As I mature and learn more about the world, I am becoming more and more of a proud conspiracy theorist…
I have always known about not trusting the military industrial complex – Good old Ike Eisenhower warned us about that before I was even born. And one of my earliest memories is marching around city hall in Lafayette, Indiana with college students (who were all so tall that I was looking at their butts) chanting against the Vietnam war. So, yeah, early on I understood that capitalists would happily kill young men (not to mention entire rural villages) by making war in order to keep their markets alive and well. This was totally clear to me by the time I was 5 years old – though maybe because my dad was an economics professor. It seemed obvious, but without being the terrible conspiracy theory everyone talked about. To be a conspiracy I imagined a group of nasty warlords in a smoke-filled room laughing as they planned how to take over the world.
But since those days, I’ve learned a lot: for example even in our spoken language, the word ‘oriented’ originally meant ‘lined up to face the orient’ – read Jerusalem (or Mecca if you think about it). All the churches in France do this so that we pray to Jesus’ home. Talk about getting into our heads!!!! The origin of much or our patriarchy is literally in the words we use that encourage us to line up correctly!!! And yet I wouldn’t exactly call this a nefarious conspiracy.
But as I have learned more about French I have been struck by: La mere (feminine noun) means mother, la mer means feminine sea, and Le mere (masculine noun) means mayor (so nowadays there are women who are politely called Madame Le Mere); the word slave comes from Slav (who were taken prisoner and enslaved around the birth of modern French), the Normans then brought this racist word over to English a mere millennium; further – to be terribly ‘gauche’ or ‘sinister’ means left-handed; and finally, in French, when something is a real mess it is called a ‘bordelle’ (and you can figure out what that means right?). But English isn’t much better: If I was gypped by being ripped off it implies that gypsies were behind the con; or when you say “its bedlam in there” you are bringing up the memory of a London based mental hospital officially named Bethlehem but locally pronounced bedlam – where they used to bate the ill patience to start ‘funny’ fights.
But is common language usage a conspiracy? As I get older I begin to think it is – thank God we in America now have a movement towards political correctness because we are stopping the more egregious errors we would make otherwise. [I remember my grandmother using the term ‘he jewed me down’ win I was very young – the look on my face stopped her cold and she corrected her error with an appropriate amount of shame). But here in Paris there are still pastries for sale in many a bakery publicly called a ‘Tête de négre’ – I won’t order them by name, If I wanted one (I hear they are delicious) I’d just point.
So, as I change my mental image of what exactly a conspiracy is – I now think we are completely surrounded by them. Do you remember how they made so much fun of those who didn’t trust fluoride in the water when we were growing up in the USA? Those crazies were called conspiracy theorists! But guess what – now the FDA has outlawed fluoride in drinking water at the federal level! Hmm, maybe we weren’t so paranoid after all.
And why are train tracks all different sizes all over the world? Because the British ‘narrow gauge’ trains were made in England to be sold to their colonies, as of course did the French rail industry; In America we made wider gauge to support our own local industry. Businesses run 100% on conspiracy so that they can ‘maintain monopoly profit’ as long as possible….That was taught to me, and anybody else who took an MBA, in business 101. Duh!
But we used to trust our governments to have our best interests at heart (after all they are elected ‘by the people for the people right’ hahahaha – rather than for the monopoly profits of our representatives’ friends). In my 58 year long lifetime this assumption has completely gone to hell in a handbasket. Of course, I imagine that the 1950s were a particularly egalitarian time in the USA (I honestly believe that, without the nefarious intervention of Joseph McCarthy into the 1950 we as a large land-owning and agrarian nation might have gone communist without having to deal with a Stalin). But that’s another blog brewing.
In the 1950 the military industrial complex scared us all shitless by telling us that communism was taking over the world and that we good hard-working Americans didn’t need any government help. We were told the lies and fed the poison that the private sector would see to our needs. Basic needs like going to see a doctor or continue your schooling or even to choosing our television programming would be decided by the market.
To this day, Britain and France both have government supported TV channels that provide mildly mediated content, cheap government universities and free healthcare for all. Kenya and the US don’t have these amenities so we – in these less civilized countries – have to put up with Fox News and the Christian TV channels, for our pains. Thank the founding fathers that the USA started more socialist than anywhere else because our primary education is truly free right on through age 16 (which was considered long enough 250 years ago). Kenya started their government involvement in education after McCarthy’s RED scare and their poor kids have to pay for any schooling they get. So of course charletons run most of their schools. Meanwhile in our once united states of America, many a democratic and/or republican congressperson has been voted into power because they promised NOT to provide free healthcare. That’s how brainwashed we are! I blame the media – and its nefarious conspiracy of ignorance.
In this case I totally imagine the smoke-filled room with evil warlords like Ruppert Murdoch, and his CIA, FBI and military industrial complex operatives trying to one up each other on how dumb they can keep us Americans.
When I was a kid, I thought there would be no more ignorant people by the time I was 50 years old. I thought the concept of ‘ignorant peasant’ would become anachronistic in the world by the 21st century. My understanding was simply that we knew anyone could learn, and that TV was cheap and becoming available to everywhere, the world over – so obviously it would educate everyone.
Little did I know of the content conspiracy that was developing to keep the poor down. Now the smoke filled room includes: Google and Hollywood amorally increasing profitable by entertaining us with what they think we want to see – meaning rich people with 1st world problems; Rupert Murdoch and his highly profitable telling “of lies, total lies and nothing but lies” in the name of news: and locally elected school boards all over the USA making sure that science is optional but God’s word is required reading so that we all have to give tithes to our local millionaire pastor. We are fucked. Now Americans have to depend on the comedy channel and late-night talk shows to give us our true knowledge. Oh and Russian capitalist oligarchs. OYVAY!
Of course, governments have their conspiracies as well – but they have to (by law) tell us about it them, though. They call it ‘public education’ when they aren’t calling it propaganda.
A final conspiracy I will share with anyone who cares is the chemical ‘contrails’ that lots of folks in California told me about a couple years ago. I was polite but felt like laughing because of course ‘condensation comes out of the backsides of airplanes when they burn fossil fuels up near the Ozone and greenhouse gas layer. …. “its just steam” from all our frenetic traveling all over the globe (granted made possible by the obvious conspiracy – on the part of the Saudi’s to keep oil prices down – and thus ‘to boost growth’ I have thought. Nope! Now days they DO put chemicals in the atmosphere on hot summer days to stop the suns rays from reaching us – here in Paris anyway. I know this for a fact from a friend who works for the Upper Saxony government. So maybe I should be more careful who we laugh at.
It’s not like Jeffrey Epstein killed himself after all.
Bottom Line as I approach death – I do not at all trust the pharmaceutical hospital industry at all. Keep me away from mainstream medicine’s conspiracy to keep us alive and addicted to medicines forever.
The View from a Broad 