How did we arrive at this juncture where theories are facts and facts are theories? Where nothing is assumed to be what it appears to be, where paranoia afflicts the body politic like an involuntary twitch?
In one sense, America's love affair with suspicion is nothing new. As far back as 1798, the Federalists accused Thomas Jefferson of being a tool of the Illuminati. Barely 25 years later, America's first political "third party," the Anti-Masonic Party, was fueled by heated accusations that Freemasons were corrupting the country.
Indeed, a preoccupation with conspiracies is such a long-standing American tradition that historian Richard Hofstadter famously labeled the phenomenon "the Paranoid Style in American Politics," back in 1964.
And yet, the present preoccupation with hidden hands and covert culprits seems to have racheted up a notch or two above past levels of intensity. We've lived with doubts about the JFK and MLK and RFK assassinations for 40 years, and with an enduring fascination with UFOS for even longer. But those seem almost old hat in comparison to the baroque efflorescence of recent theories that aver that Messrs Bush and Chaney are actually shape-shifting reptilians from another dimension or, alternately, that they are Satanic pedophiles presiding over child-stealing rings run by CIA mind-control experts.
People want to believe the worst. They want to think of themselves as smart enough to see The Truth, instead of bleating ignorantly like the rest of the sheep.
To point this out is simply common sense, one would think, but I suspect that we may be past the point where common sense serves as a favored guide. The ritual of assigning blame may have taken on a life of its own, where facts are secondary to poetic justice. Dick Cheney - a shape-shifting reptilian? I personally doubt it, but were it proven so, a growing part of the population would just nod their heads and say, "I knew it all along!"
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