by Jesse Walker
© 1977, 2013, Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides
Other installments of the comic covered wiretapping, environmental contamination, the CIA’s alliance with the Mafia, the attempted assassination of George Wallace, and the deaths of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood, and the Native American activist Anna Mae Aquash. Despite the funny drawings, the cartoonists were sincere about what they were doing. “That was at a time when investigative journalism was probably at its peak,” Kinney later recalled, “when all of the revelations had been coming out about Watergate, about the intelligence agencies’ misdeeds. So there was a lot of material out there that we could draw upon. I think our notion was: Okay, let’s try to get this out to people who may not be reading the daily newspaper or serious journalistic investigations, but we’ll distill it down to factoids and crack a joke about it. But getting the info out was the main goal.”78
When Rip-Off Press collected the cartoons in a comic book, Kinney and Mavrides added several stories in the ironic style. In the first one Bud Tuttle, a right-wing broadcaster devoted to exposing the “machinations of Zionist one-worlders and would-be cattle mutilators in Washington,” spends a dollar, which then passes through the hands of a series of malevolent cabals, from a cult led by Baba Black Sheep to the Soma Broadcasting System, a media combine controlled by Cthulhu, Inc.79 There is also an absurdist eight-page story about the “Solar Czars of Cornutopia,” a quiz headlined “You Killed Kennedy! And Here’s the Proof . . . ,” a comic about cattle mutilations that ends with some cows devouring a dead relative, and an elaborate conspiracy chart designed to be cut out and twisted into a Möbius strip. In the last feature, the Vatican, the Communists, the Theosophists’ Great White Brotherhood, and other forces sit atop a diagram that incorporates everyone from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to Big Brother, who is shown to be in direct command of both George Orwell and Janis Joplin.
“We were partly reacting to a certain kind of conspiracy mongering that presumed that everything under the sun connected up into one big conspiracy, which we found to be somewhat absurd and overblown,” Kinney would later explain. “The sort of ironic intention was to take that to such an extreme that it collapsed under its own weight.” In short, the comic book was both ironist and fusionist, mixing gags with serious allegations and trusting readers to tell the difference.
In 1982, the Tulsa-born, Austin-based game designer Steve Jackson created an Illuminati card game. He was inspired by Illuminatus! but he didn’t want to do a direct adaptation of such a convoluted story: “[E]ven if you could figure out who was on whose side, which I didn’t think I could, how could you make a game out of it?” Instead he created his own scenario, using Wilson and Shea’s books “as spiritual guides, but not as actual source material.”80 In the game that resulted, several contending conspiracies—the Bavarian Illuminati, the Discordian Society, the Servants of Cthulhu, and others—battle and bargain for control of a host of smaller cabals, from the Mafia, the CIA, and the International Communist Conspiracy to the Trekkies, the Dentists, and, naturally, the Conspiracy Theorists.
It was both a fun pastime and an effective satire. In Jackson’s words, “The cards take a sardonic attitude toward absolutely everything,” because “in the world of the game, nobody is innocent. Every organization is a puppet or a manipulator, and most are both.”81 Shea liked what Jackson had done and wrote an introduction to the first expansion set. Wilson was less enthusiastic, complaining to his agent that the game infringed on his intellectual property rights.82 His agent disagreed, and no legal battle ensued. In practice, the game probably helped rather than hurt Wilson’s bank account, since it served as an advertisement for Illuminatus!
It also served as a catalyst for still more creativity, as fans produced their own versions of the game and its sequels. “I have seen people recast everything from their offices to their cities in terms of Illuminati,” Jackson has said. The games would also inspire some sincerely held conspiracy theories, of which we’ll have more to say in chapter 12.
But the biggest development of the 1980s, on the ironist front at least, was the Church of the SubGenius. This group resembled the Discordian Society, except that whereas the Discordians borrowed their goddess from classical mythology, the SubGenii assembled their mythos from more modern sources, from UFO cults to sales manuals. It was centered on the worship of a pipe-smoking messiah named J. R. “Bob” Dobbs. The Church of the SubGenius has two histories: the real one and a fictional saga spread by its devotees. Jay Kinney, who had been appointed the church’s minister of propaganda, wrote up the imaginary version in a mock exposé published in Whole Earth Review and Weirdo. “Church old-timers like Rev. Ivan Stang of Dallas date their involvement in the cult back to the late ’50s,” he wrote, identifying Dobbs as a former aluminum siding salesman and “bit-actor in C-movies” who founded the SubGenius Foundation after he began to believe he was receiving messages from aliens and/or from “Jehovah-1 the Space God.” Dobbs’s teachings initially reflected his Birchite political ideas, Kinney continued, but after an “extended love affair with LSD in the late 1960s and early 1970s” his movement “evolved into a Church.” Eventually, the church began to allow individual SubGenii to add their own gods and demons to the pantheon, transforming the “monotheistic neo-UFO cult” into “a polytheistic grab-bag.”
The church might seem to be “a harmless eccentric sect sprung from the same sun-baked environment that Jack Ruby and Lyndon Johnson both called home,” Kinney concluded, but it “has long since outgrown its humble roots and is stalking bigger game. Consider it all a joke at your own risk.”83At least one academic who read the account failed to recognize it as a put-on, gravely reporting that “Kinney fears that the Church’s absolute cynicism is tantamount to fascism” and adding, “Sharing that fear, we note that Bob’s world is a white phallocracy.”84
In fact, J. R. “Bob” Dobbs never existed. The church was dreamed up in the late 1970s by a couple of Texas wiseacres named Doug Smith and Steve Wilcox, or, as they referred to themselves in their SubGenius lives, Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond.
Stang grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, watching monster movies and producing his own amateur films and science fiction fanzines. As an adult he became a freelance movie editor and director, working on industrial films, documentaries, fund-raising films for nonprofits, and music videos. When Drummond moved to Dallas from Austin, Stang recalled, the two men bonded over their shared love of “what you might call kook pamphlets or extremist literature”85—Jack Chick comics, Bircher tracts, Scientology questionnaires. They also noticed a face that kept recurring in the ads in old magazines: “This square-looking guy smoking a pipe, and he would always be grinning.” That man’s face inspired the face of “Bob,” and the tracts they were reading and sci-fi movies they were watching inspired the church’s mythology.
From around 1976 to 1979, the idea for the church gestated. “We have to have an enemy, you know,” Drummond had told Stang as they were inventing the faith. “Let’s just call it The Conspiracy.” This wouldn’t be just any old cabal. “It’s not just the people who shot JFK or the crashed flying saucer in Area 51 or Roswell,” Stang later explained. “It’s everybody. Every normal person is out to get every abnormal person. Just instinctively. They don’t even think about it. You know, harking back to when you’re a nerd getting bullied in school all the way up to when you’re an outsider in the office in a way that might as well be high school.” (“And for that matter,” he added, “the whole stupid thing even continues in the little society of active SubGeniuses.”)86
The group’s first pamphlet was printed on January 2, 1980. The cover announced: “REPENT! Quit Your JOB! ¡SLACK OFF! The World Ends Tomorrow and YOU MAY DIE!” (Then, in smaller type: “Well, no, probably not . . . but whatever you do, just keep reading!”)87 It was followed by more SubGenius pamphlets, by SubGenius films, by a SubGenius magazine called The Stark Fist of Removal. You can get a taste
of the church’s style of humor, and a hint of the perspective lurking behind the humor, in this passage from 1983’s The Book of the SubGenius:
They aren’t readying us for takeover, THAT’S already HAPPENED. ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT IS HERE. It just isn’t obvious yet. But any day now the media will have people not only prepared for the realization, but welcoming it. One World Government is “hip.” . . .
Sounds like kook-talk, huh? That’s because they’re always one jump ahead of you. THEY ENGINEERED THE SPREAD OF CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIES, because even though many of the theories are true, they still sound crazy: the Rockefeller Conspiracy, the C.F.R., The Round Table, the Bilderbergers, the JFK “cleanup,” ALL OF IT.
The C.F.R. and the Trilateral Commission: oh, they’re bad guys, alright, but compared to the REAL controllers they’re just the clerks at the front desk. They’re just the sales force of a far larger “company.” Sure, they have more control than any sane American ever dreamed possible, but they themselves are more controlled than THEY ever dreamed possible. According to “Bob,” some of the top men there actually still believe they’re preserving a two-party system in America. . . .
For that matter, you’d be CRAZY not to suspect that the Church of the SubGenius is one of Their cleverest ruses. . . . We’re not, and we don’t care who believes it, but that IS how tricky They REALLY ARE.88
The older ironists liked the new church. Robert Anton Wilson joined. Paul Mavrides got involved early on and participated heavily in the ensuing decades. Kerry Thornley contributed a sidebar to The Book of the SubGenius, and he later declared the “Bob” cult a “sister faith or brother religion” to Discordianism—“or at least our Marine-Corps buddy theology.”89 John Keel came to a SubGenius party, where by Stang’s account the old ufologist got drunk and confessed that his books regularly fudged the facts: “I’m from a carnival background. You think that stuff’s real?”
By the mid-1980s, SubGenius influence was creeping into the larger culture. The face of “Bob” appeared in the credits of the kids’ show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Steve Jackson and the church put together INWO: SubGenius, a “Bob”-based version of one of Jackson’s Illuminati games. David Byrne, the lead singer of the arty pop band Talking Heads, became a SubGenius. So did the members of another rock group, Devo. (In the SubGenius video Arise!, Devo singer Mark Mothersbaugh described The Conspiracy as “the human condition. It’s things falling apart. It’s fat ladies in double-knit jumpsuits beating their kids in Kroger’s. . . . It’s Christ without a penis.”)90 Richard Linklater’s 1991 film Slacker, which presented an Austin filled with conspiracy theorists and other artists and cranks, drew directly on SubGenius lore.
As Slacker entered theaters, another movie dived even deeper into the ironic style. Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America was written and directed by a card-carrying SubGenius named Craig Baldwin.91 Tribulation was constructed largely from found footage, combining B movies, newscasts, and other sources to illustrate a secret history of the Western Hemisphere. It was a seminal independent film, a significant step in the evolution from earlier found-footage filmmakers to the mash-up artists inhabiting YouTube today. But as fascinating as Baldwin’s rapid montage of fragments from our shared cultural past can be—he has compared the effect of watching his movies to gazing at “shards of a mirror”92—the most impressive thing about Tribulation 99 is the carefully nested narrative that allows Baldwin to sketch out a conspiracy theory as bizarre and comic as anything in Illuminatus! or The Book of the SubGenius while threading through it a serious critique of U.S. foreign policy.
© 1991, 2013, Craig Baldwin
The surface story of Tribulation 99 involves extraterrestrials colonizing the inner earth and brave heroes in Washington struggling to protect the planet from the aliens’ machinations. The feverish narration, which draws heavily on crank literature that Baldwin found via Stang’s 1988 book High Weirdness by Mail, sketches out a fantastic scenario that seems to justify terrible crimes in high places—but since the story is too ridiculous to take seriously, the effect is to expose rather than excuse the abuses of power. We are informed, for example, that when the CIA overthrew the Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, it was really displacing “the aliens’ well-placed humanoid double.”93 Árbenz’s land reforms are presented as a masquerade: “He claims the idle land is to be distributed among 100,000 peasant families, but actual[ly] plans for more sacrificial pyramids to satisfy the mutants’ blood lust.” Another leader overthrown by the CIA, Chilean president Salvador Allende, is described as a “cybernetic replicant” trying to “alter the earth’s polar axis.” The “Watergate martyrs” were “plumbing a possible alien pipeline in Democratic Party headquarters when tripped up by the trivial technicalities of local burglary law.”
Throughout the film, titles appear on the screen. Some of them echo the story line with screaming tabloid headlines. Others, printed in another typeface, offer a nonironic description of the underlying facts. While the narrator gives us one explanation for Washington’s shift from backing the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to overthrowing him—“Our good friend Noriega is suddenly replaced by a grotesque, voodoo-spouting freak!”—the words on-screen offer a real-world explanation: “Noriega refuses to participate in anti-Sandinista arms-cache hoax.”
Completing the Möbius strip, these critiques contain conspiracy theories of their own. The narrator endorses an especially absurd lone-gunman theory of JFK’s death: “His assassination must have been by an android like Oswald, since no lone human being could possibly hit a distant moving target two times within 1.8 second.” Meanwhile, the on-screen title informs us that “Ex-CIA chief Allen Dulles serves on the Warren Commission, supports single-assassin theory.” In effect, Baldwin was using images of the Enemy Within, Enemy Outside, and Enemy Below to point an accusing finger at the Enemy Above.
Not everyone was able to distinguish a sincere conspiracy theory from a satiric effort. We’ve already seen how Krassner’s hoaxes and the Report from Iron Mountain were mistaken for evidence of actual cabals. The same thing happened to Robert Anton Wilson, whose novels have been cited in all sorts of conspiracy theories, often by the fundamentalist Christians who were the targets of much of his satire.94 “A lot of them have found that selective passages from my books, out of context, are very useful to them,” he told one interviewer. “I don’t mind that at all,” he added. “I regard that as a marvelous joke.”95
Even the Church of the SubGenius attracted some bona fide believers. “That has actually been the biggest regret for me,” Stang said in 2012. “We were just trying to be like the [psychedelic comedy group] Firesign Theatre and underground comics, our heroes. And what we ended up with is this flypaper for kooks, to a certain degree. Or maybe just people who are ignorant and gullible. Or maybe they’re just getting into this stuff for the first time. And they should be damned glad it was us and not Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown. . . . I’ve been told by quite a few people that the Invisible College or something like that was channeling this stuff through me. And I go, ‘No, they’re not. My buddies and I just get high and we come up with this crap.’ ”96 In church circles the believers are dubbed “Bobbies” and mocked, often mercilessly. “A whole lot of SubGeniuses are people who got burned in their childhood by some religion,” Stang notes. “Maybe Orthodox Judaism, or fundamentalist Christianity of some kind, or Catholic school. They’ve got a bone to pick, and they’re angry.”
That isn’t true of Stang, who was raised by secular humanists. “My interest in religion is very, very much like my interest in monster movies,” he said. “When you’re a kid you read the Greek and Norse religions and they’re full of cyclopses and dragons and monsters and they’re really cool. And for that matter, even the Book of Revelation has some pretty good monsters in it, my favorite being the Whore of Babylon. . . . I’ve never lost my love for monsters. As long as somebody else’s religion or political party has something like a monster in it, I’m still interested.
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br /> “To us, ‘Bob’ is the ultimate monster,” he added. “Because he’s the epitome of a mind-control guru. He’s like the guy who can make you sit in the sweat lodge until you burn, literally dying. And then die. And then act like it was your fault.”
It wasn’t just outsiders who sometimes mistook the ironists’ efforts for evidence of real conspiracies. The ironists themselves sometimes fell down a rabbit hole and started taking their creations seriously. That happened to Krassner, who eventually returned from his trip around the bend, and to Thornley, who didn’t.
Krassner’s descent began when he started researching his Scientology story. “I began to work on ‘The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy,’ ” he reminisced later. “But then, in the course of my research, a strange thing happened. I learned of the actual involvement of Charles Manson with Scientology.” Sure enough, Manson had dipped his toes into Hubbard’s church before deciding to go into the guru business himself. “Suddenly I had no reason to use Sirhan as my protagonist. Reality will transcend allegory every time.”97 At that point Krassner got a call from Mae Brussell, who had read about the Scientologists’ lawsuit against The Realist and wanted to tell him that the church hadn’t actually killed any Kennedys. “Oh, I knew that,” he replied, “but the article was just gonna be a satire, and they took it seriously. I’m working on something else now instead. Let me ask, do you know anything about the Manson case?”