The United States of Paranoia (32 page)

© 1991, 2013, Craig Baldwin

The surface story of
Tribulation 99
involves extraterrestrials colonizing the inner earth and brave heroes in Washington struggling to protect the planet from the aliens’ machinations. The feverish narration, which draws heavily on crank literature that Baldwin found via Stang’s 1988 book
High Weirdness by Mail
, sketches out a fantastic scenario that seems to justify terrible crimes in high places—but since the story is too ridiculous to take seriously, the effect is to expose rather than excuse the abuses of power. We are informed, for example, that when the CIA overthrew the Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, it was really displacing “the aliens’ well-placed humanoid double.”
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Árbenz’s land reforms are presented as a masquerade: “He claims the idle land is to be distributed among 100,000 peasant families, but actual[ly] plans for more sacrificial pyramids to satisfy the mutants’ blood lust.” Another leader overthrown by the CIA, Chilean president Salvador Allende, is described as a “cybernetic replicant” trying to “alter the earth’s polar axis.” The “Watergate martyrs” were “plumbing a possible alien pipeline in Democratic Party headquarters when tripped up by the trivial technicalities of local burglary law.”

Throughout the film, titles appear on the screen. Some of them echo the story line with screaming tabloid headlines. Others, printed in another typeface, offer a nonironic description of the underlying facts. While the narrator gives us one explanation for Washington’s shift from backing the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to overthrowing him—“Our good friend Noriega is suddenly replaced by a grotesque, voodoo-spouting freak!”—the words on-screen offer a real-world explanation: “Noriega refuses to participate in anti-Sandinista arms-cache hoax.”

Completing the Möbius strip, these critiques contain conspiracy theories of their own. The narrator endorses an especially absurd lone-gunman theory of JFK’s death: “His assassination
must
have been by an android like Oswald, since no lone human being could possibly hit a distant moving target two times within 1.8 second.” Meanwhile, the on-screen title informs us that “Ex-CIA chief Allen Dulles serves on the Warren Commission, supports single-assassin theory.” In effect, Baldwin was using images of the Enemy Within, Enemy Outside, and Enemy Below to point an accusing finger at the Enemy Above.

Not everyone was able to distinguish a sincere conspiracy theory from a satiric effort. We’ve already seen how Krassner’s hoaxes and the
Report from Iron Mountain
were mistaken for evidence of actual cabals. The same thing happened to Robert Anton Wilson, whose novels have been cited in all sorts of conspiracy theories, often by the fundamentalist Christians who were the targets of much of his satire.
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“A lot of them have found that selective passages from my books, out of context, are very useful to them,” he told one interviewer. “I don’t mind that at all,” he added. “I regard that as a marvelous joke.”
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Even the Church of the SubGenius attracted some bona fide believers. “That has actually been the biggest regret for me,” Stang said in 2012. “We were just trying to be like the [psychedelic comedy group] Firesign Theatre and underground comics, our heroes. And what we ended up with is this flypaper for kooks, to a certain degree. Or maybe just people who are ignorant and gullible. Or maybe they’re just getting into this stuff for the first time. And they should be damned glad it was us and not Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown. . . . I’ve been told by quite a few people that the Invisible College or something like that was channeling this stuff through me. And I go, ‘No, they’re not. My buddies and I just get high and we come up with this crap.’ ”
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In church circles the believers are dubbed “Bobbies” and mocked, often mercilessly. “A whole lot of SubGeniuses are people who got burned in their childhood by some religion,” Stang notes. “Maybe Orthodox Judaism, or fundamentalist Christianity of some kind, or Catholic school. They’ve got a bone to pick, and they’re angry.”

That isn’t true of Stang, who was raised by secular humanists. “My interest in religion is very, very much like my interest in monster movies,” he said. “When you’re a kid you read the Greek and Norse religions and they’re full of cyclopses and dragons and monsters and they’re really cool. And for that matter, even the Book of Revelation has some pretty good monsters in it, my favorite being the Whore of Babylon. . . . I’ve never lost my love for monsters. As long as somebody else’s religion or political party has something like a monster in it, I’m still interested.

“To us, ‘Bob’ is the ultimate monster,” he added. “Because he’s the epitome of a mind-control guru. He’s like the guy who can make you sit in the sweat lodge until you burn, literally dying. And then die. And then act like it was your fault.”

It wasn’t just outsiders who sometimes mistook the ironists’ efforts for evidence of real conspiracies. The ironists themselves sometimes fell down a rabbit hole and started taking their creations seriously. That happened to Krassner, who eventually returned from his trip around the bend, and to Thornley, who didn’t.

Krassner’s descent began when he started researching his Scientology story. “I began to work on ‘The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy,’ ” he reminisced later. “But then, in the course of my research, a strange thing happened. I learned of the
actual
involvement of Charles Manson with Scientology.” Sure enough, Manson had dipped his toes into Hubbard’s church before deciding to go into the guru business himself. “Suddenly I had no reason to use Sirhan as my protagonist. Reality will transcend allegory every time.”
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At that point Krassner got a call from Mae Brussell, who had read about the Scientologists’ lawsuit against
The Realist
and wanted to tell him that the church hadn’t actually killed any Kennedys. “Oh, I knew that,” he replied, “but the article was just gonna be a satire, and they took it seriously. I’m working on something else now instead. Let me ask, do you know anything about the Manson case?”

“Of course,” she said. “The so-called Manson murders were actually orchestrated by military intelligence in order to destroy the counterculture movement. It’s no different from the Special Forces in Vietnam, disguised as Vietcong, killing and slaughtering to make the Vietcong look bad.”
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Krassner started getting drawn into Brussell’s worldview. When he finally met three of the Manson killers, the women asked him who really ran the country. Pulling a pyramid-shaped seashell from his pocket, he launched into a rap about secret societies, organized crime, military intelligence, and the corporate world. Serious conspiracy stories began to rub shoulders with
The Realist
’s investigative satires, including a 1972 piece by Brussell on the Watergate affair.

Krassner began to think that people were following him. Once, on a bus, he became convinced the man sitting in front of him was in the CIA. To let the guy know that he was on to his game, Krassner pulled out a ballpoint pen and started clicking it like a telegraph, saying “Paul Krassner calling Abbie Hoffman” over and over. (Krassner later told Hoffman, a prominent Yippie, about the incident. “Oh, yeah,” Hoffman replied. “I got your call, only it was collect, so I couldn’t accept it.”)
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“I had wanted to explore the Charles Manson case,” Krassner later wrote, “but ultimately I had to face the reality of my
own
peculiar darkness. Originally, I had wanted to expose the dangers of Scientology, but instead I
joined
a cult of conspiracy. . . . I thought that what I published was so important that I
wanted
to be persecuted, in order to validate the work. In the process, I had become
attached
to conspiracy.”
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Krassner’s return from paranoia didn’t end his interest in conspiracy theories. It just grounded it. “I was able to examine more closely in terms of what could be a conspiracy and what could be misinterpreted,” he explained. “The way conspiracy people work, they start with a premise automatically—‘This is an assassination, not a suicide’—and then they go back and back through the facts and make them fit that conclusion that they already have.” Instead he tried to foster a spirit of “conscious innocence,” of approaching a mystery with “as little predisposition as possible.”
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In the meantime, he kept cracking conspiracy-themed jokes. When HBO hired Krassner to help write a comedy special in 1980, only one of his gags made it to the air: a Secret Service man ordering a drink he calls a Lee Harvey Wallbanger. The censors cut the next line, when the bartender asks, “Yes, sir, will that be one shot or two?”
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Thornley, for his part, managed to get drawn into the JFK assassination circus. Jim Garrison tried to get him involved in his investigation of the Kennedy killing, and after Thornley rebuffed the D.A., Garrison started suggesting that Thornley himself had been a part of the plot. Garrison put out a press release claiming that the Discordian had been “closely associated with Lee Oswald,” not just in the marines but “at a number of locations in New Orleans” in September 1963.
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Thornley gave a deposition before a New Orleans grand jury at the beginning of 1968, and the experience convinced him that Garrison’s team wasn’t interested in justice. Among other things, the team members seemed intent on pigeonholing him as a Birch-style conservative. “I explained several times to them that I am neither a traditionalist nor a nationalist nor a racist—that I oppose the John Birch Society and what passes today as political Conservatism,” Thornley wrote shortly afterward. “I went on to say that I am a ‘rightwinger’ in so far as I favor individualism, but my rightism is more anarchistic than authoritarian. They looked at me blankly, not seeming to hear.”
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As Garrison’s allegations spread through the underground press, Thornley put out his side of the story in every venue available to him. (The subscribers to
Ocean Living
, a low-circulation zine that Thornley helped edit, were surely surprised when the material they were used to—a typical article informed readers that plankton “can be gathered in nets and used as a nourishing foodstuff”
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—was now mixed with statements by the assassination theorists David S. Lifton and Sylvia Meagher criticizing Garrison for his pursuit of Thornley.) Garrison was soon spreading the story that Thornley, who bore some physical resemblance to his marine friend, had served as a “double” for the accused assassin, posing as Oswald in the time before the president’s murder so as to create a false trail of Oswald’s activities.

As he fended off Garrison’s attacks, Thornley reconsidered his assumption that Oswald had acted alone in Dallas. In 1973, he read a feature in the Yippie tabloid
Yipster Times
that would later be expanded into Canfield and Weberman’s book
Coup d’État in America
. Thornley wasn’t just convinced: He began to suspect that he really
had
been involved in the assassination without his knowledge, a hypnotized zombie held in reserve in case something went wrong with the Oswald plan. He started typing up his speculations, boosted by new “memories” of things that he believed had happened to him years before, and he circulated the manuscripts among his contacts. After that, he perceived various odd events as the secret government’s reactions to those memorandums.

Some of the incidents would scare anyone: At one point armed bandits in ski masks had raided a party he was attending, stealing Thornley’s identification along with everyone’s else’s money. But Thornley was also capable of accusing his girlfriend of working for the conspiracy. He wrote to Greg Hill, “I am literally surrounded by the Intelligence Community, but after the first three attempts to murder me things seem to have cooled down and most of the spies now appear to be on my side.”
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At one point he became convinced that a coworker at the Sunshine Floral Company was really Robert Anton Wilson, “living incognito with [Timothy] Leary in Atlanta for reasons I obviously could not fathom.”
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He wondered whether the collapse of the New Left was caused by “foreign intelligence agencies . . . dosing organizers with a substance causing heart disease, thereafter maintaining control over them by means of a microwave device capable of instantly halting a Pacemaker.”
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By the 1990s, he believed that he was “the product of a Vril Society breeding/environmental manipulation experiment.”
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In the midst of this, the real Wilson cut off his correspondence with Thornley. It was hard, he told Gorightly years later, “to communicate with somebody when he thinks you’re a diabolical mind-control agent and you’re convinced that he’s a little bit paranoid.”
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Thornley continued to write, sometimes with wit and self-awareness, sometimes not. He spent the last few years of his life working at menial jobs in Atlanta and selling trinkets and essays on the street. It was a chaotic conclusion to a chaotic life—a darkly poetic fate, I suppose, for a man who worshipped Eris. “You know,” Thornley told Hill in one of his more lucid moments, “if I had realized all of this was going to come
true
, I would have chosen Venus.”
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