On The Wing

History is not best left to the history books. Lessons learned through the passage of time can be better understood by contemporary students who take the time to sift through contrary views of important events and decide for themselves what, who and most importantly why.

Who wielded the greatest influence in our country’s past?  Freemasons? The conservative right? A cabal of international interests? What about our future? Conspiracy theories abound. Here is Sal Buttaci’s take on that very notion.

HISTORY RAKED OVER THE COALS

By Sal Buttaci

What is it about a supposed civilized nation’s obsession with conspiracy theories?  Proponents are still asking the same questions, shouting them into the echo barrel of time, stupidly unsatisfied with the responses that turn the questions back on us.  Can’t these theorists find a better way to fill their hours than to rake over the coals historical events they argue either did not happen or did not happen as recorded?

High on the list of conspiracy theories is the wide-spread growing belief that secret societies, most especially Freemasonry, are working behind the scenes to create “A New World Order”:  one government, one economy, one single mindedness of purpose. Though the Freemasons vehemently deny that their symbols on buildings and currency unlock dark secrets of world domination, theorists today more than ever believe differently.  Add to the dire political and economical predictions those Biblical prophecies interpreted by Christian Fundamentalists that point to imminent events leading to the “End Times,” the final days of life on Planet Earth.

What added fuel to the fire of this New World Order Theory, according to many of its supporters, was the presidential election of Barack Obama!  Some Christian groups have even gone so far as identify him as the Antichrist straight from the pages of St. John’s Book of Revelation.  So many factors contributed to this mindset:  Obama’s meteoric rise to prominence, his defeating the odds a black man would be elected to the U.S. Presidency, pictures showing him not saluting the American flag, comments he has made that questions his Christian faith, his seeming proclivity towards Socialism… Theorists can go on and on.

According to Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former Secretary of State in President Nixon’s administration, Henry Kissinger, “Conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of “a New World Order.”   [His remark in a 2008 interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange]

Another hot conspiracy theory that hasn’t cooled yet after nearly fifty years involves the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Despite the Warren Commission’s decision that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the President, conspiracy theorists continue to voice their objections.  Depending on the particular sub-theory to which they subscribe, orders for Kennedy’s assassination originated with one or more of the following: the mafia don of New Orleans,  mobsters in Marseilles, Corsican killers, Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, Hoover and the FBI, and even Lyndon Johnson.  Theorists continue to believe each subsequent President after JFK has access to the truth of how he died but are sworn to secrecy.

This is one theory that needs to be put to rest.  If I were Jack Kennedy, I would ask to be left alone.  Now I don’t know what the story is in the next world.  Maybe Jack is so busy playing touch football with his brothers, he doesn’t give one fig newton about what is still being said about his assassination back in November 1963.  Maybe Jack is in heaven where all enigmas have been solved and there’s no room for knitted eyebrows or wing feathers in a ruffle.  And if heaven forbid JFK is in H-E-L-L, the last thing he would need are further complications on a torrid eternity by the fiery lake. If an intra-world interview were possible, I believe Jack Kennedy would say, “Does it matter who did it?  The end result’s the same.  I died.  Case closed.”

Conspiracy theories abound in today’s society.  Everyone looks askance at what is promoted as truth and does his or her best to disprove it, usually with outlandish alternative stories. This conglomerate of tale fabricators, bored by the unceremonious truth, dig deeply into their scarred psyches in search of a good-size helping of mad food.  They cook up these insane theories one need not be a fourth grader––forget rocket scientist!––to punch holes in.

And the saddest part of it is this: they actually swear by them!  They bet on their mothers’ graves, ask God to strike them dead if their theory holds no credence. They remind us of the posse mentality in The Ox-Bow Incident, that 1940 novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark that demonstrates what travesty of justice can transpire when the will of the unreasonable few decides for each individual too weak-minded to think for himself.

Conspiracy theorists usually insist on premises that contradict logic.  Sometimes the more incredible the story, the more attractive the temptation to jump on board.   For a good example, take that one popular theory insisting the moon landing  on July 20, 1969 was a hoax.  According to the naysayers, those astronauts who took one giant step for mankind actually took rehearsed steps for Hollywood in some clever setting constructed to fool the TV public into believing our flag is still waving on the lunar surface.  They refuse to accept the historical fact of interplanetary travel to the moon, preferring instead to accuse our government of staging history, expecting the nation to fall in line and believe the notion of Flash-Gordon antics.

According to some paranoid distorters of history, John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley are still alive!  They have even been sighted together on a faraway island in the Caribbean, old men in beach chairs sipping tequila, skimming black stones on the blue surface of the waters.  They are hiding out in their gigolo disguises.  Not a single person has been observant or intelligent enough to see beyond their plastic faces and phony wigs.

Don’t get these theorists started!  It is almost a religion with them: finding events and punching holes in them, slicing away layers of what the world accepts as facts, until what they are left with is an asinine caricature, something for us to laugh at which they proceed to tell you they can prove.  We watch them almost frothing at the mouth, wild-eyed and lip-quivering.  Often they bear a strong resemblance to that madman with the ax in The Shining.

High on the list of conspiracy theories  that have grown out of a mistrust with our government is the Roswell Incident that occurred in New Mexico in 1947.  We have all heard about it.  It got ink in all the national and international newspapers back then and many library and bookstore shelves contain many books about it.  A spaceship supposedly crashed and several extraterrestrials were scooped off the ground and hustled away to Area 51 Warehouse where they continue to this day to undergo top-secret scientific study.

Washington, DC, tells us it never happened.   Extraterrestrials have not dropped out of the sky to visit us.  Their silver craft did not crash in the desert.  There is no warehouse hiding little bald green men with huge eyes and hardly any noses to speak of.

Here is what the conspiracy folks tell us.  Extraterrestrials certainly did visit from some far-away planet.  Their crash was unintentional and none of the three aliens perished.   They not only survived the crash, but are sharing all of their scientific knowledge with Earthlings a little at a time.  All our technological strides we owe to their sharing  know-how with our scientists and engineers.  The most recent shareware, say the theorists, is cloning, something the aliens perfected when they were faced with a dwindling population on their planet.  This is why they all look alike.

The theorists haven’t yet figured out how or do they even care how those little guys, those aliens from way up there, were able to transform their alien shapes into human earthling form.  We non-theorists listen to the wildest tales spewed out of the mouths of the paranoid who have heard them insist the Roswell aliens cloned themselves into great numbers, assumed identities of Nobel Prize scientists and child prodigies like Tiger Woods who was proficient enough to play winning golf when he was still in diapers.
In other words, the greats of society they insist are extraterrestrials in masquerade, assisting us in the discoveries we have seen in recent decades.  On of the theorists in fact goes one better than the Roswell mob.  He tells the world a reptoid race visited the Earth thousands of years ago, mated with Earthlings, and their descendants are members of the European royal families as well as several American presidents including pere and fils Bush!  And Gore too, though he lost the election!

There are several theories that grew out of the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  Theorists claim it was an inside job engineered by the U.S.A. and Israel to provide a motive for attacking Muslim countries, confiscating their oil, and making Israel a safer place to live.

As long as major events occur that for some are too mind-boggling to believe, there will continue to be a revisionist response, especially among those cynics who think the government is out to get them.  I am sure that if we study long-gone eras, we will find promulgators of conspiracy theories in every cranny and under every rock.  There seems no escaping those who pride themselves in believing little or disbelieving what the establishment accepts as truth.

Of course, we would be remiss to argue in disfavor of all conspiracy theories.  Surely there were some that were valid.  After all, when science blindly accepted the centricity of the Earth, there were those who followed the dissenting voices of Copernicus and Galileo, but for every theory that has been proved true, rest assured thousands ought to have been tossed in the fire barrel of history.

As for Obama, I think it is sad that when we finally elect a man who wants to bring about social justice in America, conspiracy theorists come out of the proverbial woodwork to discredit him and his noble intentions.

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Salvatore Buttaci is a retired English teacher who has been writing since childhood. His first published work, an essay entitled “Presidential Timber,” appeared in the Sunday New York News when he was sixteen. Since then his poems, letters, short stories, and articles have been widely published in The New York Times, Newsday, U.S.A. Today, The Writer, Cats Magazine, and elsewhere in America and overseas. He has lectured on Sicilian-American pride and conducted poetry workshops and readings.

He lives in West Virginia with his wife Sharon. He can be reached here: sambpoet@yahoo.com