If you read my blog more than just taking the passing flyby notice of the odd Paffooney picture, you may have noticed the fact that I have many unfortunate mental quirks basted in a flavorful sauce of vivid imagination and fatally high intelligence. I am too smart to live, most of the time, and so my mental quirk about constantly searching conspiracy information is probably a self-destructive attempt to get hold of seriously secret information that will probably get me killed. But conspiracy theories are dangerous in more than just the paranoid delusional way that somebody like Alex Jones always perceives it.
Since I already mentioned the Infowars rage-clown, let me talk a little bit about how Alex Jones is a truly dangerous force crying about sinister suppositories of conspiracy constantly… I do not follow the man. His website takes all kinds of conspiracy-type information and puts it through the grinder of his manic-orangutan persona and turns it all into a giant salad of poop and nuts covered in puree of mystery meat. The truth is sometimes in there, but all mangled and bunged-up. For instance, he claims that the Sandy Hook shooting of all those innocent children and heroic teachers was a false-flag operation by the government. He claims that no children were actually killed… the event was staged… The government is simply trying to turn public opinion against gun owners and wants to threaten Second Amendment rights. Gene Rosen, one of the people who heroically helped students fleeing from the Newtown shooting, was harassed by phone calls calling him a “government stooge”. Jones’ true believers are not smart enough to leave things like this alone. They take it upon themselves to press the matter and rub salt in the wounds. In fact, some Alex-Jones-true-believer criminal types stole the memorial for Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski, two seven-year-olds who died at Sandy Hook Elementary, because they didn’t actually exist… they weren’t actual children… and then they phoned those children’s parents to taunt them… all in the name of Infowars’ version of the truth.
Here is the article I used as the source for my information; Why Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Harmless Fun
These facts about conspiracy theories and the people involved in them make me physically ill over the fact that I am also a believer in some very prominent conspiracy theories. But unlike Alex Jones, I don’t pull things out of a Pandora’s box of paranoia and mental cesspools. I try very hard to site my sources and choose them critically. I believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, not by a lone gunman, and probably not by Lee Harvey Oswald at all. There was a massive conspiracy. I have dug into the roots of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. I know who Jim Garrison is… who Guy Bannister and Cord Meyer are… I know about the mysterious history of questionable deaths of witnesses to the shooting and where the efforts at cover-up become apparent enough to know that somebody powerful was behind the whole thing. But, although I think I know who and why… there is not enough evidence to name names and try to prosecute anyone. Kennedy’s death was an important blow to the architecture of my childhood. It combined with other terrible things to take away any chance I may have had to grow up innocent and happy. Pursuing the truth will haunt me for the rest of my days.
And there are other places where I want to believe. How about aliens? I wrote a comic novel or two about that. There is a source of endless comedy and clowns.
But I am a believer here also. The thing about Roswell and the numerous flying saucer incidents that have grown into an entire conspiracy subculture is that so much of it can be traced back to ingenuous and credible witnesses. Many of them not only had nothing to gain from lying, many of them lost their reputations, their careers, and sometimes even their lives because they tried to tell us truthfully what they witnessed.
I promised to back that sort of assertion up, so one of the sources of my belief is the astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. Here is a video readily available on YouTube to let you hear it in his own words.
I apologize for dumping my strange obsessions on you simply to feed monsters lurking in my silly, questioning head. I have to make sense of the world for myself, and I do it here in writing. I pulled you in with the promise of humor, and while I may have salted this essay with a bit of that, I have basically tried to convince you of my pet conspiracies. Forgive me. For as long as I keep blogging (especially when I am trying to do it every day and need things to talk about) I will continue to try these same tricks. Watch me carefully. Hold me to a standard of truth that makes me better than Alex Jones.
Catch a Falling Star 
Who Do You Listen To?
There was a time when you could turn on the TV news and listen to what you were fairly confident was actually news. Walter Cronkite on CBS always seemed to really “Tell it like it is.” He never seemed to put a spin on anything. No one doubted anything he said when he reported space missions from NASA or the assassination of JFK. You never had to wonder, “What is Cronkite’s real agenda?” His agenda was always to tell me the news of the day.
The question of politics and ideas was always one of, “Which flavor tastes best in my own personal opinion?” Because I was weirdly and excessively smart as a kid, I often listened to some of the smartest people accessible to a black-and-white RCA television set.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal were both identifiably smarter than me. I loved to listen to them argue. They were equally matched. They respected each other’s intellect, but they hated each other with a passion. Buckley was a Fascist-leaning conservative ball of hatred with a giant ego. Vidal was a self-contradictory Commie-pinko bastard child of liberal chaos with an equally giant ego. I never agreed with either of them on anything, but their debates taught me so much about life and politics that I became a dyed-in-the-wool moderate because of them. They were the key evidence backing up the theory that you needed two sides in the political argument to hammer out good ideas of solid worth. And, though I didn’t trust either side of the argument fully, I always trusted that both were basing their ideas on facts.
When I was young I identified as a Republican like my father, and thought George Will was a reasonable opinion-leader. After all, a man who loves baseball can’t be a bad guy.
Then along came Richard Nixon and the faith-shaking lies of Watergate. The media began to be cast as the villain as they continued to show the violence and horrors of Vietnam on TV and tell us about campus unrest and the terrible outcomes of things like the Kent State Massacre. The President suggested routinely that the media was not using facts as much as it was using opinions to turn people away from the Nixon administration’s answer to the problems of life in the USA. I tried to continue believing in the Republican president right up until he resigned and flew away in that helicopter with his metaphorical tail between his legs (I am trying to suggest he was a cowardly dog, not that I want to make a lewd joke about poor Dick Nixon… or is that Little Dick Nixon, the man who let me down?)
And then along comes Ronald Reagan, the man acting as a “Great President” because he was a veteran actor and knew how to play the part. And with him came Fox News.
Roger Ailes, a former adviser to Nixon, got together with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a man who would commit any crime necessary to sell more newspapers, and created a news channel that would pump out conservative-leaning propaganda that would leave Joseph Goebbels envious. I make it a rule to only listen to them and their views on anything when I feel the need to get one-foot-hopping, fire-spitting mad about something. So, since, I am a relatively happy person in spite of a long, hard life, you can understand why I almost never watch Fox News. They are truly skilled at making me mad and unhappy. And I suspect they do the same for everyone. They deal in outrage more than well-thought-out ideas.
News media came under a cloud that obscured the border between facts and partisan opinions. And conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the shouty-pouty angry news. So, I began to wonder where to turn for a well-reasoned and possibly more liberal discussion of what was politically and ethically real. I found it in the most surprising of places.
I turned to the “Excuse me, this is the news” crews on Comedy Central where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were busy remaking news reporting as a form of comedy entertainment. It is hard work to take real news and turn it into go-for-the-chuckles statements of fact that make you go, “Hmm, that’s right, isn’t it?” Stewart and Colbert consistently examine how other news organizations hurl, vomit forth, and spin the news, and by so doing, they help you examine the sources, get at the truth, and find the dissonance in the songs everyone else is singing. And these are very smart men. As I said, the intellectual work they do is very difficult, harder than merely telling it like it is. I know because I have tried to do the same myself. And is it really “fake news”? It seems to me like it is carefully filtered news, with the poisons of propaganda either surgically removed, or neutralized with antidotes of reason and understanding.
So, Mickey listens to comedians to get his news. Is that where you expected this article to end up? If not, where do you get your news?
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, conspiracy theory, humor, insight, politics, review of television, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as News, news media, news reporting, Walter Cronkite