The United States of Paranoia (37 page)

The program’s episodic, monster-of-the-week structure allowed all those threats to coexist in the same framework without weaving them into one vast explanatory narrative. At the same time, the show attempted to build such a narrative anyway. That proved to be its undoing. The grand conspiracy that had once stayed in the background—more an enticing set of hints than anything else—began to intrude more and more, and good storytelling gradually gave way to a plot that seemed less interesting with each new revelation. When the series went off the air in 2002, it set the first half of the final episode in a courtroom (a secret military tribunal, naturally). The trial allows the chief characters to summarize the vast conspiracy they uncovered. After this goes on for a while, the judge asks angrily, “Is this leading anywhere?”
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What longtime
X-Files
viewer never exclaimed the same thing?

A better episode—I’d call it the show’s best episode—is “Jose Chung’s
From Outer Space
,” an installment scripted by Darin Morgan and first broadcast in 1996. In a series whose hero focused so emphatically on exposing the Truth, Morgan’s story casts doubt on the very notion of a single Truth—or, at least, of a Truth that can be captured in a master narrative. It is framed around the efforts of a writer named Jose Chung—imagine John Keel with a touch of Richard Condon
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—to investigate an alleged alien abduction in Washington state. The result is a
Rashomon
-style collection of mutually inconsistent accounts of the same event, which appears by turns as an extraterrestrial contact, a CIA operation, and even a journey to the inner earth. There is an “alien autopsy” video, inspired by a hoax that had been broadcast on network television the year before, and there is the part left out of the autopsy video, in which the alien turns out to be a man in a rubber suit. Mulder meets the Men in Black, and he discovers that they are, or at least appear to be, the quiz-show host Alex Trebek and the pro wrestler Jesse Ventura.
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Another character decides that Mulder and Scully themselves are Men in Black. There is an air force officer who creates false flying saucer sightings as disinformation and who then doesn’t know what to believe when he seems to witness an alien contact himself. Everyone, even Mulder, is an unreliable narrator, and at the conclusion we still aren’t sure what happened on the night of the apparent abduction. Instead the episode ends with Chung invoking “those who care not about extraterrestrials, searching for meaning in other human beings. Rare or lucky are those who find it. For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways on this planet, we are all alone.”
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It made sense that
The X-Files
would have room for an episode such as this one. If the program was going to explore almost every American phobia, from the fears held by militias to the fears held
about
militias, then it ought to have some space for the ironic style.

The ironic style was, in fact, more visible than ever before. By the 1990s, even mainstream news stories about conspiracy theorists sometimes adopted a lightly ironic tone, allowing readers to try on some odd worldviews while maintaining their distance.
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And where mainline papers merely dipped their toes, alternative outlets such as
The Nose
and
Mondo 2000
plunged in merrily.

Mondo
, a glossy mag for the cyberpunk subculture, ran a series of bizarre letters to the editor from one “Xandor Korzybski” alleging one strange plot after another. A typical effort opened by invoking “the bloodsucking aliens’ Master plan to take over the world from their plush caverns in the U.S. deserts and make us into spaceship-building slaves by 1994, in cahoots with U.S. and Soviet government officials who will escape to Mars just before the world ends in 1999.”
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From there the letter just got weirder. Korzybski’s rants were so popular that the magazine eventually gave him a column.

Was he kidding, or was he a kook? Opinions differed. Did you take him seriously, or did you just dig the craziness? That was up to you. Ken Goffman, who coedited the magazine under the pseudonym R. U. Sirius, thinks that Korzybski “at once believes this and knows it’s absurd, or perhaps alternatively, depending on the mood.”
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But that’s just an informed guess. “I don’t think we ever discussed if he took it seriously or not, but that was the way at
Mondo
then,” he recalls today.
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Goffman sums up the editorial attitude with a quote often attributed to the founder of a medieval Muslim secret society, the Order of Assassins: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” It was a perfect line for the 1990s, that pause in history after the Cold War ended and before the War on Terror began. Then a very different Muslim conspiracy brought down two towers in New York, and a different sort of plot spotting seized the day: less fun, more urgent, and more dangerous.

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EVERYTHING IS A CLUE

I think he was trying to tell me something, like it had some sort of a meaning.

—George Costanza
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O
ctober 7, 2001: less than a month after 9/11. Police in Maryland decide that two trucks on Interstate 270 might be carrying explosives. The alert cops block traffic for an hour, searching the vehicles for tools of terror. The cargo turns out to be stage equipment headed to a memorial service for the firefighters killed in the attack.

A forgivable mistake, given the circumstances? Perhaps.

In Tyler, Texas, a few days earlier, federal agents, city police, and bomb experts from far-flung cities had descended on a family’s mailbox to grapple with a gadget jerry-rigged from wires, batteries, and green duct tape. The streets were blocked; the neighbors were evacuated. The device turned out to be an eight-year-old’s homemade flashlight, built as a school project and left in the mailbox for safekeeping.

Still forgivable? Maybe—though on reflection, it doesn’t seem likely that the killers who organized the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would select a neighborhood in east Texas as their next target. But why, after learning that the bomb was actually a flashlight, did the authorities still feel the need to confiscate it?

When George W. Bush was president, the group most frequently invoked as a symbol of political paranoia was the 9/11 truth movement, nicknamed the
truthers
, who believed that a cabal within the U.S. government had either organized the 9/11 attacks or deliberately refrained from preventing them.
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But the truthers were ultimately a side attraction. The most prevalent form of paranoia after 9/11 was the mind-set that allowed officials to mistake a harmless school project for a jihad. Americans were on edge, waiting for the next deadly attack. And in a change from the Cold War, when we at least knew the form such an attack would take, all sorts of activities or objects could be construed as a threat.

It was the same species of fear that had flared during earlier hunts for spies and saboteurs. But now the consequences of failing to spot the conspirators seemed much more catastrophic. Anything might be a weapon; anything might be a clue.

We’ve seen how the loosely structured Al Qaeda was misperceived as a tightly centralized organization, and we have compared this to the ways earlier Americans mistook scattered Indian raids for a tightly controlled conspiracy. But there was another antecedent to Al Qaeda’s image: the global networks of mayhem found in the James Bond movies and their imitators. To show how the image of the Bond villain was conflated with the reality of the jihadist, Michael Barkun points to the

speculation about Osama bin Laden’s Tora Bora cave complex in the final days of the U.S. attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The myth of bin Laden’s subterranean fortress began with a story in the London
Independent
newspaper on November 27, 2001, which described a mountain honeycombed with tunnels, behind iron doors, with “its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydro-electric generator,” capable of housing 2,000 people “like a hotel.” This story was quickly picked up and embellished by American media. The result was that on November 29th the
Times
(London) published a cut-away drawing titled “Bin Laden’s Mountain Fortress,” showing thermal sensing equipment and tunnels wide enough for a car to drive through. . . . When “Meet the Press” was broadcast on December 2nd, Tim Russert showed the drawing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suggested there might be many such sophisticated redoubts, and not only in Afghanistan.
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When American forces arrived at Osama’s actual lair, they found something somewhat simpler. They found some caves.

“There’s a tendency for people to say, ‘First the World Trade Center, then the Pentagon, now something near me,’ ” the sociologist Joel Best remarked after the attacks.
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Sure enough, after September 11 and the smaller anthrax attacks that followed, the country was dotted with terrorism scares.
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Baltimore-Washington International Airport shut down an entire concourse when someone mistook some powdered coffee creamer for anthrax spores. In Nevada, a man called in the police after receiving a suspiciously lumpy package that, when opened, turned out to contain a pair of lace panties and a love letter. An airline bound for Los Angeles was diverted to Shreveport, Louisiana, when a man handed a stewardess a note she described as “bizarre” but not actually threatening. (“It didn’t make a lot of sense,” she later said, “but at the same time it was alarming.”)
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Another flight was diverted on its way to New Jersey when some passengers aroused suspicion by speaking a foreign language in the back of the plane. A thorough investigation revealed that the men were two Jews praying.

It was an understandably cautious time, and some of those incidents seem ridiculous only in retrospect. Others were simply preposterous. Even the most sympathetic observer will have a hard time defending the airport guards in Philadelphia who nabbed Neil Godfrey before the twenty-two-year-old could board his flight to Phoenix. According to Gwen Shaffer’s report in the
Philadelphia City Paper
, a National Guardsman’s suspicions had been aroused because Godfrey was reading a novel—Edward Abbey’s
Hayduke Lives!
—whose cover illustration included some dynamite.
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United Airlines refused to let Godfrey board his plane, then barred him again when he tried to take a second flight.

As 9/11 receded into the past, incidents like those happened less often. But they didn’t disappear. In January 2007, guerrilla marketers erected illuminated signs in locations around ten cities, each displaying one of the Mooninite characters from the
Aqua Teen Hunger Force
TV cartoon. In nine of those cities, the campaign went off without incident, but in Boston the cops construed the signs as bombs and essentially locked down the town. On learning that the installations were not explosives, officials started calling them a “hoax,” as though the advertisers had expected people to mistake the Mooninites for weapons. “It had a very sinister appearance,” Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley said of one of the signs. “It had a battery behind it, and wires.”
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When people enter an apocalyptic frame of mind, the historian Richard Landes has observed, “everything quickens, enlightens, coheres. They become semiotically aroused—everything has meaning, patterns.”
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In the months following 9/11, that mentality was almost inescapable. Consider some of the flotsam on the Internet after the attacks. One frequently forwarded e-mail gave readers instructions on how to fold a $20 bill, revealing an image that seemed to predict the planes hitting the towers:

Another message asked readers to open Microsoft Word, enter the initials NYC, and then switch the font to Wingdings. The results:

Some people might take that as a curious coincidence; some might declare it evidence that Microsoft was somehow involved in the plot.
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But every interpretation, from the most levelheaded to the most cracked, demanded that the reader pause to interpret the material in the first place. The world was filled with unexpected connections and irregular details. With clues.

After the attacks, the government expanded its apparatus for collecting its own clues and interpreting them. Congress created a federal Department of Homeland Security. The USA PATRIOT Act, rushed through in October 2001, permitted secret searches and warrantless Internet surveillance, gave police access to accused terrorists’ phone records (again without a warrant), and required retailers to report suspicious customer transactions to the Treasury; it also provided other extensions of state power.
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Muslim-baiting hucksters from a variety of backgrounds gave presentations to law enforcement agencies on how to identify Islamic terror plots. At their worst, they resembled the alleged experts on Satanism who peddled paranoid misinformation to the police in the 1980s. (“When you have a Muslim that wears a headband, regardless of color or insignia, basically what that is telling you is ‘I am willing to be a martyr,’ ” Sam Kharoba, the founder of the Counter Terrorism Operations Center, told a crowd of cops at one course.)
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Across the country, law enforcement agencies established institutions called fusion centers: intelligence-sharing shops run on the state and local levels but heavily funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Some fusion centers and Homeland Security contractors extended the rhetoric of counterterror in disturbing ways. The Missouri Information Analysis Center devoted a dossier to the remnants of the militia movement, plus a host of other dissidents it roped in with the militiamen. The fact sheet, which was distributed to police throughout the state, declared that “it is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitution Party, Campaign for Liberty, or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr.”

The document also warned that the Gadsden flag, a familiar historical banner bearing the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me” below a coiled rattlesnake, “is the most common symbol displayed by militia members and organizations.”
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Watch out, highway patrolman: That history buff with the flag on his bumper just might be a terrorist!

The Virginia Fusion Center’s “terrorism threat assessment” covered not just real terrorists but such groups as the Garbage Liberation Front, an ecological organization whose activities, the report explained, “include dumpster diving, squatting and train hopping.”
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A Texas center warned that “Middle Eastern Terrorist groups and their supporting organizations” were “gaining support for Islamic goals in the United States and providing an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.” Among its examples: public schools that allowed Muslim students to take prayer breaks, a Treasury Department conference on financial services in the Islamic world, and certain “marketing schemes” in “hip hop fashion boutiques.”
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The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a terror-tracking company hired by the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security, sent out alerts that subversives were plotting to hold a candlelight vigil, organize a gay and lesbian festival, and screen the antifracking film
Gasland
. One of its memos revealed that

anti-government groups, convinced that the US government is intent on incarcerating them in FEMA prison camps, injecting them with micro-electronics while giving them the flu vaccine, and planning to seize their firearms will be out in full force in support of the “Fed is Dead” protests being held the weekend of 21–22 November 2009.

TAM-C [the Targeted Actionable Monitoring Center, a division of the company] analysts hasten to add that not all of the protestors marching against the Federal Reserve System are conspiracy theorists. But enough of the protesters possess these types of theories that cause the TAM-C to alert law enforcement personnel that some of the marchers have a different view of reality than most people.
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You’re forgiven if you expected people tasked with preventing terrorism to concern themselves with whether a political group includes anyone
who is violent
, not whether it includes anyone with “a different view of reality.”

In 2012, Senate investigators offered a devastating judgment on the fusion centers’ output. After reviewing thirteen months’ worth of the centers’ reports, the investigators concluded that the documents were “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” Nearly a third of the reports were not circulated after they were written, sometimes because they contained no useful information and sometimes, the Senate study said, because they “overstepped legal boundaries” in disturbing ways: “Reporting on First Amendment–protected activities lacking a nexus to violence or criminality; reporting on or improperly characterizing political, religious or ideological speech that is not explicitly violent or criminal; and attributing to an entire group the violent or criminal acts of one or a limited number of the group’s members.” Homeland Security usually refused to publish these problematic reports, but the department also retained them for an “apparently indefinite” period.
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