Grappling to Understand
You ever stumble across something huge that you've never heard of? That happened to me this weekend while reading The Atlantic. I read an article entitled, "The Listener." It's about George Noory's quotidian all-night radio program, Coast to Coast AM. In the Eastern Time Zone, it runs from 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. Its content is geared toward conspiracy-types that like to hear stories about UFOs, time travel, the emerging economic world order (ala Alex Jones, who appears on the show), and various freak occurrences and illnesses that can somehow be tied into a bigger, sinister plan.
It's bizarre stuff, playing at a time when the vast majority of people are asleep.
Yet it's attracting 3 million listeners, over 525 radio affiliates nationwide.
When I was ten or so, my parents bought me a simple clock radio. It had the paper flaps that you could hear turn in the middle of the night. I really liked it. I used to spend hours in bed, turning the AM dial, trying to catch different radio programs. At night, you can often pick-up AM signals from far away. I remember I'd catch one in Cincinnati and other cities five+ hours away. I'd lie in bed, listening, reading some sports magazines. Those hours may have been among the most serene in my lifetime, so I related to this story about millions of people listening to Coast to Coast AM by themselves while the world sleeps.
I was also attracted by the conspiracy theories. Like many Americans, I at times think something sinister is afoot. I touched on it here last October, and I even listened to Alex Jones for awhile, but gave up on him when he wouldn't connect the conspiratorial dots (mentioned here). I don't know where I stand on the theories. I've pretty much resigned myself to the position I held for years: if there's a mass conspiracy out there, ordinary folks like me have no way of figuring out what it is, so I might as well go about living my life as though there is no conspiracy.
Overall, though, I incline to the position that there is no conspiracy. Rather, it's just the same Progressivist religion that has been dogging mankind for over 200 years. From the theories of Godwin and Condorcet, through its varied offspring such as Marxism and New Deal politics, to Obamacare. It's not a conspiracy. It's just an ideology that too many people share, especially people in power. When that ideology is then combined with greed, something like a conspiracy starts to emerge.
Big bankers, for instance, wanted to control the money supply for their own profit, so they hatched the Federal Reserve in the name of a stable money supply and the national good. I have no doubt that the people who put the Federal Reserve into play meant well. I also have no doubt that they also intended to profit enormously. Some may have intended one or the other (public good or private gain); some may have intended both (like Al Gore and global warming). It doesn't matter: the two came together in a conspiracy-type arrangement that plagues us to this day. You see the same thing at work throughout the 20th century: Eisenhower's freeway program, which was enthusiastically supported by automakers. The support for Obamacare by the elements in the medical industry that stand to gain enormously. You see it every time a member of Congress loses his seat, then gets a cushy job with a government contractor. It's not a conspiracy. It's a tangled mess, all brought about by the Progressive mindset.
And why do I say the Progressive mindset brought it? Because the Progressive religion's church is the federal government. It wants a strong and effective and expansive (leviathan and intruding and pervasive) federal government, which then becomes a tool of greed, to the detriment of those who don't have access to the federal government's power-pocked halls. The people outside the power structure can't see the machinations. They don't know how the system works, and they can't begin to figure out what's going on. They want to understand, but they can't. They then come up with ways to understand it, and conspiracy seeps into their minds. Conspiracy is the one way they can make sense of it.
And they're not too far off the mark.
Odin's Comeback
Coast to Coast AM has an iPhone application. I downloaded it yesterday and found some interesting stuff: a story about an underwater plane (link), a story about ghost hunting, and a story about a woodpecker in Arizona that shape-shifts into a man (link). It's kind of a Ripley's Believe It or Not: some true, some bogus, all interesting to the extent someone believes it. A lot of it reminds me of ancient mythological beliefs and makes me wonder if mythological religion has made a warped comeback in this post-Christian age. We've returned in many ways to pagan mores. Why not a return to their more vulgar religion?
