So I finally got around to reading Jon Ronson’s second book, Them: Adeventures With Extremists. He’s also the author of The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was made into a mediocre movie a couple years ago.
Ronson does a lot of interviews in the unofficial skeptics’ media circuit. So if you’ve heard him talk about conspiracy theories, he’s probably revealed a lot of this book to you already. That’s OK though, since his stories move along at a brisk enough pace so that you won’t get bogged down in material he’s already covered for too long.
And the chapters – each dedicated to a specific subject – do seem like stories. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that Them is a compilation of long travel articles, each of them vaguely connected to conspiracy culture. Some of these connections are looser than others. In one chapter about a mysterious wealthy Saudi man and another about the director of American History X, the connection to the rest of the book is particularly tenuous.
Putting that aside, there is some really great and funny reportage on the extreme right in this book. David Icke, Alex Jones, the KKK, and Islamic fundamentalists all expose themselves as the total buffoons they are at points.
But simply laughing at the conspiracy kooks wouldn’t make a very interesting book to most people, so Ronson digs a little deeper. The chapter on David Icke in particular shows how one kind of madness can influence a different sort in otherwise normal, rational people. I don’t want to give away too much, but basically mass confusion ensues from whether or not David Icke is being literal when he talks about the ruling class being made up of lizards from another dimension.
There’s also another chapter that will make mainstream libertarians and conservatives extremely uncomfortable. It’s about a KKK leader who is trying to reform the organization’s hateful image. If the guy that chapter focuses on hasn’t been a Daily Show field piece yet, he definitely should be. His defense is painfully close to the defense Tea Party activists give to the charge of racism – No they don’t hate anybody, they just don’t want liberal values like interracial marriage forced onto them.
The most interesting part of the book to me was in how Ronson sort of pieced together the truth behind all the sensationalism from both sides about the Bilderberg Group, who supposedly runs the world by having boring meetings at fancy hotels for one long weekend every year.
The answer, the one most skeptics who focus on conspiracy theory already know, is that in reality nobody is really running the world. Nobody’s piloting the plane. And that’s terrifying for everyone.
It’s even terrifying to those who the Alex Joneses of the world would have us believe really are at the helm. They actually like the idea of being the focus of their ire. It makes them feel more important than they are. It maintains the illusion that somebody is in control. So they do things to fuel the paranoia a little.
And that’s where we’re left. Nobody is isolated these days. Spreading seemingly irrelevant ideas really does have effects on others, even if it’s not the intended ones. You can go live on some mountain in Idaho with a bunch of Nazis to get away from it all, but you’re still connected with the rest of us. That’s just the kind of world we live in now.
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Atheist Hobos 