Conspiracies A-Go-Go
by Gary Phillips
Being a lefty and a mystery writer, I’m a prime sucker for conspiracy theories. Some of these I dismiss out of hand for political or logical reasons—or both. Take the birthers ... please! Because to me, really, they’re just racists who’ve found a cover issue or are straight up nut jobs like their titular leader, Orly Taints, er, Taitz. The other side of the spectrum has its whackos as well. Like those who postulate it was previously planted thermite bombs that brought down the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11. But that’s the great thing about conspiracy theories, there’s room for all in the big tent of believing the hidden hand is manipulating world events.
Aside from giving mouth breathers material, these theories provide order in a chaotic universe and do have a toehold in reality. Conspiracy theories, for all their interlocking arcane personalities and organizations, attempt, conversely, to simplify the complexities of the real world. Take for instance the persistent notion the car barons of General Motors killed the Red Car, the Pacific Electric Railway trolley and bus system connecting cities in L.A., Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties.
It is true that GM, Standard Oil and several other entities including tire interests formed a front company in Southern California called the National City Lines. This consortium did buy up right-of-ways and rail lines to eventually remove them and replace them with buses built by GM to use gas, oil and rubber for the tires. It’s also the case that ridership was declining, particularly post WWII (helped in part by GM ads for our American right to have the convenience and freedom of a car). The red and yellow cars (the inter-urban line) were not profit makers. Real estate values and several other factors contributed to the decline of the trolley.
Now of course the NCL’s role in the demise of rail in the Southland is not insignificant. Had there also been an organized tea party-like outcry, if you will, at these shenanigans to force a public policy that stood foursquare for maintaining and modernizing the rail system as a public good, the outcome might have been different. But then, we would have been deprived of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The film, based on the book by Gary K. Wolf, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, effectively blended live action and animation. The plot is about an evil entity, personified as a chap named Doom, who murders to cover up his scheme to buy up Toontown and destroy it to build a freeway, while simultaneously carrying out shady deals to destroy the trolley cars—all in the name of the good god Big Buck, as Funkadelic’s George Clinton opined on “Maggot Brain.”
Ideology also plays a large role in conspiracy theories. In Mark Lane’s and Dick Gregory’s Code Named “Zorro”: The Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., they posit that the FBI had a hand, if not a guiding hand, in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The inside flap of the book jacket reads: Why was King’s police protection removed on the day he was killed? The FBI squad assigned to destroy King as a black leader (under the banner of COINTELPRO, an agent provocateur program the FBI designed to neutralize King and the Black Panthers utilizing snitches, illegal wire taps, planting false evidence and so on), whom they codenamed Zorro, became the lead in investigating his murder.
Hampton Sides, in his recent book Hellhound on his Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, constructs a narrative of King’s last days up to and returning to Memphis in support of the black garbage men’s strike. The civil rights leader movements are paralleled, as you would in a mystery novel, the same timeline with the man convicted of his assassination, the petty criminal James Earl Ray.
Sides acknowledges in interviews that yes, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, hated King, but was forced to have his FBI find his killer given the furor and pressure on the government to do so. But as Janet Maslin points out in her New York Times review of the book, Sides doesn’t examine the question of whether Ray acted alone or not. A question that remains unanswered for many.
The late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, dropped a bomb when it was published in 1998, given certain questions and allegations his book raised. The Reagan Administration through the CIA backed the right wing insurgents of several groupings collectively referred to as the contras or Somocistas (supporters of the dictator Anastasio Somoza) as they sought to violently overthrow the Marxist Sandinistas in power in Nicaragua. President Reagan and his vice president George Bush the First (ex-CIA director) saw Nicaragua as another Cuba in the making. These maneuverings were part of a larger geopolitical chess game played out between us and the then Soviet Union.
The contras, Webb wrote, initially were not getting enough cash flow from their western allies. They jumped into the lucrative cocaine trade with Nicaragua as a transit point for the Colombian marching powder. The idea was to raise some spending cash to buy arms and whatnot. The book draws a line between this activity, their fixer Danilo “Chanchin” Blandón, and “Freeway” Rick Ross, an ambitious drug dealer in South Central L.A. who would build a multi-million dollar distribution empire until he was busted. For this was at a time when crack or rock cocaine made the scene, produced by a simple process of boiling down coke, baking soda and water until it crystallizes. It’s crack, with its concentrated hit, that Ross’ customers started to demand, and like any good businessman, he was more than willing to fill the need.
Dark Alliance’s major tenets fed perfectly into an already growing urban belief; the CIA had been airlifting dope, or providing the planes for same, into America’s inner cities to keep the natives in thrall for years. But this wasn’t a new notion. In 1972 Alfred McCoy published The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, a book the CIA sought to repress in the courts.
Among those of us on the black left, albeit not exactly a groundswell, McCoy’s book was required reading. While McCoy’s book was something of an obscure text, Webb’s made prime time. Lending credence to Webb’s assertions were the findings of the committee impaneled during that time by the Vietnam vet and Massachussets’ junior senator John Kerry. His committee did establish direct links between the drug trafficking and the contras. Even the director of the CIA at that time, John Deutch, came to South Central at the behest of Congresswoman Maxine Waters to assure residents his agency wasn’t pushing dope.
Yet it seems the CIA and their ilk are pikers when it comes to old line secretive nefarious organizations the likes of the Freemasons or the Illuminati. Several of America’s revolutionary figures were Masons, including Ben Franklin, Paul Revere and Col. Ben Tupper. There’s various books, Internet chitchat and what have you about the supposed Masonic influence in our country. For instance, you can find various entries about Masonic architecture and hidden symbolism in the layout of Washington, D.C.
Much too has been made of the hidden meanings in the Great Seal with the eye inside the floating tip over the rest of a pyramid on the back of our one dollar bills. The National Treasure films have had fun with these long-held myths about the Masons. Including having actor Nicolas Cage looking like a James Bama rendered Doc Savage paperback cover in the movie posters—particularly the first outing. Keeping it all the way modern, I ran across a site claiming Jay-Z, Nas and Kanye West are Freemasons. I guess I better listen more closely to their music.
As for the Illuminati, what aren’t they behind? Assassinations, toppling governments, the double down, colorizing classic black and white movies, and who knows what else. There’s supposed to be ancient hookups between them and the Masons, and their tentacles into circles of power. I’m surprised the creators of Lost didn’t throw them in the mix at some point. Though for all I know, the Lost secret history will have Charles Widmore and Jin-Soo Kwon as Illuminati brethren. Think about it, you ever see a cross word between them? Robert Anton Wilson penned the Historical Illuminati Chronicles, horror writer Clive Barker had the Illuminati as a kind of Phantom Zone where supernatural paraphernalia is exiled, and Marvel Comics got all, well, Marvel-style with the Illuminati.
Professor Charles Xavier, aka Professor X (the X-Men’s founder and mentor, though not a member of the Nation of Islam), Black Bolt, leader of the Inhumans, Dr. Stephen Strange, sorcerer supreme, Iron Man, Namor, the Sub-Mariner, king of Atlantis, and Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, leader of the Fantastic Four. These swingin’ cats get together at the close of the Kree-Skrull war to work in a clandestine manner not seeking power, but to forestall future earth-threatening menaces. But of course with such beings wielding power in preemptive strikes, unforeseen consequences can occur.
Like say when Iron Man as director of SHIELD, a global spy agency, pushes through the Superhero Registration Act. Every masked adventurer is required to register with the government and have their secret identities on file. Naturally there’s some pushback on this, leading to the assassination of Captain America, an invasion of deep sleeper Skrull agents (being shape shifters, you see, so some who we’ve come to know as stalwart superheroes all these years are really damn dirty Skrulls), and of the Dark Reign storyline.
The current Dark Reign saga has tycoon Norman Osborn, once the original Green Goblin supervillain nemesis of Spider-Man, running the show. Ostensibly he’s in charge of the Initiative, a move by the Feds to establish a superhero team in each of our fifty states for defense. But this gives him license to do all manner of devilment.
Here’s an instructive segment of the Wikipedia entry on him:
Norman Osborn has consistently been depicted with several unusual weaknesses related to his psychosis and to his personality. He suffers from manic depression, and has a pronounced superiority complex and, in some depictions, multiple-personality disorder. Finally, he is highly sadistic and shows disregard for the lives of innocent people who stand between himself and his objectives.
Perfect guy to be engineering conspiracies.
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