They're coming to get you!
It's not BLACK LIVES MATTER that's coming to get you (although maybe they should be), but plain old white folks who are out to get the mobs (meaning protesters), and the looters (meaning protesters), and the violent (meaning protesters, the angry ones, or maybe other groups) and thereby save us all (meaning us white folks. Who else could it be?).
Paranoia, merely paranoia. But, oh, paranoia can do a lot of damage. And paranoia goes way back. In truth, it has never been absent.
In the 1980's there was a national mass hysteria about Satanic ritual abuse. Are any of us old enough to remember? It was widely believed that young children, preschoolers, were being subjected to ritual abuse. It began in California, in the McMartin Preschool. It was believed that the teachers had tortured and raped children, killed them and drank their blood, and so on and so on. You don't want to know the ways. (Toddlers were interviewed by therapists, for those who do not know the stories.) Or maybe it began earlier with a supposedly autobiographical book (one that I'd never heard of at the time) about discovering abuse through "recovered memories," memories that weren't, until they suddenly were. The hysteria became a fever. It was fed by talk shows (even Oprah), articles, books, lectures–it was everywhere. It grew gravitas. It became an international conspiracy–the elite were said to be abducting children world-wide for Satanic purposes. People were prosecuted.
Every conspiratorial notion forms from a tiny grain of truth, like an oyster its pearl.
I remember a case that arose when I lived in Boston in 1984 as this hysteria was well underway, when teacher after teacher at the Fells Acres Preschool was accused of raping the children in their care in a variety of fanciful ways that seemed to me, even then, highly improbable. The stories were weird, and involved secret rooms, a clown, trees, and, I think, animals. Several teachers were sent to prison with lengthy sentences. One was not released until 2004, another died in prison.
That was before everyone started forwarding messages on the internet.
Therapists played an important role spreading the "recovered memory" theory of memory. Until they didn't.
Debunked. Conspiracies. All of it. People learned from this.
You would think.
This is an actual poster that I first saw in the background of a photo of a Trump supporter. Conspiracies lie beneath.
Laughable, maybe. (That head, that body!) But I wonder. What might someone be thinking or feeling about the country, or our government, to exhibit this kind of adulation? I read that some of those who kept vigil outside Walter Reed Hospital had signs that said Trump was a gift from God. This is adulation to the power of ten. What is he is supposed to be fighting? It's more than just the usual political issues. There's hellfire here. Religiosity. We know that some believers identify a major evil that reads a lot like Satanic ritual abuse of children. All too familiar. (Thank the Qnon faction for throwing in that idea.)
What is it that is so compelling that it elevates Trump to this insane level? I have trouble putting myself in that place. What is that place? What does it look like?
Many of us (I include myself here) feel strongly about the role of government; we want it to support public education, the nation's health, our environment, and we expect it to keep us safe vis à via infrastructure, a sensible foreign policy (arguable, precisely what that is), equitable policing to keep us safe (more of a wish, unfortunately; see Black Lives Matter), and you can imagine the rest.
But I don't see a god anywhere.
So what is it, this missing element that looks to Trump so worshipfully?
Is it fear? Fear of what?
I think of the fears of the white slaveowners when emancipation turned their world upside down, when it came about that the people they oppressed were now to be equal to them. Many just gritted their teeth, hating it, silently. Many couldn't bear it, and needed to conspire, to act. Bitter and smug in their imagined superiority, men formed secret societies to attempt to return the world to what it was before. We know that they failed, but their failure was an incomplete one. People still fear the protests of Black Lives Matter.
Among other fears. There must be many.
I come to the Illuminati. I suppose they come to mind because I wrote a paper about them in graduate school, probably after reading historian Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," published in 1964, that I remember reading in the 1970's.
The Illuminati were the USA's first off-the-wall hysteria. (The Salem witch business happened in the 1600's before we were a nation, so I'm not counting that.) The full name of the group was the Bavarian Illuminati, Bavaria being in southern Germany, because they originated in Europe in the late 1770's as a secret society formed to combat superstition, abuses of state power and the like. They were essentially a by-product of the Enlightenment. Secret organizations, like Freemasons, were a thing for like-thinking groups of men. And not only then. George Washington was a Freemason. So was my father, for that matter.
Secret societies are like catnip for conspiracy lovers. Starting from the pulpits of Massachusetts the Illuminati were pilloried, atheists that they were assumed to be, accused of conspiring to abolish Christianity and overturn the government and–again, there was that sexual element–it was preached that they advocated sensual pleasure and promiscuity. Unclean! Save the children!
It was unlikely, at best, that any actual "Bavarian Illuminati" ever set foot in this country. Nonetheless, the complete lack of evidence failed to slow the fear until the early 1800's when the failure of a Christian demise or lack of a government coup wore down the Illuminati fear factor.
Well, that's not really true. There is a film called "American Illuminati" (2017) that purports to tell the "real history of America as you've never known it. The shocking truth of how America was engineered and controlled by a secret organization that has infiltrated religious groups, political parties, universities and corporations." You can get it on Amazon Prime. Although it told me it is "currently unavailable to watch in your location" (what's wrong with my location?), I'm told that if I watched this item I would also like "Prison On Earth, Beyond the New World Order," "Shadow Government," "Unsealed Conspiracy Files," "God Kings, the Descendents of Jesus," and "Alien Agenda."
I demurred.
Here is a happier note. For a bit of balance, I would argue that it's always fun to see some enthusiasm, maybe even adulation, on the other side. Herewith:
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| The house, by the way, is not really crooked, the street is slanted, but I decided to leave it this way. |
