The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  22. “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” The Realist, May 1967.

  23. “Why ‘The Up Your Tenth Anniversary Issue of The Realist Editorial Giggy Trip’ Will Be Two Years Late,” The Realist, May–June 1970.

  24. Reginald Dunsany [James Curry], “Final Solutions to the Assassination Question,” The Realist, March 1968.

  25. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press, 2004), 260. When I told Krassner a scholar had mistaken Curry’s article for an earnest exposé, he replied, “[Y]ou just made my day.”

  26. Leonard C. Lewin, Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (Dial Press, 1967), 3.

  27. Ibid., 39, 41.

  28. Ibid., 84.

  29. “Report from Iron Mountain Lives On and On,” podcast, February 22, 2010, bookpod.org/report-from-iron-mountain-lives-on/.

  30. In the ensuing legal fight, which ended in 1994, the Liberty Lobby was represented by Mark Lane.

  31. David Germain, “War Never Came, So Mine’s Now Warehouse,” The Sunday Gazette (Schenectady), July 21, 1990.

  32. Stewart C. Best, “Conspiracy Briefing,” Best Video Production, Christian Intelligence Alert, 1997.

  33. The faith’s birth date has been variously given as 1957, 1958, and 1959.

  34. Malaclypse the Younger [Greg Hill], Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her (IllumiNet Press, 1991 [1969]), 7–8.

  35. Adam Gorightly, The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture (Paraview Press, 2003), 27.

  36. A friend of Thornley wrote that Oswald’s role in the book gave it “a sort of eerie novelty, like the appearance of Fidel Castro as an extra in a Busby Berkeley film.” Trevor Blake, “The Idle Warriors,” Ovo 11 (September 1991).

  37. Malaclypse the Younger [Greg Hill], The Principia Discordia, or How the West Was Lost: Discordianism According to Malaclypse (The Younger), H.C., ande beeing the Officale Handebooke of The Discordian Societye ande A Beginning Introdyctun to the Erisian Misterees, Which Is Most Interesting (privately published, 1965). This text overlaps with the 1969 Principia, but it is essentially a different book.

  38. Malaclypse, Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess, 54.

  39. “Robert Anton Wilson Interview,” Conspiracy Digest, Spring 1977.

  40. Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminati Papers (Sphere Books, 1982), 2.

  41. Ibid., 47. “Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals,” he elaborated.

  42. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth, 2nd ed. (New Falcon Press, 1996), 33–34.

  43. Quoted ibid., 106.

  44. Ibid., 49. Italics in the original.

  45. Ibid., 132.

  46. Many years later, Wilson and Shea satirized Rand in Illuminatus! as “Atlanta Hope,” the crazed right-wing author of a mammoth novel called Telemachus Sneezed. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus! (Dell, 1988 [1975]).

  47. Wilson reenacted this uneasy relationship with his uncle when he discovered the work of Ezra Pound. In addition to loving Pound’s poetry, Wilson was attracted to some of the poet’s economic ideas, but he was repelled by Pound’s anti-Semitism and his sympathy for fascism. Wilson was pleased when he heard about Pound’s comment to the Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Wilson: “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” Wilson was probably pleased as well with something Ginsberg told Pound during the same encounter: “[Y]our economics are right.” Quoted in J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 344.

  48. Robert Anton Wilson, “Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective,” Critique 27 (1988).

  49. Robert Anton Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell (Falcon Press, 1987), 25.

  50. Fredric Wertham, “Calling All Couriers,” The New Republic, December 2, 1946.

  51. Mildred Edie Brady, “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” The New Republic, May 26, 1947. Brady also attacked Reich in an article mocking California’s anarchist bohemians. See Mildred Edie Brady, “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” Harper’s, April 1947.

  52. See Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton University Press, 2013), 79–80.

  53. Reich, in turn, could almost have passed for McCarthy himself if you snipped the right quote out of context. He referred to one psychiatrist who had written unkindly about him as “a well-used stooge of the American Red Fascist conspirators,” for example. Not that he admired McCarthy. The educator A. S. Neill, concerned that the psychiatrist saw Stalinists behind everything bad, wrote to Reich that surely McCarthy was an evil who “isn’t inspired by red fascism.” The psychiatrist reacted by scrawling in the margin, “HE IS.” Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, ed. Beverley R. Placzek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 389, 396.

  54. A. Nonymous Hack [Robert Anton Wilson], “The Anatomy of Schlock,” The Realist, September 1965. Wilson was identified as the article’s author in Best of The Realist, ed. Paul Krassner (Running Press, 1984), 166.

  55. A private alternative to the Post Office was also the subject of 1966’s most enduring conspiracy novel, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In Pynchon’s story it is never clear whether the underground post office, called Trystero, is a genuine ancient conspiracy, a practical joke, or a figment of the protagonist’s imagination—an ambiguity that admirers of the ironic style should appreciate. Wilson and Shea later gave Trystero a cameo in Illuminatus!

  56. “Repartee,” Innovator, October 1967. Wilson used the pseudonym Simon Moon several times in this period. He eventually gave the name to a character in Illuminatus!

  57. Author’s interview with Christina Pearson, February 9, 2012.

  58. Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Frauenfelder, “Boing Boing Interview: Robert Anton Wilson,” Boing Boing 1 (1989).

  59. Robert Anton Wilson, letter to Art Kleps, Paul Krassner, Franklin Rosemont, Bernard Marszalek, Mike Aldrich, Randy Wicker, and Eric West, November 8, 1968, scribd.com/doc/95686467/The -Principia-Discordia-or-How-the-West-Was-Lost-1st-Ed.

  60. Quoted in Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, 2nd ed. (Penguin Compass, 1986), 331.

  61. Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (Falcon Press, 1986 [1977]), 63.

  62. Wilson wrote frequently for rogerSPARK, both under his own name and under a host of pseudonyms: Simon Moon, Mordecai Malignatus, Ronald Weston, the Reverend Brother Kevin O’Flaherty McCool. Arlen Riley Wilson and Kerry Thornley contributed to the paper as well.

  63. rogerSPARK, February 3, 1969.

  64. “Daley Linked with Illuminati,” rogerSPARK, July 1969.

  65. “The Playboy Advisor,” Playboy, April 1969.

  66. “We actually had a recognized student group at Cal called the Bavarian Illuminati,” reported Sharon Presley, one of the Berkeley anarchists. She added that “the by-laws were a hoot; obviously no bureaucrat actually read them.” Sharon Presley, e-mail to the author, October 20, 2012.

  Since the publication of Illuminatus! groups called the Illuminati have become a perennial gag, and not just on college campuses. In the 1980s, a prankster managed to get an alleged organization named the Libertarian Illuminati listed in the Encyclopedia of Associations. When a reporter called to ask about it, he replied by weaving an elaborate fake history for the group going back centuries.

  67. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, 64. This is a good place to note a proto-Mindfuck prank in 1967, when an unknown person or persons—Doug Skinner speculates that Gray Barker was responsible—sent John Keel and other UFO researchers some mysterious mail whose letterhead identified the authors
as The International Bankers. “We are a very powerful organization Mr. Keel and can make things very uncomfortable for you and your friends who try to find out too much about Phase One, Three or any thing concerning other parts of the Universe,” the alleged banking conspiracy wrote in one letter. “We are always watching Mr. Keel, we have eyes and ears that never sleep.” The entire document is reprinted at johnkeel.com/?p=1667. Barker, for the record, did periodically allude to the International Bankers in his published writing. In one book he described them as “shadowy terrorists,” rumored to be based in the Orion galaxy, who “had even dared to mail letters, written on formal, engraved stationery, threatening the cleansing of Earth.” Gray Barker, The Silver Bridge: The Classic Mothman Tale (Metadisc Books, 2008 [1970]), 91.

  68. Quoted in Kerry Wendell Thornley, “Wonders of the Unseen World,” New Libertarian, June 1985.

  69. Robert Anton Wilson, “The Illuminatus Saga Stumbles Along,” Mystery Scene, October 1990.

  70. On the nature and extent of the cuts, see Tom Jackson, “The ILLUMINATUS! Cuts—How Substantial?,” May 21, 2012 (rawillumination.net/2012/05/illuminatus-cuts-how-substantial.html) and the discussion in the blog post’s comment thread. Wilson claimed that five hundred pages had been removed and subsequently lost. Other sources suggest that the excisions were more modest.

  71. Alan Moore, “Robert Anton Wilson 10 : Alan Moore 2” (2007), youtube.com/watch?v=P8ah5VLztK4.

  72. “Robert Anton Wilson Interview.”

  73. Quoted in “The Other Side,” LeFevre’s Journal, Winter 1976.

  74. LaRouche and his followers were also known for a distinct style of over-the-top invective. This description, for example, appeared in a front-page article in a LaRouche paper: “Exhibiting the strong flavor of faggotry, the puffy-cheeked, baby-faced Moss combined the worst English pomposity with that exquisite, simpering quality that most Americans dislike about the British aristocracy.” Robert Dreyfuss, “A Close Encounter with Robert Moss of MI-6,” New Solidarity, May 5, 1980. The author of that passage would later leave the LaRouche orbit and become a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.

  75. “Anti-Semitism in Conspiracy Literature,” Conspiracy Digest, Winter 1976.

  76. “Apollo Hoax?” Conspiracy Digest, Winter 1977.

  77. “Cover-Up Lowdown,” Cover-Up Lowdown 1 (1977).

  78. Author’s interview with Jay Kinney, February 22, 2012. All Kinney quotes come from this interview unless otherwise noted.

  79. “Passing the Buck,” Cover-Up Lowdown 1 (1977).

  80. Steve Jackson, “Illuminati Designer Article,” n.d., sjgames.com/ illuminati/designart.html.

  81. Steve Jackson, e-mail to the author, January 12, 2012. All Jackson quotes come from this e-mail unless otherwise noted.

  82. Wilson was not completely consistent here, since he elsewhere expressed his opposition to intellectual property laws. He would later enter the world of games on his own terms as the host of a role-playing game called Conspiracy.

  83. Jay Kinney, “Backstage with ‘Bob’: Is the Church of the SubGenius the Ultimate Cult?” Whole Earth Review, Fall 1986.

  84. William A. Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (State University of New York, 1994), 140.

  85. Author’s interview with Ivan Stang, August 8, 2012. All Stang quotes come from this interview unless otherwise noted.

  86. The church wasn’t shy about turning its critique against itself. In a rant about the United States’ “diabolically seductive brand of mindless consumerism,” for instance, one SubGenius book invoked Amazonian tribespeople “walking around in Coca-ColaTM T-shirts, Aerosmith shirts, ‘Bob’ shirts.” Revelation X: The “Bob” Apocryphon—Hidden Teachings and Deuterocanonical Texts of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, ed. Ivan Stang and Paul Mavrides (Fireside, 1994), 21.

  87. “SubGenius Pamphlet #1” (Church of the SubGenius, 1980).

  88. The Book of the SubGenius, ed. Ivan Stang (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983), 93.

  89. Kerry Thornley, “Introduction,” in Malaclypse, Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess, v.

  90. Arise! SubGenius Recruitment Film 16, directed by Cordt Holland and Ivan Stang, screenplay by Stang, Paul Mavrides, and Harry S. Robins, SubGenius Foundation, 1991. An earlier version of this film started circulating around 1986.

  91. Tribulation 99 cinematographer Bill Daniel was the brother of Slacker cinematographer Lee Daniel. Incidentally, 1991 was a banner year for conspiracy cinema: Along with those two pictures, it saw the release of Oliver Stone’s assassination flick JFK, the film that made the phrase “Oliver Stone movie” a lazy synonym for “conspiracy movie” even though most of Stone’s films do not involve vast conspiracies.

  92. Author’s interview with Craig Baldwin, March 26, 2009.

  93. Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, written and directed by Craig Baldwin, Facets Multi-Media, 1991.

  94. The boundary between Wilson’s countercultural and Christian readers is more fluid than you might expect. In his study of a London millenarian church, the British journalist Damian Thompson spoke with a Christian who in his younger years “flirted with anarchism, punk rock, witchcraft, and Satanism.” During that period, Thompson reported, the interviewee accepted Illuminatus! as “truth lightly clothed as fiction.” When he was born again, he “carried out only minor adjustments to this narrative.” Damian Thompson, Waiting for Antichrist: Charisma and Apocalypse in a Pentecostal Church (Oxford University Press, 2005), 103–4.

  95. “Nardwuar vs. Robert Anton Wilson,” November 8, 1996, nardwuar.com/vs/robert_anton_wilson/index.html.

  96. Firesign Theatre was a quartet of comics whose dense, nonlinear audio plays drank from the same well as Illuminatus! At one point, in fact, they considered the idea of optioning Wilson and Shea’s trilogy, though they never followed through. For more on their career, see Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (New York University Press, 2001), 78–80.

  97. Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, 216.

  98. Quoted ibid., 223.

  99. Ibid., 247. Like Hoffman, Krassner was heavily involved with the Yippies—indeed, he was the one who gave the group its name.

  100. Ibid., 254.

  101. Author’s interview with Paul Krassner, July 26, 2012. After Krassner moved to San Francisco, he, Kinney, and a few friends started a group they initially called the Conspiracy Club. (Later, when it became clear that the refreshments deserved equal billing with the conversation, it became the Conspiracy Dessert Club.) Everyone would bring in clippings from the news that might seem to suggest a conspiracy, and the group would discuss the stories. Sometimes participants were serious, sometimes they were joking, and sometimes they hovered in between. “I think our approach and our sensibility was to question everything,” Kinney told me, “including our own tendency to read into some of this material.”

  102. Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, 320.

  103. Quoted in Gorightly, The Prankster and the Conspiracy, 91.

  104. Kerry Thornley, “A Bulletin to All ‘Rightwing Anarchists’ and Other Libertarians,” Free Trade, July 1968.

  105. Kerry Thornley, “Living On the Sea and Off the Land: A Suggestion,” Ocean Living 1, no. 4 (1968).

  106. Quoted in Gorightly, The Prankster and the Conspiracy, 194.

  107. Thornley, “Wonders of the Unseen World.”

  108. Kerry Thornley, “How Our Movement Began: Extremism in the Defense of Liberty, Part II,” New Libertarian, April 1985.

  109. Kerry Thornley, letter to Doc Hambone, n.d., multistalkervictims.org/mcf/hambone/thornley.html.

  110. Quoted in Gorightly, The Prankster and the Conspiracy, 193.

  111. Quoted in Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 336.

  Chapter 10: The Ghost of Rambo

  1. Good Guys Wear Black, directed by Ted Post, screenplay by Bruce Cohn and Mark Medoff, from a story by Joseph Fraley, Action One
Film Partners, 1978.

  2. Quoted in Rick Perlstein, “Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges,” The Baffler 19 (2012).

  3. Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Metropolitan Books, 2008), 250. For a critique of Frank’s book, see Jesse Walker, “What’s the Matter with Libertarians?” Reason, December 2008.

  4. David Morrell, First Blood (Warner Books, 2000 [1972]).

  5. Morrell, “Rambo and Me,” introduction to First Blood, xii. The first version of Morrell’s essay appeared in Playboy, August 1988.

  6. The relevant research was summarized in Peter Rowe, “Busting Vietnam Stereotypes,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, November 11, 2005.

  7. Morrell, “Rambo and Me,” x.

  8. Ibid., xii.

  9. First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff, screenplay by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, from a novel by David Morrell, Anabasis Investments, 1982.

  10. Morrell, “Rambo and Me,” ix–x.

  11. Andrew Kopkind, “Red Dawn,” The Nation, September 15, 1984.

  12. Red Dawn, directed by John Milius, screenplay by Milius and Kevin Reynolds, MGM/UA, 1984.

  13. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Harper Perennial, 2000), 395.

  14. On whether Cosmatos or Stallone deserves credit for directing First Blood Part II, see Henry Cabot Beck, “The ‘Western’ Godfather,” True West, October 1, 2006.

  15. Rambo: First Blood Part II, directed by George Cosmatos, screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron, from a story by Kevin Jarre, Anabasis Investments, 1985.

  16. Quoted in “Reagan Gets Ideas at ‘Rambo’ Showing,” The Milwaukee Sentinel, July 1, 1985.

  17. Gustav Hasford, “Vietnam Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry,” Penthouse, June 1987.

  18. There’s a hint of another primal conspiracy myth too. When the Chuck Norris and Anne Archer characters are holed up at the Squaw Valley Inn, Norris looks out the window warily. “Any enemies out there?” Archer asks. Norris, who has started to suspect Archer of being part of the conspiracy, replies pointedly, “I’m just as worried about the enemy within.”

  19. For a thoughtful discussion of Good Guys Wear Black’s relationship to both the eighties POW/MIA rescue cycle and the colonial Indian captivity narratives, see Louis J. Kern, “MIAs, Myth, and Macho Magic: Post-Apocalyptic Cinematic Visions of Vietnam,” in Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War, ed. William J. Searle (Popular Press, 1988).