What Did You See?

I went through a conspiracy phase. It was in the 90s mostly, but resurfaced briefly in the early 2000s due to the Florida Recount and the events of September 11th, 2001. I didn’t see conspiracies everywhere, but I certainly did hone in on certain areas that seemed hazily believable — aliens, the JFK assassination, actions of COINTELPRO and the incident at Waco. (Note: I still believe aliens exist and possibly may have visited Earth. I think the Roswell stuff is baloney. I think the government let people think there was alien stuff going on because it made it easier to hide all the crazy space program/cold war stuff going on. I still find some of the testimony of test pilots describing UFOs compelling because they know a lot more about what they are looking at than me.)

I have always been a skeptic and an empiricist to a certain degree. My slavish devotion to research and a obsessive nature to understand has led to a LOT of reasonable explanations on all of these conspiracies. Simply put, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is lacking, except for COINTELPRO, they are dirty scumbags. This exploration gave me insight on how these alternate narratives spawn and grow. I think there are two main eras of conspiracy theory in America.

Era 1: Pre-Internet (Assassinations and Little Green Men)

This is era is defined by word of mouth conversations and weird mimeographed books. The latter end of this era will see the rise of talk radio and open up a whole new channel for this information. It is pretty easy to see how bad information got spread around. Remember life before the internet? Seriously, think about it. If you saw something on TV, or heard it on the radio, that was it. Unless you were some weirdo taper…cough…that happened to record everything. There weren’t giant repositories of all the crazy shit you wanted to remember. There was no youtube filled with news clips or phone videos of last night’s TV. Human memory is also sort of shitty about things. It is easy to conflate memories, especially for things that appear less meaningful at the time they occur. Try to recall a vivid memory. Then try to remember what everyone was wearing. (Some no doubt can do this, but they are exceptions.)

This just adds artifacts into the existing narrative. Remember urban legends before the internet? You would hear something that seemed like a myth, but you had no way to check without going to a library, or happening upon someone that might know if the story is true or false. Bad information multiplies like a virus.

Era 2: The Internet (There is a Mirror Reality)

Yes, I realize that was transition phase, but it’s not super important. The internet changed a bunch of stuff. It allowed like minded individuals to live in bizarre echo chambers that reinforce their preexisting beliefs. It also gave us access to a ton of information. A lot of that information is total garbage and/or porno. So, my reactions are shrug, yay, boo.

I shouldn’t be so surprised that humans would use all this technology to lazily concoct an entire mirror reality to the one that most of live in. I guess I’m more surprised that it isn’t awesome. If I were to create a subjective mirror reality that I want to convince everyone is going on, it would include far more fun. I would just try to convince people that all these other constructs of human creation don’t exist, like gender maybe.

Yes, I’m a painting with very broad strokes. It will have to do for now…

You would think all this information would make it easier to debunk bad info. You would be wrong to think this.

OK, ok, people are angry and alienated. I get that. The world can be a scary place. The US Government is not perfect. Bad shit happens, and America overreacts to everything. TV news is outlandish. TV news is a commercial. Newspapers and Radio are far better sources of information. Content made by people who like to listen and read is generally far superior to content made to go on TV. TV is too caught up in the pretty picture.

Sidenote: Has anyone noticed the gleam in their eye on Doomsday Preppers when they talk about the upcoming collapse? They are exciting for it, right? Its like when you read The Stand and get all excited for how you can go in any store and take stuff. The world is your playground…until the Cormac McCarthy rape cannibals come out to eat and fuck you. Please know this, Preppers:

  1. If there is a collapse, I’m coming to your houses. The ones you showed me on TV. (Except not the hippie one with the gross hot tub.)
  2. If there is martial law, or revolution. You will lose. Holding on to a couple semi-automatic weapons will NOT, I repeat, NOT save you. You have no chance against the might of the US Military in its current form. Sure a few could hold out in some insurgency, but most of us won’t be joining you.
  3. The conspiracy is someone is trying to sell you shit. You don’t need or want 5000 servings of freeze dried plop. The fear that you accuse society of is the same fear that motivates you to buy this stuff.
  4. Alternative conspiracy media outlets use the same fear-mongering that they accused the mainstream media of using.

What makes me most upset is the invalidation of the experience of the victims. Every time someone accuses a victim of a bombing or a shooting to be a shill or crisis actor, it starts a white hot fire of rage in my gut. If you choose to live in a separate subjective reality, fine. Don’t steal someone else’s reality. They have to heal. We all do.

Writing Class Assignment #2

Lyer’s Poker

by Donald McElroy

I


    Carl Peters slammed the door shut on his truck and slapped the steering wheel with open-palmed hands until they stung and throbbed back at him. “NO NO NO NO NO!” On the last “NO” his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth a bit, the bitter aftertaste of stale beer mixed with panic. He began to run through the last 30 minutes in his head. At first Yvie had complained of a slight discomfort, and he thought it was drinking on an empty stomach. Once she grabbed the knife, he knew she had drank from the wrong glass.

    He turned the truck over and radio squeaked out, “All I want for Christmas is my two teeth, my two front teeth, my two front teeth”. Only one station broadcast in Van Buren at that time of night, so Carl Peters gave up and turned off the radio. He could hear the voices from inside the house. Two were arguing, one was gurgling.

    “No, Martha, we can’t let her do it…”

    “But she’s suffering.”

    Eugene looked across the room to the kitchen where half-cooked stew sat on the stove. The knife used to chop the vegetables lay on the floor on the invisible boundary between rooms. “The ambulance is on it’s way.”

    “You know it can’t get here in time” Martha’s voice was pinched and reedy.

    Carl Peters got out of the truck and started back towards the house. His feet crunched the hard ground. As he got closer to the door, the voices began to soften, he could see Martha and Eugene kneeling on the floor, a grisly nativity scene. He wasn’t strong enough to go inside, and he wasn’t scared enough to run. “I’ll just tell them it was an accident, because it was” ran like a stag loop in his head. The lights framing the door window reflected off his face. The colors gave an illusion of change.

    “Yes, that’s why I wanted to drive her myself.” Eugene glanced sideways at his daughter then furrowed his brow so only his wife could see, “Talk to her, Martha, she needs to hear you.”

    “I don’t know how.” That is when Martha finally begin to sob.

    “Remember when she got the mumps, you talked to her every night.”

    “It’s not the same thing. I wasn’t in the war, so I can’t lie like you.”

    “You are going to be ok, Yvonne. Your mother and I love you.” Yvonne tried to talk but only air gurgled in the back of her throat. Her back arched in spasms of pain.

    “I love you, Yvie.” Martha found it almost as hard to speak as her daughter. From the other room a baby cried, screaming for her mother.


    II


    “So he just sat in the car while she died?” Stella cradled the glowing laptop and radiated disgust.

    “Pretty much, until the police get there.”

    “What the fuck, Donald. I thought this was a Christmas story.”

    “It is a Christmas story, it takes place at Christmas.”

    “People have a certain expectation of Christmas stories. It should be happy. It shouldn’t include someone accidentally poisoning his war-widow fiancee with lye.”

    “Well it’s not a total accident, he wanted to kill someone, just not her. Besides, I got it from the newspaper. I didn’t make it up.” Donald tried to sound jovial.

    “You brought it to life, that makes you an accessory after the fact. Who wants to remember this?”

    “I don’t know if I want to, but I have to.” As he said this, Donald noticed that the blinking lights in their own bedroom gave a similar illusion to Stella’s expression.

    “Just because you choose to relive all this grief, doesn’t mean everyone should have to.”

    “Where I grew up, there is a very dark core waiting under the veneer of their Norman Rockwell chairs.”

    “It’s like that everywhere. ‘You aren’t special, my dear’, isn’t that what you always say?”

    “I don’t say ‘you aren’t’, I say ‘none of us are’, there is a big difference.”

    “It makes me feel the same.”

    “I’ll work on that” Donald promised. “What bothers me most, is that I never heard of it. Nothing happens up there. You know…you’ve been there…the Pioneer Times is mostly filled with birthday parties and recipes. This was the trial of the century, but no one ever talked about it! People like to point at all this moral decay like it’s something new, but it’s not. That is why we shouldn’t forget these stories.”

    “Maybe they were just trying to forgive.”

    “Forgive and forget? I can forgive, but I can’t forget.”

    “Maybe they need to forget so they can forgive.” Stella cocked her head a cracked half a smile. Donald gave her a kiss on the forehead and took back the laptop in humble silence.

The Dangers of Time Travel

Time travel stories always make a point of educating us on the perils of messing with the past. Unless that story is Looper, in which case it revels in such behavior. A common warning is don’t kill your grandfather, for then you will never be born. Unless, of course, the man you thought was your grandfather isn’t actually your grandfather at all, and just some cuckolded rube. (Hello, revelatory climax to my time travel movie…)

We are also warned against killing ourselves as a baby, or bringing back a steam engine to ancient Rome. My own current belief in a multiverse or possibly multiverses somewhat precludes some of these dangers, for we merely would pinch off into a new plane of reality where that choice was already made. Does a belief in multiverses become a multi-multiverse? If so I’m copyrighting that now.

I’m not a physicist, but I can sort of understand what they talk about…sometimes… One interesting thing I heard lately was that since the universe or universes were so large and full of things that it was more statistically likely that our existence was a simulation created by someone else. OK, I am going to give you 5 seconds to let that sink in. As to how one creates an equation for that, I have no idea, but someone has done that math. IF this is correct, does that also mean that everything that could possibly be done, has been done? Logically, I think that follows, but can’t say for sure. So if everything that can be done has been done and we’ve never seen a time traveler from the future, that means that no one in the future has invented time travel and therefore it is probably impossible.

Why is it that all this advanced modern physics sounds like magic and religion? One of the main criticisms of String Theory is that it isn’t science by our definition of science. Does this mean we need to wait for linguistic drift to change the meaning of word, or perhaps does it require a full shift of how we perceive the scientific method? I don’t have good answers for any of this, but somewhere a Star Trek staff writer is getting excited just imagining how he can romanticize our fundamental confusion about how the multi-multiverse works.

The season finale of Mad Men’s first season has always been a favorite. Don sells the Carousel to Kodak using pictures of his own past while describing what the Greek root for nostalgia means. He describes this device as a time machine that “goes backwards and forwards, it takes us to a place we ache to go again.” It is a scene that works on many levels, and as I just rewatched it, I realized I had missed an interesting facet of the scene. By using his own photos, he gives resonance to the pitch, and he also really means it. The look on Don’s face that no one in the room sees is his own twinge of nostalgia. I guess you could read this as he is just buying his own bullshit, but that is a very cynical reading. This is the first time I remember Don really being open and honest, and this was the first time I really liked his character. What I had missed is that Don didn’t realize the dangers of time travel.

This sort of time travel is fraught with as many dangers as the paradoxes delineated previously. When you crack open a box of photos or as I did recently, listen to tapes of your childhood all kinds of ghosts can come flying out of that box. To be clear, there is no regret here, but I didn’t understand the ramifications of what I was really doing. The tape here is one from Christmas 1977. It is a tape that my dad set up to record on Christmas morning. It contains the voices of my long dead grandparents, great grandmother and various other relatives.

The tape had been broken since the mid-1980s, and given the work to make some of the other 1970s cassettes listenable, I was skeptical about getting the tape to work right. This is a tape that snapped off the leader due to heavy listening. I was fascinated back then, for it let me relive Christmas morning over and over. After about 20 minutes of careful work, I had the tape on the reel and back in the housing. I slapped it into the tape deck and began to digitize it, worried that if anything went wrong on the first pass, I would at least have something.

The quality of the tape surprised me. I stood at my desk and listened in rapt attention for the entire first side. It was intense, but I loved it. My maternal grandparents were a big part of my young life. I stayed with them on Saturday nights and watched the Muppet Show, Chips, and BJ and the Bear. (unfortunately, they also liked Lawrence Welk and the Irish Rovers…) Sundays we would get up and go to breakfast, first at a diner my Uncle Stubby’s brother Elwin owned. After he sold it, we would go to Meserves. After Sunday breakfast it was off to Laverdiere’s then the flea market to look at antiques.

They were Nan and Bumpy. I couldn’t pronounce Grampy properly, it came out as Bumpy and the name stuck. He didn’t seem to mind the informality of it all. This is, of course, the same man that would proclaim ‘poop and peanut butter sandwiches’ years after I had outgrown the phrase.

We had moved back to Northern Maine when I hit second grade. My grandparents moved there when I was in 5th grade to be closer. Within 6 months, my grandfather died of an extremely aggressive cancer. He went to see a doctor two hours away and never came back. Looking back now at conversations he and I had the summer before his death, I wonder if he knew. He told me of very specific plans about how long money had to last and joked about there being enough if he died within the next 2 years.

I spent most nights at my grandmothers house for the next year or so, I didn’t want her to feel alone. I would spend most saturday nights at her house until she moved back to Southern Maine. Another grandchild had been born, and Nan was spending half the year near to my cousin. This era was marked by Hunter, The Golden Girls, and Saturday Night’s Main Event where Nan would try to explain to me that she was pretty sure that this wrestling was fake. Often times as well, friends of mine would stay over as well. Nan would even play monopoly with us.


Sunday morning she would help me on my insanely long paper route before we would hit breakfast and then head to her store. Part of the retirement plan was for my grandparents to run a convenience store. Nan didn’t much want to keep doing it after Bumpy’s death, but it took a few years to sell the business. A good part of Sunday morning would involve us playing rummy or honeymooner’s spades.

The fall of my senior year of high school, I stayed home sick with a pretty hellish flu. I remember mom and dad telling me that Nan was sick as well and they were taking her to the doctor. I was somewhat feverish and delusional when they brought her back to our house where she had to drink a can of Ensure and slept on the other end of the L shaped couch. I guess I knew something was wrong then, but it wasn’t until the next day that my parents told me that she had inoperable cancer and might have a year.

She died before I graduated, but she did get to see my acceptance letter to college. I think that was more important anyway. I have only vague recollections of the funeral. Between her funeral and a classmate of mine that died the year before, I decided I don’t need to be in the room anymore. It is just too much for me to handle. In some ways it still is.

Among all the things that this tape has shown me, it has made it obvious to me that I just pushed this whole thing into the closet. It has been waiting for me…back in 1992 right where I left it between a jean jacket and a blazer with shoulder pads. The reminder of how much they meant to me far outweighs the dangers of time travel.

(If you want to listen to the tape, it is here: https://soundcloud.com/nate-mcfadden/christmas-1977)