#ObamaGate is the biggest scandal of my life. This is not just politics this is the corruption of everything we love and respect as Americans. At least it should be.— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) May 20, 2020
That's how conspiracies work, isn't it? If it isn't, it should be, so it is and will be, as soon as we unmask enough of the conspiracy to prove its the corruption of everything we love and respect as Americans (which I have a feeling doesn't mean full equality for all and equal justice for all, because this conspiracy is a zero-sum game where, if you win, I lose, and that's what threatens "everything we love and respect as Americans.")
I've been through this. When I was an infant it was Joe McCarthy, who most people didn't even notice until the Army-McCarthy hearings (it was those hearings that exposed him and ended him, because they exposed him). In my childhood it was the John Birch Society, unknowingly supported by my church because we used Welch's grape juice for communion, and I drank the stuff at home (whatever happened to frozen grape juice, anyway?). And always there were the Commies, and the KKK; I even remember the racist pamphlets with African-Americans drawn as cartoon images, lusting after blonde white women about to burst from their tiny dresses. There's always an "other" in American society (probably true in all societies, but what of it? This is the one I live in.), always someone to blame, always a conspiracy theory to accuse them with, always a revolution about to happen because we were born in revolution and only in the final revolt will we be free (the greatest lie of American history: the American Revolution was to give the mercantile and land owning/slave owning classes freedom from English taxes and rules, and freedom above all to exert the power they envied England's ruling class for having, exert it over others themselves, rather than borrow a portion of it from overseas. That's the stench and stain that prevails in American history, the hidden wound we cannot heal because we cannot expose it because it is the source of our power and our weakness, simultaneously.) There's always some reason I suffer, and it's always either my fault, or someone else's fault; and which of those two do you think is more popular, and more likely to produce demons we must struggle against? There aren't that many of us who are all that self-reflective; probably about as many as the people who see their troubles as all inflicted on them by dark forces. And in between is the great mass just trying to get through the day, crossing the festive hall from one side to the other, flying out of the storm into the light, and flying back into the storm on the other side of the hall. They are just grateful for the brief respite from the storm.
It's the people on the fringes, by and large, who direct the country, with the mass in the middle voting indifferently one way or the other, and only every century or so finding out indifference is a choice, too, not an echo. But do they ever worry about conspiracy theories, about vague explanations for complicated issues, about dark stories based on darker visions? No, probably not.
This old world just keeps spinnin' round. It is a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down. At least, it should be.
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