Quacks, Conspiracy Theories, And Wacko DIY Cures - Why Is America So Full Of Them?

Blanton Phelps knew exactly where COVID came from, and it certainly was not from the Wuhan lab.  Phelps had been a longtime believer in strange and unusual phenomenon - 'Alternate Explanatory Theory' (AET) it was called in the psychiatric community, described in a recent special edition of the Journal of Advanced Psychiatry devoted entirely to cockamamie beliefs, why they occurred and why they persisted so long.

 

Another in the same journal focused on immunizations  There are immunizations against all childhood illnesses and yet parents are refusing them on the grounds that they cause all kinds of worse problems like autism, brain cancer, and worse.  The author wrote:

The government places minuscule tracking devices in these vaccinations. These tracking devices act as beacons for various satellites. In this way, similar to the technology found in controlling airplane traffic, the government knows where we are at all times. Indeed, it is unclear how much information is provided in these beacon devices. These beacons may, for example, provide rudimentary data, such as age, heart rate, blood pressure, or speed. They may also provide more detailed information, such as what we are saying at any given time.

All of which leads to the flimflammery of anti-vaxxers.  With no proof whatsoever, and basing their conclusions on hearsay, discredited research, and a wild, collective fear of government perversity and secretive manipulation, these 'alternate realists' refuse to get vaccinated thus slowing herd immunity, putting their families and neighbors at risk, and adding to their subscription to conspiracy theories.

This is not surprising because an online journalist writing on the alternative website Scam! recently wrote a series of articles on fluoridation and said that he wanted to warn people because more and more jurisdictions were adding the chemical to drinking water.  However he was not so much worried about the usual issues – cancer, mental retardation, early Alzheimer’s autism, and monkey tics – but about an even more pernicious effect. 

The Soviets had learned from captured Nazi scientists that fluoridation had unique properties of mind control – it made people more compliant and particularly responsive to political persuasion.  The Nazis had successfully fluoridated German water and that was why so many millions of otherwise normal people had become such rabid Nazis.  The Soviets wanted to accomplish the same thing, except this time to promote Communism; and had surreptitiously fluoridated water systems in the United States.



At the same time spies and Soviet propagandists spread information about Communism.  The result was a whole decade of pro-Soviet American Communism. 

‘Tracking’, therefore, is not that weird.

The number and type of conspiracy theories increases geometrically.  We have always been a loony, unhinged, and crazy society, but now all bets are off and absolutely anything goes. All this academic airing about conspiracy theorists is all well and good, but the question still remains – who are they? What world do they inhabit?   Have they abandoned logic altogether and their theories based simply on a disassociation from traditional rationality? Or have is their world a complex one of sylphs, druids, and spirits on the one hand, and unimaginable Tantric powers on the other?

Socio-political theorists have suggested that everything in American culture has been tending towards this disassembly of reason and rationality for decades.  There is no longer any received wisdom but collective wisdom.  The judgment of tens of millions of ‘bettors’ always produces more relevant conclusions than any one or group of intellectuals.   Both considered and frivolous bets are all placed in the pot, mixed and turned, sorted and analyzed. 

It isn't so much about unhinged conspiracy theories per se, but about the nature of conspiratorial belief itself.  Is there some of the unhinged in all of us? Why is America particularly infected with the conspiracy virus? Why are we not content with rationality?  Why do we turn so quickly to the paranormal, supernatural, and implausible?

Now Blanton Phelps would never have considered himself a conspiracy theorist or even a believer - a true believer in impossibilities. He admitted that there might be some truth to US government complicity in the attacks of 9/11 - why was it so far-fetched when Roosevelt had let the Jap bomb Pearl Harbor so that he finally had a compelling argument to enter the War against the Nazis, when Lyndon Johnson concocted a story about American warships being fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin so that he could finally go to the American people with his Southeast Asia domino theory? -  but he never deep down actually believed it.  He considered himself a logical person but one openminded enough to consider all possibilities. 

So COVID might well have been part of the International Jewish conspiracy to weaken the United States to the point of lockdown so that they could buy cheap, keep their properties in escrow until the epidemic passed, and then sell them at fabulous prices. Once a Jew, always a Jew, Blanton considered, so when you got all of them together to plan such an ingenious idea, why not?  HIV/AIDS could very well have been a conservative plot to decimate black and gay populations,

Of course, he didn't really believe the Jew COVID theory entirely, but he didn't believe either that someone coughed somewhere in the world and lit it up with hacking and coughing.  The Wuhan lab story was a good cover for something far more insidious.  There was a very good chance that the US military, after failed attempts to isolate and weaponize bird flus, SARS, Ebola, and other viruses, finally succeeded in capturing some errant COVID genes, got them to multiply like molecular rabbits in a lab far beneath the Utah desert, and then someone dropped a beaker and even from 1000 feet below the little buggers were able to find their way up and out.  

To be fair Blanton Phelps was as consistent as could be.  He trusted modern medicine as far as that goes, but doctors as a whole couldn't be trusted.  There wasn't much difference between wars fought on principle (democracy, sovereignty, the rule of law) but really to line the pockets of the poohbahs in the military-industrial complex and the medical establishment in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to rob Americans blind. 

So when he had some ailment, rather than go to a board-certified physician, he turned to alternative medicine.  When homeopathy, a crackpot theory described in the Hindi version of the Indian Homeopathic Journal of Medicine as  'Likes producing likes reduces likes' - or give a patient something to give him a fever and the disease-caused fever will disappear - had no effect, he tried ayurveda another wacko theory where roots and berries are thought to cure cancer, and women's psychopathological hysteria among other lesser disease.  And after that, hot yoga, water cures, nature therapy, and sleep deprivation. 

Sleep deprivation was an interesting possibility, derived from homeopathy.  Rather than considering sleep as a restorative agent, it was thought in the alternative medical community to be just the opposite - i.e. the more the patient was kept awake, the more his bodily functions kept attacking disease and truly restorative bodily fluids increased. 

Finally Blanton tried DIY home remedies, and these of course were in the thousands for every ailment.  The former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai was convinced that drinking his own urine was essential for cleansing his bodily system and lived to a ripe old age.  Idi Amin was reported to have used a ‘witches’ brew’, a concoction like that of Macbeth’s weird sisters to cure his persistent venereal diseases which of course never worked, and he became more and more demented from syphilis as he days wore on.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 

A Harvard academic writing in Conspiracy Today noted this: 

A more persuasive argument is that “conspiracy theories afford adherents a means of maintaining self-esteem, coping with persecution, reasserting individualism, or expressing negative feelings”; and an even more persuasive one suggests that “conspiracy theories emerged because of ‘an irrational need to explain big and important events with proportionately big and important causes'. 

Academia aside, Blanton Phelps with his crypto-conspiracy theories, wacko medicine, and cockamamie home remedies was just plain nuts; and he wasn't alone. America is loaded with these wingnuts, ready to believe anything that sounds reasonable.

Woke Women Don't Go On Blind Dates - Sex Is To Be Adjudicated

Janey Parsons had been brought up to believe that a Mr. Right was in her future - a man if not of her dreams, then of the reality of honesty, truth, respect, and earning ability.  Her mother, an early feminist whose moniker was 'The Phantom' in recognition of her anonymous zingers to the New York Times and Washington Post objecting to the journals' misogyny and blatant disrespect for women, hadn't changed an iota.  Even though women of her daughter's age found, thanks to her, the stairway to stardom easy to climb, they must still demand compliance with the new code of female virtue.  

She signed her letters to the editor 'Anonymous' because in those early, heady days of the revolution, only a few dared to be outspoken about women's rights, and if and when they were, censure was sure to follow.  'Bitch, cunt, mind your own fucking business' was what was to be expected for outing female integrity; and this hardened her against male retrogressive patriarchy.  If it hadn't been for this...scurrility...she might not have been so insistent on her daughter's sexual choices, but she couldn't help herself. 

Men are pricks, she said, are and always will be, so finding Mr. Right may be a rocky road - or words to that effect which rolled off Janey's back because, Mom, things have changed.  Men are different.  You did your job.  Of course she was only thinking of Boiler Room Doug, the engineering student who backed off when he saw women coming and waited for their signal to approach - a train lineman's idea as to when to let the locomotive into the yard - but with any luck other men might be not so 'diffident'?

She hit post-feminist wokeness in full stride on her first foray into sexual womanhood, the MeToo, 'No Means No' generation of the newly-sensitized and aware female. When Dave, a chemistry major (shades of Boiler Room Doug) asked her up, she quickly found out that he had not been versed in the appropriate steps to sexual completion.  He never once asked a 'May I?' or 'Should I?' but slammed ahead like a rutting pig until she had to shout, 'Get off me, you jerk'. 

Then there was Armand, ah oo-la-la Frenchman with Gallic charm and a pompadour who seemed to know the ropes but, like Dave, plowed ahead like a farmer behind a mule; but hers was not a furrow to be hoed, and she shouted the same refrain, 'For the love of Mike, get off me'.  

Now, to be fair, Dave and Armand were pickups in a bar, not exactly the place to find Mr. Right - too random, too sketchy, and God knows what detritus you might end up with; so why not try the new high-tech AI-enabled online dating algorithms.  

'Harvard graduate, law school bound seeks lover of Kant and de Saint-Exupery in mutually respectful relationship. Non-smokers preferred'; and for this as an opener filled in the blanks to describe herself perfectly - an intellectual with a sensual side, a lover of the devil-may-care but within the bounds of propriety, a giver, and an upholder of honesty.  Of course there were all the boilerplate items that these dating agencies required, but she got her point across and included a reasonably honest photograph of her on the beach at Southampton, wind in her hair. 

 

'I should have signed up for speed-dating', she thought after a month of tedious, presumptuous, idiotically sex-consumed men who should have been able to find Miss Right without such fol-de-rol; but of course she was in the same boat. 

She tried a few out - Percy from Staten Island who was a perfect gentleman but who never once mentioned the water sports in his sexual closet; or Brad from Shaker Heights who couldn't come 'to closure' with the lights on. 

Each one of these jerks had done the right thing - 'Is it OK if I move my hand here...and how about here...and what about here?' but were so sexually pedantic that she wanted to puke.  Where were Don Juan, Lothario, and Valmont? There would be no 'liaisons dangereuses' here or any time soon.  What I wanted is to be fucked royally, she admitted, with all due respect to her mother. 

Perhaps I need to tweak my resume, she thought.  The original was too tootie-fruity, too Harvard, too academic, too goddamn Upper West Side when all she wanted was to be screwed with no fanfare, no abuse, and a modicum of thanks. 

'Sexy Manhattan bitch', she drafted 'anxious for a good time, no ties that bind', but that would bring out all the serial killers from Queens. 

'Sex must be adjudicated', she said, referring to the Harper & Collins' Handbook for the Modern Woman; and so it must, in person, without the flimflam and posturing of online dating; so it was back to the drawing board, or more accurately to the hot pickup spots in the neighborhood - the National Gallery of Art, the Met, the Whitney where likeminded people could met; but after five Saturdays of trolling in these airless, crushingly dull places, she went back to McSorley's for a shot of Wild Turkey and a chaser, and lo and behold, there was Mr. Right with bedroom eyes nursing a Chardonnay. 

Could it be? Could he be the one? Disgusted at herself for these Barbie fantasies, these troglodyte desires, this Fifties romantic  bullshit, she smiled and said, swallowing every bid of feminist pride, 'Do you live around here?'. 

Adjudicating, vetting, and sussing completed, Janey went up to his Broadway loft and lo and behold, here was a man who didn't ask but knew, and the deal was closed.  He was the one for her, a man.  Her mother never told her about the likes of him, that such specimens were even out there, so she was quick to tell her about her discovery.   

 

Her mother, tethered despite her feminism to a dullard, a good man with good intentions but no free will to speak of and no penetrating sexual intent whatsoever, could only say, 'Good for you', a nice closure to the mother-daughter thing. 

A Vaudevillian And A Clown - Don't Wish For Better, Trump And Harris ARE America

For those desperately wishing for presidential candidates other than Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, forget about it.  This is as good as it gets, and what's wrong with a vaudevillian and a clown when American politics is a circus, a hilarious, lion-taming, bear-baiting, high wire extravaganza in the first place?  Tarts and shills, carny barkers and touts, magicians and fire-breathers.  

Who can take it seriously? What future historian will ever deny the side show that passes for American politics today?  Enough questions. Point of fact: Trump the tummler and Harris the clown may be no Jefferson or Hamilton, but are still as American as apple pie.  Times change, the Wild West, Al Capone, Hollywood, and Las Vegas have gotten in the way of the promise of the early days of the Republic. 

Although Jefferson, Hamilton, and Franklin would turn over in their graves if they could see what America has become, they are dead and buried, irrelevant except for the occasional desultory reference on the Fourth of July.  America is not their America or your grandfather's; it is a bling and gold-grilled, extravaganza; a glitzy, tinseled, pasties and G-stringed place. 

 

Why should politics be any different? Clowns and mountebanks are everywhere in politics. Jugglers and sword swallowers pass laws, bang cocktail waitresses two at a time, hiss and harangue for justice and civil rights, set up tarts and hookers at the Mayflower, and have the chutzpah to look straight into the lens of the camera and say 'I never had sex with that woman'.  Getting fellatioed under the Lincoln desk, flying to Buenos Aires to meet an Argentine firecracker with the cover of 'hiking the Appalachian Trail', defrauding the nation out of thousands in Enron/Bernie Madoff Ponzi schemes - this is America.  

Kamala Harris is Pierrot-in-Chief, a political cipher with a klaxon laugh and a jar head, full of platitudes, touting herself like a carny barker hawking freaks at a side show as 'a distinguished woman of color', a faux black woman whose roots are as far from the inner city as the pyramids of Gaza. She expects sympathetic voters to look past her Armani suits and see a bitch from the 'hood in a pimped out Cadillac, all gold chains and bosomy décolleté. 

 

'Get yo' ass up outta here', yelled LaShonda Williams.  'You ain't no sister'; but according to Harris it was all about legacy, not comportment to which LaShonda replied, 'Who the fuck you think you kidding?'

The truth? Harris' bailiwick, not like that poseur Trump, but for months she and her White house flacks lied left and right about the 'cognitive decline' of the President, bald faced lies about his competence, his clarity, and his command, covering up the doddering, hopeless old man until it was time to push him under the bus.  

A palace coup, but Kamala was no Richard III, an Übermensch, seducing Lady Anne whose husband and father-in-law, the king of England, he had just murdered; killing the princes in the tower and everyone else in sight.  She eased the old guy out, knew what she was doing from the moment the two of them sat down in the White House, propped him up in public, dismissed him in private, then dumped him.  Oh, she is a vixen all right, one of the cackling Weird Sisters of Macbeth, a succubus in court, the eviscerating terror when it came to denying the confirmation of Justice Kavanagh. 

Donald Trump by comparison is just a comedian, a Borscht Belt Jackie Mason or Henny Youngman, quick with one-liners, crude imitations, sendups of everyone north of Jackson.  He is a true American, a showman, the one who knows that Sturm und Drang beats careful parsing of executive policies and the do's and don'ts of legislative debate any day of the week. His supporters hear what he means not what he says, but enjoy the bombast, the braggadocio, the sheer chutzpah of the man, a one-man band, a master of legerdemain and sound-and-light. 

What is America if not image and fakery? We have come about as far from the Enlightenment as any country can possibly come; as far from the top hats, morning suits, and Victorian parlors of English House of Lords' civility as the Man in the Moon; as distant from academia, high culture, and philosophy as.....well, there really is no comparison. We are a nation of rubes, upstarts, low-bourgeois bar fighters who deserve Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. 

 'A sucker is born every minute', said P.T. Barnum - you can fool most of the people most of the time, so from magic tricks to the billion dollar schemes of the crookedest of Wall Street shysters, there will always be shell games, creative financial 'instruments', and get-rich-quick schemes.  We are not a nation of tricksters - most Americans still go to church and believe what they hear from the pulpit - but admire those who can fool the pants off of someone with more money than they should have. Slipping on a banana peel is all it is, but there it is too - our ethos.

Democracy is the worst political system possible, said Winston Churchill, except for all the rest, and the downside of America's opportunism and devil-may-care scramble to the top is fraud - there really is no way to sugarcoat it; but one has only to look at the shenanigans of Congress and the White House, the lies, the coverups, the chicanery, and the balderdash to why deception is part and parcel of the American way. 

 

The moral of the story is: be happy with Trump and Harris.  It's not that we should be able to do better than that.  They are better than that.  They are the best we've got because in their clownish, outlandish personalities, they are 'one of us, one of us'