Doomsday Preppers is my new favorite thing on TV. It’s a documentary-style show that features groups of survivalists who for a variety of creative reasons think some kind of apocalypse is imminent. It’s the kind of show that seems to be baiting people like me who are morbidly fascinated with grandiose, paranoid delusions. And now I can’t stop watching it.
Gene Ray says that all of physics is wrong. It would have to for his new model of reality, which he describes as a Time Cube, to be correct. Everything from quantum theory to force being equal to mass times acceleration; it’s all just wrong according to Ray. So when his ramblings counter some established truth about how the physical world operates, he can always play the “Everything you know is wrong” trump card.
So I’ve almost got to the double digits of this column about crackpots and craziness without even having addressed David Icke. He’s probably best known for spreading the idea that European royalty and other powerful elites like George Bush and Boxcar Willie are secretly the descendants of reptilian shape-shifters from another planet who interbred with humans in ancient times to create special bloodlines… Bloodlines of evil! And they eat babies! And stuff. It’s an extension of the Ancient Aliens hypotheses you get from guys like Zecharia Sitchin and Giorgio A. Tsoukalos (who I hear is actually a really nice guy, for what it’s worth) with a little interplanetary erotica thrown in for fun.
If that’s all you’ve heard about David Icke, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that’s not quite the extent of all his crazy ideas. You don’t just put that out there and then spend the rest of your time fishing or writing about architecture. He has several books, some of them very long and all of them just packed to the brim with speculation about the secret motives behind everything from the JFK assassination to Sumerian mythology.
I first heard about Alex Jones during one of my first breaks home from college, catching up with a friend from high school. He went to college in Meadville, PA, at the same school which after one semester drove Trent Reznor into the happening nightlife of Cleveland and probably fueled his angst-based career for the next 20 years.
So there wasn’t much to do in Meadville. One thing to do was drive around delivering pizzas to townies while listening to the Alex Jones radio show. That’s what my friend did. This was in the days before iPods, so unless you wanted to drag around your CD collection and risk it getting stolen by Alex Jones fans for crystal meth money, radio was your only option.
So we would get stoned and laugh at the crazy man yelling about the global “elite” in his documentaries. It’d be fun to pick apart the fact from fiction and to try to identify the point where reasonable concerns about government waste turned into the fever-dream rants of a paranoid lunatic. So yeah, the drug war is bullshit, but it’s not part of a UN plot to end American sovereignty.
“OBAMA! And BIDEN! The Three Musketeers!”
So it looks like birtherism is about as dead as we could hope. Sure, the WorldNetDaily and Washington Times crowd will never be convinced Barack Obama is an American human, but the public consciousness has at least shifted enough around this issue that when someone admits to being a birther it’s pretty much the end of any serious conversation. So now the would-be birthers who still want to be taken seriously have to limit their race-baiting to the kind of dog-whistle buzz words and phrases that people like Newt Gingrich are so fond of.
But wait! There is a better… um… well, there’s another way! I just heard about it. There’s this guy who goes by the name Freeman. I’m not sure if he gave himself that name because he’s a fan of those people who don’t recognize the American flag when it has gold tassels, but if he did it would be the least absurd thing about him. Anyway, he thinks Obama is a foreigner, of course. But the twist is that he’s a clone of this Egyptian Pharaoh from 3300 years ago.
“Gimme all your money or I’ll crush your head!”
One of the more celebrated debunking instances among skeptics is when James Randi and his cohorts caught the notorious scam artist / phony “faith healer” Peter Popoff red-handed lying to his audiences. For those who don’t know this story, Popoff’s staff would ask the audience as they were arriving to fill out “prayer cards” with their names, contact info, and which ailments they were hoping to cure by showing up. Popoff’s wife would collect them and during the performance, she would read some of the more promising entries and transmit the information to a receiver Popoff had hidden in an earpiece.
Who’s the craziest motherfucker you’ve heard about? I’ll give you a minute to think it over. Got one? Who is it? OK, you’re wrong. The correct answer is Francis E Dec. In my obsessive pursuit of all things unhinged I’m pretty sure he will be the ultimate yardstick for the scale of the craziest motherfuckers of at least the 20th century. Guys like Deepak Chopra, Fred Phelps and Jack Chick just have to stand back in awe of the way Dec fully embraced his inner crazy. The time cube guy was probably inspired by him. But you’ve probably never heard of him. And if it weren’t for his letters you never would.
A billboard campaign rarely makes the news unless it’s either wildly provocative or sponsored by an atheist group. As far as billboards go, it’s all well and good to remind people of some dehumanizing catastrophe like a Celine Dione concert at the local casino; but if you suggest that Christianity’s a myth or that atheists exist, everyone will freak the fuck out.
Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This makes no fucking sense because truth is a quality of a statement which describes its factual accuracy and isn’t a human being which might wear shoes. But he might have been trying to point out how easily it is to make false statements and misrepresent the truth compared to the effort required to correct the lies.
Bryan Fischer is a living case study of this phenomenon. He’s the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, which is the organization which collaborated with Texas Governor Rick Perry in throwing their little rain dance / prayer rally last month. He’s also very active on The Twitter, spending maybe an hour or two every day typing out the most dishonest possible way to attack the gays, Muslims, liberals, moderate Republicans, and bears. That’s actual bears, not big gay dudes. He might be the inspiration for Stephen Colbert’s character’s fear and hatred of the godless killing machines.
Last week on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did a segment on how the media’s been conspicuously avoiding coverage of the Quixotic Presidential campaign of Ron Paul. His supporters loved it, probably hoping that more coverage of Paul would mean more people getting on board with his campaign. But more coverage means more coverage of his crazier positions too, and there are a lot of them.
Atheist Hobos 