Saturday night I’m out having dinner with a friend I’ve known for nearly 20 years now. He’s always been a bit neurotic, but of late he seemed to be improving. Then the whole war with Iraq happened and the botching of the post-war process seems to have unhinged him. Now, he’s decided that the Illuminati are running everything, and all the bizarro crap you hear on late night talk shows is absolutely true. Chem-trails, the face on Mars, alien space craft at Area 51, all of it. True.
When he told me this, my jaw nearly shattered the table on it’s way down. This is a guy who savaged anyone who didn’t grasp such things as science, how government operates, economics, or any of a number of things, as well as he did (he had a 3.9 grade average in college), and now, he’s saying that all of it is meaningless because it’s all bullshit fed to us by the Illuminati who control the world.
I desperately wanted to choke the living shit out of him when I heard him say it. He’s literally the only person I know IRL whom I can consider to be my intellectual equal in most respects. So, between clenched teeth, I tried to make him see reason.
“Don’t you think that if the Illuminati were really in charge we’d have cooler stuff?” I asked. “After all, they control everything, so they’ve got the best brains on the planet working for them, why don’t we have better stuff?”
“We have exactly the kind of stuff they want us to have.” Was his reply. There seemed to be something small and child-like about him as he said it, he shifted back in his seat, and just kept twisting slightly, as if the possibility of there not being an Illuminati was more frightening to him than the thought of some secret society running things.
“What about ‘chem-trails’?” I asked. “I’ve seen vapor trails for years now. You can’t tell me that they’re some kind of mind control experiment. They’re a natural product of combustion in jet engines.”
“I’ve seen them when there’s been no jets in the sky.” There was that strange shifting again. “If there had been any jets, I’d have heard them. But there weren’t any. Nothing in the sky at all. Just this strange checkerboard pattern.”
I can’t really describe my shock at this point. He and I both share a love of military hardware, and he can quote the stats on the SR-71 from memory! Yet, here he was, denying that any of it mattered. Forget that jets can leave vaportrails while flying so high that the sound never reaches the ground, forget that he might not hear them when he’s inside his apartment, forget that high altitude winds can follow patterns vastly different than those on the ground. Nope. It’s all some kind of plot.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why are they doing this? For what end? They must have some reason behind it? And what are they spraying?”
“Who knows?” More of that odd shifting of his, which just inflamed my anger. “It could be mind control substances, or something to protect us from diseases, or something to thin the herd out.”
I was spitting mad at this point, trying to push back the frothing rage that was forming inside of me. I knew that if I let my passions get out of hand, I’d create a scene inside the restaurant, and the last thing I wanted to do was to jump up and start screaming, “You stupid fuck! Why the fuck are you doing this, you know it’s all bullshit!” Yet I couldn’t clamp down on my anger well enough to be able to rationally refute his statements. I felt betrayed by his sudden adoption of these bizarre beliefs. These seemed worse, IMHO, than his misogynist views or his ardent following of the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
“What’s it all for?” I demanded. “I mean, if those guys really control the world, why hide it? Take the JFK assassination, for example, suppose it were to come out tomorrow that it really was a CIA plot, what would it change? There’s nothing we could do about it. Any of the players would either be dead or really old men. If they chose to tell us about it and say, ‘Ha!’ without prosecuting the survivors, there ain’t shit we could do about it.”
“I’ll tell you why they don’t say anything about it.” He seemed, I don’t know, smug, confident, at this point in the conversation. “Rednecks. They’re scared of rednecks with guns. Because if word got out, there’s plenty of rednecks with guns who’d love to shoot government people.”
:smack: These guys have captured alien technology, nuclear weapons, the entire germ warfare divisions of every nation on Earth, and they’re concerned about a bunch of guys with pop guns? Come on! If these guys want to trim the entire population of the Earth down to a chosen few, they can do it easy. Just lob a few nukes, or release a virus that only the select have been vaccinated against, and you’re done.
The exchange was more than what I’ve recounted here, but I can’t bear myself having to rehash it all out. I wanted to ask him what the hell’s the point of ruling the world? I mean, once you’ve gotten control of the Earth, what else is there to do? Start breeding the master race? And if you’ve gotten control of the Earth, why hide it? There’s nothing anybody can do to stop you. Nothing at all, and you would know this, because you control everything!
