to the hoax in 1972, but that didn’t stop people from believing the Report was real. The members of the Liberty Lobby printed their own edition—since they thought it was a government document, they assumed it was in the public domain—and they didn’t stop selling it until Lewin sued them.30 In 1990, the Associated Press distributed a story about the history of Iron Mountain, the spot in New York state where the Special Study Group was supposed to have met. The article casually cited the book’s claims as a part of the place’s past. “After two years of meetings, the commission decided that permanent peace was a bad idea,” the reporter recounted, then quoted Lewin’s introduction to the book and moved on to the next stage of the location’s history.31

  People still tout the Report as a genuine window into the mind of the Enemy Above. Some of them don’t seem to be aware of Lewin’s confession; others know about it but just don’t believe it. “The government claimed it was a HOAX,” wrote Stewart Best, the director of the DIY documentary Iron Mountain: Blue Print for Tyranny. “The Eastern Establishment claimed it was a HOAX. Eventually the writer of the forward [sic], a Mr. Leonard Lewin, claimed it was a hoax, a political satire, written to generate interest in the problems of war and peace, disarmament, etc. The only problem with all of this is the simple fact that IT WAS PUBLISHED AS NON-FICTION, and it was claimed at the time of the release that it was AUTHENTIC by both Lewen [sic] and the Editor-in-Chief of Dial Press.”32 You might get the impression that Best does not comprehend how a hoax works.

  The third source of the ironic style was Discordianism, a spoof religion founded in the late 1950s by a couple of Californians named Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley.33 If you believe the mock faith’s mock bible, the Principia Discordia—and just to be clear, it is unwise to take anything in the Principia Discordia at face value—the church was born with a blinding epiphany in a bowling alley. “This particular evening,” the Principia relates, “the main subject of discussion was discord.” Hill and Thornley

  were complaining to each other of the personal confusion they felt in their respective lives. “Solve the problem of discord,” said one, “and all other problems will vanish.” “Indeed,” said the other, “chaos and strife are the roots of all confusion.” . . .

  Suddenly the place became devoid of light. Then an utter silence enveloped them, and a great stillness was felt. Then came a blinding flash of intense light, as though their very psyches had gone nova. Then vision returned.

  The two were dazed and neither moved nor spoke for several minutes. They looked around and saw that the bowlers were frozen like statues in a variety of comic positions, and that a bowling ball was steadfastly anchored to the floor only inches from the pins that it had been sent to scatter. The two looked at each other, totally unable to account for the phenomenon. The condition was one of suspension, and one noticed that the clock had stopped.

  There walked into the room a chimpanzee, shaggy and grey about the muzzle, yet upright to his full five feet, and poised with natural majesty. He carried a scroll and walked to the young men.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “why does Pickering’s Moon go about in reverse orbit? Gentlemen, there are nipples on your chests; do you give milk? And what, pray tell, Gentlemen, is to be done about Heisenberg’s Law?” He paused. “SOMEBODY HAD TO PUT ALL OF THIS CONFUSION HERE!”34

  That was followed by a vision of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, who became the duo’s object of worship.

  Should that story seem hard to believe, here is an alternative account. Hill and Thornley were high school pals in East Whittier, California, where they shared an affection for crackpots, a distaste for religion, and a fondness for pranks. (Once they created what Thornley’s biographer Adam Gorightly described as a “seemingly mundane radio program” interrupted periodically by reports that “Soviet planes were invading the U.S. and dropping bombs.”35 They loaded this latter-day “War of the Worlds” into a concealed reel-to-reel tape player, set up an ordinary radio that appeared to be the source of the broadcast, and let it play during drama class, scaring the hell out of their classmates.) Discordianism was a drunken prank of a theology, a couple of smart-asses cracking jokes. It probably wouldn’t have outlasted their teen years if Hill and Thornley hadn’t found themselves corresponding in the early sixties, reviving their old high school gag in their letters.

  By that time Thornley had spent some time in the marines, where he had befriended a private named Lee Harvey Oswald. Whe
n Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, Thornley wrote a novel, The Idle Warriors, that attempted to make sense of his old friend’s decision. He finished it in 1962—surely the only book to have been written about Oswald before the death of John F. Kennedy. Thornley had trouble finding a publisher for the manuscript, which didn’t see print until 1991.36 But in the wake of Kennedy’s death, in 1965, he did produce a paperback, called Oswald, that attempted to analyze the assassin’s mind. It included no conspiratorial speculations. At that point, Thornley believed that Oswald had been a lone gunman.

  That same year he contributed some pages to another book, though in this case I am using the word “book” loosely. The Principia Discordia, or How the West Was Lost was a collection of antireligious, antistatist, and generally antiauthoritarian humor assembled by Hill; only five copies were printed. It included an early attempt at a Discordian mission statement. “Why are the secrets of the atom used to promote chaos among men? Why are the most generous motives of men played upon to produce slavery? Why do otherwise sane people attend church on Sunday?” asked a passage contributed by Thornley. “The purpose of The Discordian Society is to provide false, comforting answers to questions of this sort; to give mystical reasons for the disorder around us; to promote unworkable principles of discord—in short, to provide the world with a workshop for the insane, thus keeping them out of mischief as Presidents, Ambassadors, Priests, Ministers, and other Dictators.”37

  As this and other texts circulated among the church’s growing circle, Hill and Thornley and their collaborators kept adding to the new faith’s mythos. Discordians, they decided, were discouraged from praying, prohibited from eating hot dog buns, and encouraged to break the prohibition on eating hot dog buns. And every Discordian was a pope. Or at least all the male Discordians were. The women were called momes.

  Much of this appeared in the radically revised 1969 edition of the Principia, now subtitled How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her, which had a print run of much more than five and would be reprinted several times in the ensuing decades. It was silly stuff, but some serious ideas could be spotted floating behind the jokes. Order, the Discordians argued, is in the eye of the beholder. “The real reality is there,” the Principia explained, “but everything you KNOW about ‘it’ is in your mind and yours to do with as you like. Conceptualization is art, and YOU ARE THE ARTIST.”38

  It was natural that the Discordians would become fascinated by conspiracy theories, the fringier the better. What better example could there be of a mind organizing signals into an intricate imaginary order than a crank’s mad attempts to explain the irrational world? As one Discordian pope put it, “Nesta Webster had all sorts of spooks in her head (I always imagine her looking under the bed for Illuminati agents at night), but she was so modest that she didn’t recognize herself as the artist creating all that. She imagined it was going on outside her.”39

  The pope in question was Robert Anton Wilson, a novelist, journalist, and essayist who wrote frequently about conspiracy theories. All three streams flowed into his work: He was a Fortean, a Discordian, and a regular contributor to The Realist. You could see those influences in the literary method he called guerrilla ontology. Since ontology is the study of being, he explained, “the guerilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page ‘How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?’ ” That, he said, was the “basic technique of all my books,” be they nominally fiction or nominally nonfiction.40 It was a perfect fit for the ironic style.

  Wilson’s writing was marked both by skepticism and by a playful willingness to suspend his skepticism. He believed conspiracies were “standard mammalian politics,”41 but he also recognized, as in his comments about Webster, that conspiracy theories often revealed more about the theorist than they did about the actual objects of the theorizing. He was also extremely antiauthoritarian in his politics, and this attitude made him both more willing to believe that powerful people were engaged in criminal plots and less willing to believe that the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently. In 1975, he and Robert Shea would publish Illuminatus!, a three-volume novel that both embodied the ironic style and played a large role in bringing the Illuminati into contemporary popular culture.

  Robert Edward Wilson—he traded the Edward for an Anton after he started writing professionally—was born in Brooklyn in 1932. Wilson’s father lost his job not long after the boy was born, and the family had to move to a coal-heated bungalow on an unpaved road in Gerrison Beach, an Irish Catholic enclave on Long Island. In that place and time, Wilson later recalled, the angry unemployed “were divided into two hostile camps. The first group said The Depression resulted from the machinations of the Wicked Jews, but the other group said it resulted from the selfish scheming of the Wicked Republicans. My father was in the second group. Despite their ideological differences, both groups of heretics voted for Roosevelt religiously.” Well, almost all of them voted for Roosevelt religiously: There were a few odd ducks such as Wilson’s uncle Mick, an acolyte of the anti-Semitic radio priest Charles Coughlin. Mick Wilson thought the president “was actually a rich Jew, who had changed his name from Rosenfelt,” his nephew later recalled.42 When Wilson’s dad joined the CIO, his uncle took to singing, “Hi-ho, hi-ho / I joined the CIO / I paid my dues to a bunch of Jews / Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-ho.”43

  Wilson’s dad and uncle did agree on one thing: Neither one wanted the United States to enter World War II. Mick still suffered from the poison gas he had encountered as a soldier in the previous big war, and neither he nor his brother wanted Americans to be sent off to battle again.

  Wilson contracted polio as a child, and his doctors told his parents that he would be paralyzed for life. He overcame that, thanks to the Sister Kenny method, a controversial treatment developed by an Australian nurse who is now regarded as a pioneer of physical therapy. As a result, he wrote, “the major event of my early childhood consisted of being cured of a major crippling illness which left most of its victims permanently confined to wheelchairs, by a method which all recognized Experts regarded as unscientific and useless. This instilled me with certain doubts about Experts.”44 The objects of his doubt soon grew to encompass the Catholicism that dominated his neighborhood. When he went to Brooklyn Technical High School and encountered the liberals who taught civics there, he found he had doubts about some of their ideas, too—particularly their support for Franklin Roosevelt’s war. He started reading antiwar historians, despite the disapproval of his teachers.

  He also, at age seventeen, became a Trotskyist, finding that the Trots “agreed with me about how capitalist wars get started, but they weren’t anti-semitic nuts like Uncle Mick.”45 That phase didn’t last long. Though he was the only member of his party cell who actually came from a working-class background, the others kept accusing him of having “bourgeois tendencies.” Fed up, he left the organization and adopted the ideas of Ayn Rand instead. He quickly discarded those dogmas, too.46

  Wilson was working his way through a variety of ideologies, incorporating individual ideas that he liked but growing steadily more suspicious of large-scale belief systems in general. (In later years, he would frequently point out that “belief system” can be abbreviated as “b.s.”) He found that he had absorbed Uncle Mick’s distrust of banks and governments even as he recoiled from his uncle’s bigotry and ideological certainty.47 He knew he didn’t like the form of capitalism that prevailed in the United States in the middle of the century, and he knew he didn’t like the form of socialism that had taken hold in the eastern bloc either. He started investigating alternative systems, looking for ideas that “transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism and totalitarian Socialism.”48 His favorite was the individualist anarchism promoted by Benjamin Tucker and other nineteenth-century libertarians.

  He was also intrigued by the theories of Wilhelm Reich, a radical psychiatrist who had fallen prey to the paranoia o
f the postwar era. Reich had already, in Wilson’s admiring words, been “expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Society for being too Marxist, from the Communist Party for being too Freudian, and from the Socialist Party for being too anarchistic.”49 After arriving in the United States in 1939, Reich attracted sensationalist press coverage by preaching sexual liberation and touting the allegedly curative properties of “orgone,” a cosmic energy that the psychiatrist believed he had discovered. Before long there was a Food and Drug Administration investigation and then an injunction ordering the destruction not just of Reich’s orgone accumulators—the devices that had attracted the FDA’s attention—but of all of Reich’s books that invoked orgone energy or “allied material.” When Reich did not cooperate, he was charged with contempt and sentenced to two years in prison, where he died.

  Historians often attribute the psychiatrist’s legal difficulties to the witch-hunting atmosphere engendered by McCarthyism. It is possible that they are partly right; it’s not hard to imagine intersections between the Red scare and the Reich scare. But as with Fredric Wertham’s anticomics crusade, the driving forces behind the war on Reich hailed from the left. Wertham himself denounced the psychiatrist in The New Republic in 1946, describing one of Reich’s books as “exactly what the fascists preach.”50 The next year in the same magazine, the prominent consumerist Mildred Edie Brady pointed to Reich and his “cult of no little influence” to remind psychiatrists of “the responsibility of their profession to discipline itself if it is not to be disciplined by the state.”51 Her article inspired the FDA’s investigation.

  Brady had been on the receiving end of an inquisition in 1941, having lost her job at the Office of Price Administration when Representative Martin Dies charged the agency with harboring Communist sympathizers.52 Now one of her articles set into motion the process that culminated with Reich imprisoned at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and his books dumped into an incinerator. Disciplined by the state, indeed.53