Conspiring, In Theory

CONSPIRACY THEORIES, which I generally don't like, are of little interest to me. Maybe I'm burned out. My first bad experience with them was the assassination of President Kennedy. The shock of this for an eight and a half year old third greader was traumatic. I had never before in my short life even remotely considered the possibility that the Preisdent of the United States could be murdered. as I recall I still knew nothing about Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Precocious and ambitious, I began a project of cutting out every article in our local newspaper which had anything at all to do, directly or indirectly, with th awfule vents of November 22, 1963. It happened on a Friday. Saturday's edition ran the huge ink stained headline, Sunday's paper was more of the same, and by Monday and beyond the sad funeral and transition to LBJ grabbed the nation's attention. And the conspiracy theories began to flow as freely as a pure mountain stream, clogged with the murky mud of suspicion. How, after all, could a nondescript litle nobody like twenty four year old Lee Harvey Oswold have possibly carried out such an audacious act? By the time the dust had cleared, and it really never has entirely cleared, not only were the CIA, FBI, and Vice President priime suspects as acconplices, but fingers were being pointed at the Russians and Cubans, Khruschev and Castro, our old communist enemies. Both of these accused seemted to tacitly imply that they would indeed have been quite willing if not outwardly pleased to have been the assailant, but, alas, had not been. By 1966 I had read every book in the library, not an inconsiderable number were already availale in our medium sized town library, and was beginning to lose my patience and become a bit suspicious as to whether the whole thing had been the product of group pre planning, or wasin fact the random action of a lone gunman, maybe one who hated Kennedy. Only, Oswald didn't hate Kennedy. I tried to figure it all out, but couldn't. Neither, it seemed, could anybody else. I walked out of the Oliver Stone movie in 1990 as a thrity five year old whose curiosity has been renewed, inflamed by Stone's masterful way of implicating, using circumstantial evidence, seemingly everything and everybody who gets out of bed in the morning. My credulity recovered, my innate skepticism and critical thinking skills having become better honed by the time I graduated from the sixth grade. No, not all conspiracy theories are inherently invalid, told a friend of mine who swears by them. But neither are they all true, nor even most of them. True, people conspire. Whenever two or more are gathered together, and so forth. Isn't the Christian religion the product of a conspiracy theory which can never be proven nor disproven? My friend asked me whether I always believe what I hear on the news, and do I really believe the "bombing" of the World Trade Center was the act of a single demented mind? I reflexively answered "yes" to the question about the news, and "probably yes" to the one about the twin towers. Another friend of mine, a solid scientific skeptic, seemed to lean towards the notion that the WTC was brought down with the "help" of several powerful explosives positioned up and down the buildings, set to detonate, which they did, the moment the airplanes impacted. And, by golly, he showed me a film which seemed to confirm this. Was the video authentic, or fabricated or doctored, one of those AI Facebook jobs? I still don't know for sure about JFK, or about the WTC, and evidently neither does anybody else. Nor for that matter do I know whether Hillary Clinton was running a whore house out of a Pizza joint in Virginia. I have my doubts. Unless, of course, the government is concealing proof from us, to spare our poor little sensitive selves more post traumatic agony, agony over Hillary's alleged prostitution ring, or of extraterrestrials floating in formaldehide, staring bug eyed like insects with big brains, perhaps forever frozen in their wonderment that we benighted humans could ever have had the naivete to doubt their existence and presence among us in the first place.