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In the sci-fi film They Live, urban drifter John Nada (Rowdy Roddy Piper) unwittingly discovers that a hideous cabal is secretly ruling America. Nada happens upon special sunglasses that allow him to see hidden messages behind advertisements and mass media: CONSUME, OBEY, SLEEP, and other commands are everywhere. More importantly, perhaps, he can see that business people and government leaders—who appear to be human—are, in fact, aliens.
They
Live, as goofy as it is, makes sense in a way. I once listened to
some PR hack on NPR explaining the rationale for advertising in schools.
Her reasoning was so opaque—so alien—that I thought surely she
must be from the dark side. The reality, of course, is not nearly so interesting.
The powers that be are not sustained by secret teams of evildoers but
by everyday institutions and their staffs. Peer behind most conspiracies
and you will find people just doing their jobs. To paraphrase Mark Crispin
Miller, conspiracies are "business as usual."
This "conspiracy" issue of Stay Free! aims to take some of the "theory" out of "conspiracy theory." The problem with conspiracy theories is, of course, that they are usually wrong—and that they make it tough for discussions of actual events to get a hearing. With so many crackpot theories out there, anyone who questions the official version of any story is seen as a conspiracy nut. The homogenization of media sources only makes matters worse, as critics such as Noam Chomsky are laughed off as paranoids. Even well-documented, mainstream news reports are dismissed as conspiracy theories once they are safely in the past. Three years ago, a front page story in The New York Times revealed that the U.S. knowingly bombed the only medical facility in Sudan. Last year, several media outlets reported that the U.S. bought the rights to satellite footage coming out of Afghanistan in order to prevent anyone else from seeing it. Yet critics who call attention to these events are now written off as conspiratorial no-goodniks.
In the end, conspiracy theories are only as good as their evidence. That’s what we are examining in this issue, teasing out the real conspiracies from the imagined, and exploring the tension between the two.
Carrie McLaren
Spring 2002
