There is a strange, hermetic counter-logic governing what can be loosely called the “conspiracy theory culture.” Basically: the more ornate a given theory is, the more it intersects and entwines with other theories, the more authority it gains. If you can connect chem-trails to drone strikes to the Bilderberg group honchos who orchestrated 9/11, then double back through Bohemian Grove to find Satanist child-murderers in bed with the Illuminati and the greys, all under the sway of the shape-shifting reptilian overlords who are really responsible for fixing oil prices and picking the popes, you’re golden.
Like physicists struggling to connect Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics, the conspiracy theorist grasps for the grand theory to unify all fields of conspiratorial thinking. If the government (or whoever) is trying to squash esoteric knowledge, then the more esoteric the knowledge, the truer it must be. The magnitude of incredibility comes to indicate an idea’s credibility. The Big Lie can only be debunked by an even bigger truth.
This whole mode of thinking, and believing, revealed itself on Sunday at Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church in the Annex, where Parkdale bookstore Conspiracy Culture hosted an event dedicated to MKUltra, the CIA’s (mostly declassified) program of behavioural engineering and mind control. Present were Cathy O’Brien, an author and speaker who claims to have been recruited into a child sex ring that was a module of Project MKUltra, and her partner Mark Phillips, who alleges to be an ex-CIA agent who hauled O’Brien out of her dismal life of ritual abuse. Also: Roseanne Barr, whose presence provided the event with an air of excitement and noteworthiness it may not have otherwise possessed. Or merited.
Roseanne (house style be damned, calling her “Barr” doesn’t feel right), claims to be good friends with O’Brien and Phillips. She also claims that Hollywood is a sort-of staging ground for ongoing mind-control experiments. And not just in the normal, taken-for-granted way where movie studios and political parties rather obviously control the messages disseminated to the culture, creating those bogus illusions of choice that are so central to keeping a consumerist-capitalist nation humming along all those subtler, sort of metabolic ways in which mind-control, as Roeseanne neatly puts it, “makes tolerance of the intolerable normal.” But in more actively monstrous ways.
Roseanne says that Hollywood is a hotbed for pedophiles. She believes that Amanda Bynes is a mind control victim who has been indoctrinated by a similar program as the one used to (allegedly) enslave O’Brien, one called Project Monarch, which one that relies on the fracturing of human consciousness and the exploitation of dissociative personality disorders. She is against religion and “New Age” healing type-stuff, yet advocates a method of awareness-heightening breathing that is pretty much exactly zazen meditation, the core tenet of Zen Buddhist practice. Roseanne led the audience, seated in padded pews, through three rounds of controlled breathing. It was beyond strange.
In a 1995 New Yorker profile released when Roseanne stood astride Oprah as the most powerful woman in Hollywood (and, arguably, America), author John Lahr praised “the ungrammatical jazz” of her standup delivery. There’s a way in which Roseanne, like Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, is able to beguile an audience with the rhythm of her voice: rippling, swelling, screeching as it rolls along the contours of a joke. Excepting the minor hiccups where the laptop computer she was reading from lagged behind her, this gift benefitted Roseanne even as she spoke to a topic that is, ostensibly, somewhat outside of her comfort zone.
Roseanne is fluent in the cant and jargon of fringe thinking. Phrases like “hall of mirrors,” “spells and incantations,” “the churning world of commerce,” “lemming-like parades” all popped up over the course of her lengthy, mostly cogent, lecture. She name checked the Illuminati, the New World Order, the Demopublicans and their falsely delineated “Coke v. Pepsi” system, as well as Arianna Huffington, John Stewart, Bill Maher and the “hipster pundits.” Like a soapbox preacher carried away on the eddies of her own cadenced outrage, she lost herself a bit, breaking into fits of false laughter, mixing metaphors (the circling wagons are tightening their nooses, apparently).
There is, perhaps, a degree to which Roseanne’s belief in an implausible MKUltra conspiracy in Hollywood deflates her varied achievements as an entertainer, comedian, trailblazing feminist, etc. After all, her long-running ABC sitcom legibly sketched the realities of aspirational upward-mobility in America. The woes of Roseanne’s fictional family, the Conners, were emotional as well as financial, with the show offering up a weekly portrait of middle-class America that skewed closer to the real deal (trouble making ends meet, empty pop cans everywhere) than something like The Cosby Show.
For Roseanne to begin deferring to conspiracy feels suspicious, maybe even a bit disappointing. The idea of “conspiracy” is like a deus ex machina that foists the responsibility onto the shadowy shoulders of Grand Mitigating Forces. It shifts the conversation away from bottom-line stuff like wage equity, the wildly uneven distribution of wealth and power, and the systematic subjugation of women – stuff that the show Roseanne was, barring the egregious late-season “the Conners win the lottery!” plotline was always about – and onto more fanciful constructions like cabals of satanic pedophiles and a sinister, string-pulling New World Order. It just doesn’t feel right.
That Roseanne has hitched her saddle (or vice-versa) to Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips, two fairly prominent speakers who have been broadly discredited even within the conspiracy theory set, doesn’t help anything.
MKUltra is all too real. The existence of the program – the enlistment (and, maybe, abduction) of unwitting citizens in the United States and Canada, their exposure to sensory deprivation and diets of chemical-grade hallucinogens – has been documented and declassified. Moreover, the bald-faced existence of Project MKUltra suggests the existence of programs like MKUltra: of hush-hush agendas that represent abuses of governmental (and extra-governmental) authority at their wildest extremes. MKUltra proves both that, yes, there are conspiracies – and of course there are see: the WikiLeaks cable dump, see: any secret shared by even just two people – but that the sort of shifty-eyed paranoid thinking that’s at the heart of conspiracy culture is totally validated.
Cathy O’Brien’s claims that she was “born into a multi-generational, incest-based family” and that “unelected” President Gerald Ford ritually abused her, or that Margaret Trudeau was a sex slave, undermine that validity. (She also claims that George W. Bush was part of a super-secret human hunting program called Project Most Dangerous Game, which is laughably on-the-nose, like calling your human brainwashing experiment Project Manchurian Candidate.) Just as questionable is Phillips’ claims that country-western entertainer Alex Houston was a prodigious child pornographer. For people who preach the thoroughgoing scrutiny of every assumption we take for granted, their own claims fail even a basic sniff test. Even for the open-minded, these accusations test our capacity to believe them, and the limits of our willingness to believe.
Still, maybe it’s here that the real function of conspiratorial thinking, at its furthest reaches, begins to reveal itself.
At first it seemed sort of broadly ironic for a lecture on mind control to be held in a church. As she addressed the pulpit, Roseanne even mentioned that “this might a first: to speak truth in a church” (a recycled joke). But the setting was totally appropriate. Like religion, belief in an overarching global – sometimes even extraterrestrial, sometimes even reptilian – conspiracy touching everything from the price of gold to the suppression of the electric car to existence to various “false flag” black-ops and the purported Arab-fascist coalition led by 113 year-old Nazi secretary Martin Bormann, offers the comfort that there’s some order in the world, something to keep the more horrifying universal tendency toward chaos and volatility at arm’s length.
It’s like that poster hanging conspicuously over Mulder’s desk on The X-Files. It doesn’t say “I BELIEVE” but “I WANT TO BELIEVE.” It’s less about the given theories or mega-theories but the desire to vest yourself in them, to fork over logic, self-awareness and all your constellations of knowledge and understanding to something that can bind it all together. And without sounding all condescending like, “aww look at the poor weirdoes with their wacky ideas,” this unsatisfiable appeal for meaning and orderliness-in-the-chaos ran through the logjam of people lined up to ask questions of Roseanne, O’Brien and Phillips people who sought to square what they’d just heard with their own pet theories about chem-trails, Satanism, cashless societies, black-market Russian technologies, musical harmonies and their effects on neuron pathways, aspartame, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Like believing that some guy died on a cross and turned into wine or that an elephant-headed god mitigates all wisdom in the universe, the twisted consolation afforded by full-bore conspiracy theories is a weird, maybe counterintuitive, maybe totally counter-logical sort of comfort. But a comfort all the same. When you’re predisposed to look for them, there are always “powers that be.” Maybe it’s just a matter of what you choose to believe they are.
