Everything Old Is New Again
Where conspiracy theories are concerned, there's nothing new under the sun.
I was nine years old on Friday November 22, 1963, when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a youthful symbol of hope and rebirth for the entire Western World, was murdered in Dallas. Like everyone who was alive and conscious at the time I know exactly where I was, and conjuring up that day’s feelings of hopelessness and overwhelming loss is as easy as looking at a calendar.
Talk about a day that will live in infamy.
That Friday, school ended early. We were silently ushered out of the building by a bewildered, shocked, and grieving staff, and met by our bewildered, shocked, and grieving parents. Thus began the longest weekend I can ever remember.
Families were clearly at loose ends, and needed to find meaning in a random and senseless act of violence. That Sunday, long before the shock of JFK’s murder had abated, a man named Jack Ruby murdered the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, forever denying us meaning in the form of motive.
The images of Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children standing motionless (save for John Jr’s salute), in the Capitol Rotunda, walking up Pennsylvania Avenue behind the riderless horse and casket, and at the Arlington National Cemetery gravesite, are indelibly etched in our memories.
Seeking to put immense tragedy behind a suffering nation, Lyndon Johnson, the new president, empaneled an investigatory commission led by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, and populated it with the most esteemed political leaders he could find. Famous for his arm-twisting persuasion as Majority Leader in the Senate, Johnson knew that for the sake of credibility, he needed to seat political rivals at the same table, so he put liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren, and conservative Georgia senator Richard Russell together, over their futile objections. Russell, a devout segregationist, hated Warren for rulings that granted Blacks educational and social equity, and it’s safe to say Warren had no love for Senator Russell. LBJ hoped that by putting two men with real enmity for each other together, he could nip politically motivated arguments in the bud. What he could not do, however, was overcome the human need to make sense of the senseless by building conspiracy theories to fit the facts surrounding incomprehensible, often random, events.
The Warren Commission took a year to conclude that Oswald, a disgruntled narcissist who wanted, according to family and acquaintances, to do something that would be remembered for a thousand years, acted alone.
Over the course of the following years, conspiracy theories over the number of shooters, the number of bullets fired, and the trajectory of the bullets raged. So too did the myriad theories that had as many as 80 groups, from communists, to conservatives, to the mafia, to the CIA, responsible for the assassination.
The grandaddy of them all was presented by disgraced New Orleans prosecutor, Jim Garrison, who in 1967 made international headlines by saying he had uncovered the real truth. He went on to unsuccessfully prosecute a local man supposed to be at the center of it all.
The bottom line for our species is that we need to create reason out of chaos. The randomness of life does not suit our need for order, so we invent elaborate, often implausible, stories.
Often times, these stories die of underexposure, and the prevalence of common sense, which can seem fleeting, occasionally comes to our rescue.
Sometimes, as with the Former Guy and his cohorts, there’s simply more comfort in conspiracy theories than there is in real life. When the stories are damaging to reputations, lawsuits fly. That’s why election tech companies Dominion and Smartmatic are suing Fox News for repeatedly asserting (without evidence) that they committed voting fraud. It was just too hard for some people to believe their favored candidates could possibly lose. It also explains the crazy theory that senior Democrats operate a child sex trafficking ring. The inability to reconcile the idea that political opponents might win elections fair and square requires some to invent conspiracy theories to match their experience with a world they don’t recognize. It is how, for example, a misguided and misinformed man armed with an assault rifle shot up a DC pizza parlor. He was intent on liberating child captives from a nonexistent basement.
As The Washington Post wrote, “[We] understand the need to issue corrections when [we] make errors. By contrast, many right-wing websites, talk-news loudmouths and billionaire owners of social media platforms seem to operate with the misunderstanding that they can say whatever they want no matter how false, outrageous and damaging.”
History shows how hard it is to curb the innate desire to understand events in ways that match our world views. Conspiracy theories aren’t new. They are age old survival mechanisms.
©2022 Jon Sinton