The United States of Paranoia (31 page)

McAlpine’s readers might have enjoyed
Cover-Up Lowdown
, a cartoon syndicated to underground and college newspapers for about half a year in 1976—sort of a
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
for conspiracy buffs. But the comic’s entertaining approach could hardly be more different from the
Digest
’s dry earnestness. Written and drawn by Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides, each
Cover-Up Lowdown
consisted of a single panel built around an allegation about the Enemy Above, with the source of the claim identified in a footnote. One cartoon, for example, reported that “
JFK
’s preserved
brain
and related
slides
, important for fixing the true flight path of the fatal shot, were discovered
missing
from the
Nat’l. Archives
in ’72. There’s still no clue as to who took them or where they are.”
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The report was sourced to Robert Sam Anson’s 1975 book
They’ve Killed the President
, and it was illustrated by a picture of a brain and several slides walking out of the archives, looking like a mother duck and her ducklings.

© 1977, 2013, Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides

Other installments of the comic covered wiretapping, environmental contamination, the CIA’s alliance with the Mafia, the attempted assassination of George Wallace, and the deaths of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the nuclear whistle-blower Karen Silkwood, and the Native American activist Anna Mae Aquash. Despite the funny drawings, the cartoonists were sincere about what they were doing. “That was at a time when investigative journalism was probably at its peak,” Kinney later recalled, “when all of the revelations had been coming out about Watergate, about the intelligence agencies’ misdeeds. So there was a lot of material out there that we could draw upon. I think our notion was: Okay, let’s try to get this out to people who may not be reading the daily newspaper or serious journalistic investigations, but we’ll distill it down to factoids and crack a joke about it. But getting the info out was the main goal.”
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When Rip-Off Press collected the cartoons in a comic book, Kinney and Mavrides added several stories in the ironic style. In the first one Bud Tuttle, a right-wing broadcaster devoted to exposing the “machinations of Zionist one-worlders and would-be cattle mutilators in Washington,” spends a dollar, which then passes through the hands of a series of malevolent cabals, from a cult led by Baba Black Sheep to the Soma Broadcasting System, a media combine controlled by Cthulhu, Inc.
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There is also an absurdist eight-page story about the “Solar Czars of Cornutopia,” a quiz headlined “You Killed Kennedy! And Here’s the Proof . . . ,” a comic about cattle mutilations that ends with some cows devouring a dead relative, and an elaborate conspiracy chart designed to be cut out and twisted into a Möbius strip. In the last feature, the Vatican, the Communists, the Theosophists’ Great White Brotherhood, and other forces sit atop a diagram that incorporates everyone from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to Big Brother, who is shown to be in direct command of both George Orwell and Janis Joplin.

“We were partly reacting to a certain kind of conspiracy mongering that presumed that everything under the sun connected up into one big conspiracy, which we found to be somewhat absurd and overblown,” Kinney would later explain. “The sort of ironic intention was to take that to such an extreme that it collapsed under its own weight.” In short, the comic book was both ironist and fusionist, mixing gags with serious allegations and trusting readers to tell the difference.

In 1982, the Tulsa-born, Austin-based game designer Steve Jackson created an Illuminati card game. He was inspired by
Illuminatus!
but he didn’t want to do a direct adaptation of such a convoluted story: “[E]ven if you could figure out who was on whose side, which I didn’t think I could, how could you make a game out of it?” Instead he created his own scenario, using Wilson and Shea’s books “as spiritual guides, but not as actual source material.”
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In the game that resulted, several contending conspiracies—the Bavarian Illuminati, the Discordian Society, the Servants of Cthulhu, and others—battle and bargain for control of a host of smaller cabals, from the Mafia, the CIA, and the International Communist Conspiracy to the Trekkies, the Dentists, and, naturally, the Conspiracy Theorists.

It was both a fun pastime and an effective satire. In Jackson’s words, “The cards take a sardonic attitude toward absolutely everything,” because “in the world of the game, nobody is innocent. Every organization is a puppet or a manipulator, and most are both.”
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Shea liked what Jackson had done and wrote an introduction to the first expansion set. Wilson was less enthusiastic, complaining to his agent that the game infringed on his intellectual property rights.
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His agent disagreed, and no legal battle ensued. In practice, the game probably helped rather than hurt Wilson’s bank account, since it served as an advertisement for
Illuminatus!

It also served as a catalyst for still more creativity, as fans produced their own versions of the game and its sequels. “I have seen people recast everything from their offices to their cities in terms of Illuminati,” Jackson has said. The games would also inspire some sincerely held conspiracy theories, of which we’ll have more to say in chapter 12.

But the biggest development of the 1980s, on the ironist front at least, was the Church of the SubGenius. This group resembled the Discordian Society, except that whereas the Discordians borrowed their goddess from classical mythology, the SubGenii assembled their mythos from more modern sources, from UFO cults to sales manuals. It was centered on the worship of a pipe-smoking messiah named J. R. “Bob” Dobbs. The Church of the SubGenius has two histories: the real one and a fictional saga spread by its devotees. Jay Kinney, who had been appointed the church’s minister of propaganda, wrote up the imaginary version in a mock exposé published in
Whole Earth Review
and
Weirdo
. “Church old-timers like Rev. Ivan Stang of Dallas date their involvement in the cult back to the late ’50s,” he wrote, identifying Dobbs as a former aluminum siding salesman and “bit-actor in C-movies” who founded the SubGenius Foundation after he began to believe he was receiving messages from aliens and/or from “Jehovah-1 the Space God.” Dobbs’s teachings initially reflected his Birchite political ideas, Kinney continued, but after an “extended love affair with LSD in the late 1960s and early 1970s” his movement “evolved into a Church.” Eventually, the church began to allow individual SubGenii to add their own gods and demons to the pantheon, transforming the “monotheistic neo-UFO cult” into “a polytheistic grab-bag.”

The church might seem to be “a harmless eccentric sect sprung from the same sun-baked environment that Jack Ruby and Lyndon Johnson both called home,” Kinney concluded, but it “has long since outgrown its humble roots and is stalking bigger game. Consider it all a joke at your own risk.”
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At least one academic who read the account failed to recognize it as a put-on, gravely reporting that “Kinney fears that the Church’s absolute cynicism is tantamount to fascism” and adding, “Sharing that fear, we note that Bob’s world is a white phallocracy.”
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In fact, J. R. “Bob” Dobbs never existed. The church was dreamed up in the late 1970s by a couple of Texas wiseacres named Doug Smith and Steve Wilcox, or, as they referred to themselves in their SubGenius lives, Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond.

Stang grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, watching monster movies and producing his own amateur films and science fiction fanzines. As an adult he became a freelance movie editor and director, working on industrial films, documentaries, fund-raising films for nonprofits, and music videos. When Drummond moved to Dallas from Austin, Stang recalled, the two men bonded over their shared love of “what you might call kook pamphlets or extremist literature”
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—Jack Chick comics, Bircher tracts, Scientology questionnaires. They also noticed a face that kept recurring in the ads in old magazines: “This square-looking guy smoking a pipe, and he would always be grinning.” That man’s face inspired the face of “Bob,” and the tracts they were reading and sci-fi movies they were watching inspired the church’s mythology.

From around 1976 to 1979, the idea for the church gestated. “We have to have an enemy, you know,” Drummond had told Stang as they were inventing the faith. “Let’s just call it The Conspiracy.” This wouldn’t be just any old cabal. “It’s not just the people who shot JFK or the crashed flying saucer in Area 51 or Roswell,” Stang later explained. “It’s everybody. Every normal person is out to get every abnormal person. Just instinctively. They don’t even think about it. You know, harking back to when you’re a nerd getting bullied in school all the way up to when you’re an outsider in the office in a way that might as well be high school.” (“And for that matter,” he added, “the whole stupid thing even continues in the little society of active SubGeniuses.”)
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The group’s first pamphlet was printed on January 2, 1980. The cover announced: “REPENT! Quit Your JOB! ¡SLACK OFF! The World Ends Tomorrow and YOU MAY DIE!” (Then, in smaller type: “Well, no, probably not . . . but whatever you do, just keep reading!”)
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It was followed by more SubGenius pamphlets, by SubGenius films, by a SubGenius magazine called
The Stark Fist of Removal
. You can get a taste of the church’s style of humor, and a hint of the perspective lurking behind the humor, in this passage from 1983’s
The Book of the SubGenius
:

They aren’t
readying
us for takeover, THAT’S already HAPPENED.
ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT IS HERE.
It just isn’t
obvious
yet. But any day now the media will have people not only prepared for the realization, but
welcoming
it. One World Government is “hip.” . . .

Sounds like kook-talk, huh? That’s because they’re always one jump
ahead
of you. THEY ENGINEERED THE SPREAD OF CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORIES, because even though many of the theories are
true
, they
still sound crazy
: the Rockefeller Conspiracy, the C.F.R., The Round Table, the Bilderbergers, the JFK “cleanup,” ALL OF IT.

The C.F.R. and the Trilateral Commission: oh, they’re bad guys, alright, but compared to the REAL controllers they’re just the
clerks
at the
front desk
. They’re just the sales force of a far larger “company.” Sure, they have more control than any sane American ever dreamed possible, but they themselves are more controlled than THEY ever dreamed possible. According to “Bob,” some of the
top men
there
actually still believe
they’re preserving a
two
-party system in
America
. . . .

For that matter, you’d be CRAZY not to suspect that the Church of the SubGenius is one of Their
cleverest ruses
. . . . We’re not, and we don’t care who believes it, but that IS how tricky They REALLY ARE.
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The older ironists liked the new church. Robert Anton Wilson joined. Paul Mavrides got involved early on and participated heavily in the ensuing decades. Kerry Thornley contributed a sidebar to
The Book of the SubGenius
, and he later declared the “Bob” cult a “sister faith or brother religion” to Discordianism—“or at least our Marine-Corps buddy theology.”
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John Keel came to a SubGenius party, where by Stang’s account the old ufologist got drunk and confessed that his books regularly fudged the facts: “I’m from a carnival background. You think that stuff’s real?”

By the mid-1980s, SubGenius influence was creeping into the larger culture. The face of “Bob” appeared in the credits of the kids’ show
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
. Steve Jackson and the church put together
INWO: SubGenius
, a “Bob”-based version of one of Jackson’s Illuminati games. David Byrne, the lead singer of the arty pop band Talking Heads, became a SubGenius. So did the members of another rock group, Devo. (In the SubGenius video
Arise!
, Devo singer Mark Mothersbaugh described The Conspiracy as “the human condition. It’s things falling apart. It’s fat ladies in double-knit jumpsuits beating their kids in Kroger’s. . . . It’s Christ without a penis.”)
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Richard Linklater’s 1991 film
Slacker
, which presented an Austin filled with conspiracy theorists and other artists and cranks, drew directly on SubGenius lore.

As
Slacker
entered theaters, another movie dived even deeper into the ironic style.
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America
was written and directed by a card-carrying SubGenius named Craig Baldwin.
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Tribulation
was constructed largely from found footage, combining B movies, newscasts, and other sources to illustrate a secret history of the Western Hemisphere. It was a seminal independent film, a significant step in the evolution from earlier found-footage filmmakers to the mash-up artists inhabiting YouTube today. But as fascinating as Baldwin’s rapid montage of fragments from our shared cultural past can be—he has compared the effect of watching his movies to gazing at “shards of a mirror”
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—the most impressive thing about
Tribulation
99
is the carefully nested narrative that allows Baldwin to sketch out a conspiracy theory as bizarre and comic as anything in
Illuminatus!
or
The Book of the SubGenius
while threading through it a serious critique of U.S. foreign policy.