by Mike Czaplinski, Noted Crackpot
 I love conspriacies.
Whether it's something as simple as your parents discussing ways of breaking
it to you that your Dad accidentally ran over the sleeping cat in the
driveway or something as world spanning as Majestic-12 colluding with the
Council on Foreign Relations to allow Greys to farm genetic materials from
Whitney Streiber, they appeal to the part of me that enjoyed hip 60's spy
movies, where all the terrorist masterminds had exclusively female
accomplices who wore Rudy Gernrich swimsuits and danced the froog to twangy
canned guitar music.
Even though they've been around at least since mankind developed language (I
doubt that would have been possible for two cavemen to plan a heist with
vocabulary consisting solely of grunts....then again, there are certain mob
families that have been quite successful, so perhaps I am off base), it is
only recently that they've acquired not only a certain cachet, but downright
respectability. The commercial success of the X-FILES is only the tip of
the iceberg. The incessant speculation about just what happened at Roswell
back in '47 has spawned a Congressional investigation, forgetting for a
moment the conspiratorial legacy of men like Richard Nixon, the Iran-Contra
junta and even the allegations of backroom dealings by a certain sitting US
President.
Because I love conspriacy theories so much, I've spent some time considering
the underlying cause of mankinds penchant for seeing conspiracies under
every rock. And I think I've found the answer.
Let me caution anyone before I go forward that I hold a degree in Psychology
from Rutgers University. Don't try this at home, and be sure to avoid
operating heavy machinery for at least an hour after reading the following
few paragraphs.
The human brain is a multi-function tool. It slices, dices, makes Julienne
fries and can do just about anything else you can think of and quite a lot
you'd never think of (like, for example, go to see a Pauly Shore movie). But
even for all of its infinite mutability, there are a few things it does
very, very well.
One of these things is pattern recognition. The very architecture of the
brain means that we do not think in logical sequence. For every neuron that
fires while we are working out a simple logical sylogism, many tens of
others are also kicked into a veritable rolling boil that can pop up all
sorts of unwanted and extraneous information. One minute you're calculating
the amortization of the mortgage for your dream home, then for no readily
apparent reason you picture Anna Nicole Smith, Diana Rigg and Nikki Cox
beckoning to you from a hot tub.
(At least, I do. That reminds me: I need to vacuum my apartment.)
It is possible to train yourself to ignore this noise, but you can never
stop it. The most creative of us don't even try to ignore it: they set up
mental turbines whose blades are turned by the churning activity, generating
masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel or The Desiderata.
But, you don't have to be a Mozart or an Arthur Miller to demonstrate this.
All you need to do is look at a dense field of small dark dots on a white
background. At first, when your conscious mind is still controlling your
eye muscles, you see just a bunch of dots. But, keep staring at it. In
short order, your subconscious will take over, and you will start to see
writhing patterns dance across the field. Your conscious mind is telling you
"That's just an illusion", but those patterns are there all the same.
I believe this process of reflexive pattern matching is the root of our
fascination, as a culture anyway, with conspiracies. The brain is an
equal-opportunity processor of that most elusive and most valuable of
commodites, information. It doesn't matter to the brain whether or not that
information is visual or auditory or written or whatever: at it's most basic
levels, the rolling boil of the synapses is ALWAYS trying to fit square pegs
into round holes.
(Cows. Must not think about cows.)
I present to you a completely unscientific and personal example of this
phenomena, drawn from the recent headlines:
Item 1: Recently, a new all-news cable TV network began operation. A joint
effort (hereafter referred to as TUNN, "The Upstart News Network") by a
former newsmedia powerhouse threatened by the growth of other all news, all
the time cable TV channels joined forces with an upstart computer software
company lead by a noted egomaniac with an almost pathological level of
competitiveness, whom my Samoan lawyers advise me I should call Mr. X.
Item 2: Within a couple of days, there is a mysterious explosion over the
ocean off the coast of a very long island off the eastern seaboard of the
United States that takes 235 lives. TUNN provides stellar coverage of the
story, rivalling (or even eclipsing in some cases) the established News
Cable channel (referred to hereafter as ENCC).
Item 3: A week after that, there is an explosion during a free concert at
the Summer Olympics, literally in the back yard of the headquarters of said
ENCC, and once again TUNN gives excellent marathon coverage of the
developments.
Faced with these three incidents, I came briefly to a seeminly obvious
conclusion: Items 2 and 3 were planned in some way by Mr. X to give TUNN a
chance to shine in the eyes of the world.
(Hmm. I wonder if Nikki Cox even likes hot tubs? Or hot carmel bikinis?)
For a brief instant, it made SENSE! Mr. X's history of prevarication in the
name of profitability; his bravado in berating and baiting his competitors,
especially if those competitors were established and competant, as ENCC is;
the too-convenient appearance of TUNN on the scene of the tragedies; his
utter lack of independent creativity by going into a market already
dominated by ENCC with a watered-down half-breed attempt to rule the cable
TV information market the way he thinks he dominates the computer
information market.
It all made SENSE! Why was I the only one who saw this?
It was then that my rigorous scientific training took hold-
(Scratch that: I have no rigorous scientific training. My degree is in
Psychology, which when you get down to it is simply the practice of tribal
medicine overlaid with some statistical math. And I got a "D" in
statistics.)
It was then that my rational mind-
(Better. Or at least slightly less inaccurate)
-took over and I realized that I had made a terrible but classic error in
judgement: I mistook coincidence for cause and effect. And I did it because
the wiring in my brain told it was right.
I think this is the same process that led some anonymous credulous US Army
Air Force officer to claim that a flying saucer had crashed in the desert
outside Roswell, New Mexico, when a field of mysterious wreckage was
discovered at the height of the first UFO flap of modern times. He had no
way of knowing that the USAAF had at least two research programmes going on
in the general vicinity (one was a rocket test programme at White Sands, the
other was the Moghul Project which was testing ultra-high altitute balloons
as a means of surveillance against enemy powers) that could conceivably have
been the source of the wreckage.
Of course, the rockets being tested at White Sands may not have had the
range to reach the area where the wreckage was supposedly found. And the
declassified records of Project Moghul do not show any balloon being
launched in the time period that the wreckage was found.
What's my point? Only that it's easy to see conspiracies in every little
burp and jiggle of our odd, odd world.
Perhaps that's why they may be more common than we'll ever know.
Or not.
Oh, and did I mention that Demi Moore was BORN in Roswell, New Mexico?
And if you've seen her with that shaved head...
But, I can't say any more. You never know who's reading this.
As always, if you want to send me email, the address is
[email protected], especially if you're Nikki Cox and you
like hot tubs and hot carmel bikinis. If you're the NSA or MJ-12, then feel
free to drop by for a visit some night. You know the address.
Ta-Ta,
Mike
Copyright ©1996 Mike Czaplinski
[email protected]
No matter what my e-mail address may say, I don't speak for
NCR, and the fact that I'm compelled to say so is a sad, sad commentary on
the lack of common sense prevalent in our overly litigious society. Nyah.
[ Home | hubcity ]
|
