November: Conspiracy Theory Month

[With April as "runner-up"]

Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Month! November has all kinds of goodies in this area: the 2000 presidential election and its Florida recount, Paul McCartney's supposed fatal automobile accident in 1966, and of course, the John Kennedy assassination in 1963. But as a matter of course, I think I'll be writing from time to time this month about a whole range of conspiracies, real and imagined, whether or not they involve the month of November.

Conspiracy theorists, if you read them, usually have developed their own very specific timelines and locales for the events that they are focusing on. This can create quite a creepy "alternative universe" scenario of sites that in reality were most likely totally devoid of relevance to the matter at hand. The most prominent of these, as I see it, is the "grassy knoll" in Dallas, from which extra gunmen were purported to have secretly shot President Kennedy in the early afternoon of November 22, 1963. But after Oliver Stone's conspiracy-heavy movie JFK, now I can stage my own "conspiracy fantasy" tour focusing on New Orleans and Dallas.

So what are some of the more famous conspiracy theories that have permeated our collective consciousness over the years? Here are a few that come to my mind:

--JFK's assassination wasn't just by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald acting on his own, but was a plot carried out by various parties aggrieved with the President, acting in a highly improbable unholy alliance with each other. Depending upon the conspiracy theorist, these suspected parties include extreme right wing southerners, the CIA, organized crime, Castro, and even Lyndon Johnson.

--Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in June 1968 wasn't a lone job by Sirhan Sirhan, but rather a conspiracy with another gunman on the scene. With such a crowded setting in which this crime occurred, this view is one of the more utterly preposterous conspiracy theories (to me).

--Much less preposterous-sounding is the idea that the 4/4/68 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee was a conspiracy. I personally have a difficult time accepting the notion that a career criminal such as James Earl Ray would have the motive to take out this great civil rights leader on his own. But as a hired gun or someone set up to be there when it happened? Makes more sense.

--The "9/11 was an inside job" notion carries a lot of weight with some people because those accused of plotting these horrendous attacks enjoyed enormous political gains from the attacks and were freed to carry out policies (Patriot Act, invasion of Iraq) that would otherwise have never been tolerated by the American people.

--Similarly, Franklin Roosevelt has been accused of setting Pearl Harbor up for attack in December 1941 in order to formally bring America directly into World War II, which it had successfully avoided for more than two years, thanks in large part to the enormous popular and political opposition to direct combat involvement.

--The idea that nobody ever really went to the moon and that it was all done and broadcast from a remote movie set in the American West was reinforced by movies like 1971's James Bond flick Diamonds Are Forever, which featured a scene where our hero busts through exactly such a set and commandeers the "Lunar Rover" in a chase scene, using it to flee from the bad guys. The later film Capricorn One lays out the Moon Hoax conspiracy theory more directly by portraying a staged mission for a Mars trip.

--A personal favorite conspiracy theory is the "Paul is dead" narrative, first promoted in 1969 by some Detroit radio DJs and still enduring to this day. Much of the supporting "evidence" for the notion that Beatles great Paul McCartney died in a November 1966 car crash is given in the form of subsequent Beatles lyrics and album cover clues.

--Aliens gave us advanced technology, which we "reverse-engineered". The crash at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 (which actually never happened) gave the US government access to higher technology in areas like fiber optics and digitization. I see this theory as an application to modern times of Erich Von Däniken's "ancient astronaut" ideas, in which he expresses that space aliens visited Earth in ancient times and were responsible for pyramids and giant statues. In both "theories", the implication is that humans are too stupid to think up anything on their own, and therefore outside help must be the explanation for great innovations.

--A whole new wave of conspiracy theories is being generated by wacko, paranoid elements of the political right about our current President, Barack Obama. Which is giving rise to a mirror-conspiracy theory being put out by the political left, laying the blame for derogatory statements about the President on the Republican Party and corporate interests opposed to the Obama agenda.

Well, let's see what the coming month holds for this blog regarding conspiracies. I personally plan to invest some time reading up on them and then reporting some of my findings. Should be a lot of fun!