Robert Kirby: Loose cannon
I have it on the best authority that Monica Lewinsky is actually what is known in the espionage business as a “high-grade deep mole”. In truth Monica works for Saddam Hussein who personally coached her in the finer points of presidential seduction. The entire oval office sexual farrago is a brilliantly conceived smokescreen behind which Hussein’s ominous Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalist forces are working hand- in-hand with a covertly anti-Semitic Bill Clinton in a clandestine plot to topple Israel.
That, more or less verbatim, is just one of literally thousands of conspiracy theories infesting the Internet. Like most of its kind, that one is parasitical of a currently fashionable topic. Within a week of the Nairobi bomb, the Internet seethed with explanations.
Which isn’t to suggest that older events aren’t still enjoying their share of inane conjecture. One of the latest on the Princess Diana crash concerns the driver of the Mercedes having a level of carbon monoxide in his blood that would have killed a horse. Who fed Henri Paul the noxious gas? cried the leery. And why? Was it the landmine lobby which secretly force-fed him from a bottle of the gas just before letting him drive off? Or was it MI5, specially commissioned to prevent a garish raghead from getting his hooks into the royal family’s Christmas card list? It took a rather cynical Frederick Forsyth to explain that, in his few last gasps of breath, Henri Paul probably inhaled little else but fresh exhaust gases from a ruptured engine that had just been running at high revs.
A very boring answer compared to the ruminations of a lunatic fringe who detect devious strategies behind every pot plant. As the British writer, Linda Grant, observed in an insightful article on conspiracy theories: “If there’s ever a choice between conspiracy and cock-up … conspiracy will win out every time.”
As if in proof, last week’s Guardian Weekly article -reprinted in the M&G – where, in his mesmerising literary style, Gore Vidal presented his rather ornate explanation of a right-wing conspiracy to oust Clinton. According to Vidal, the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is really no more than a front man for “Corporate America”, which powerful lobby is dedicated to the overthrow of Bill.
So far all Corporate America’s dastardly plans have failed miserably. Whitewater’s a forgotten peccadillo; the “murder” of a White House aide by Hillary has been discredited. A desperate Starr has had to move on to the always reliable turf of sexual misdemeanour.
Makes for miles of gaudy tabloid copy and endless discussions on American talk shows, even calls for studies of the psycho-political impact of furtive sexual activities on foreign policy imperatives. But, in the light of the fact that as you read this there are probably a couple of million human beings going down on one another, hardly anything special.
What makes conspiracy theories so popular? Linda Grant again: “The tendency to see plots everywhere is a means of not looking at ourselves, and our own failures, of always pinning the blame on shadowy forces beyond our control. Conspiracy theories are a form of learned helplessness. Perhaps … a yearning for the unified meaning in a time of fragmentation.”
South Africa has its due share, in particular of a mutated form of conspiracy theory: the practice of blaming everything on past political felonies. All the way back to when Van Riebeeck dropped anchor and set about callously robbing everyone of their birthright. The vegetable garden was just a front.
These days, South Africa’s own cycle of fragmentation offers rich pickings for local conspiracy theorists, especially those who requisition extra credibility by clothing their often grotesque conjecture in the timely political cloths. Infractions of 46 years of National Party administration are a favourit e hunting ground. It’s now politically trendy to dump on any judge who doesn’t toe the subservient line – he’s an updated apartheid- monger under the control of some surreptitious cabal. And what about Third Forces? The mass murder of farmers is now being blamed on extreme right-wing elements determined to humiliate Derek Hanekom?
Conspiracy theorising also offers us the chance to fill in all the gaps in what we are told. Something to impose a recognisable pattern on random and confusing events. As often the theories serve another more ominous purpose: to specify a perverse logic, even some kind of obscene morality to the gestures of subhumans – like those who shoot up people praying in churches or plant bombs in public places.
Or so the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty committees would have us believe.