The English Teacher and the Conspiracy Theorist

I often have students who claim to not have enough time to read everything that we are discussing in class. I think that this usually boils down to time management issues. Regardless, I try to offer advice about how to be a better, more efficient reader.

One of the things that I suggest when a student complains about being pressed for time is something called pre-reading. As you may have guessed, it is what you do before you start reading the main bit of the book or an article. When you are reading a book, you go over the table of contents and see how the sucker is set up. You go to the notes and see what sources the author relies on and, often, how the author uses them. You also look at any indices, tables, photos or supplementary information. You can glean an immense amount of information about a source by looking at this information and it provides you with a perspective against with you can measure the contents of the book proper. It raises questions for you to find answers to while you are reading, and this, I find, is good for memory and recall. It makes reading a book immeasurably more efficient, and it helps you decide whether or not what you are reading is related to your interests and if so, how. When I go to the library, I will often look up a book or two, go up to the stacks and pull any book around it that looks like it might be related. Often, and I'm not exaggerating, I go back to my table with twenty books to review. The vast majority of these I put aside, but this pre-reading behavior is exactly how I go about sifting the books.

Lately, I have been very busy as the semester has come to an end. I have also been giving talks right and left all semester, and I feel like I am behind on a number of projects. I have not been able to read everything that I want. So, how do I make the best use of my reading time? Pre-reading helps.

One of the books on my nightstand is Jesse Ventura's American Conspiracies, which I bought when it came out. I knew at the time I was going to have to wait to read it, so I loaned it to one of my more capable students for a project she was working on. The week that I got it back from her, we were discussing 9/11 conspiracies, and so I skipped ahead to that chapter, "What really happened on September 11th?"

A few pages in, Ventura had already confirmed a lot of my misgivings about his...entire writing career.

Each chapter starts with 3 bullet points, wherein Ventura describes the incident, the official word and his take. In this chapter, the official word is: "The 19 hijackers were all fanatic Muslim terrorists linked to al-Qeada and its ringleader, Osama bin Laden." Ventura's take is:

"Our government engaged in a massive cover-up of what really happened, including its own ties to the hijackers. Unanswered questions remain about how the towers were brought down, and where a plane really struck the Pentagon. The Bush Administration either knew about the plan and allowed it to proceed, or they had a hand in it themselves."

He should be ashamed.

Now, I could go into the long tedious rehashing of his chapter, but that would not be useful. If Ventura makes me defend the Bush administration, quite frankly, the terrorists win.

But the opening bullet points suggest a great way forward. Like many investigations carried out by government officials, there is in fact "an official word." This is the 585-page 9/11 Commission Report (links to a big honkin' .pdf). But when one scans the notes for that chapter, one document is noticeably missing: The 9/11 Commission Report! Indeed, the notes for this chapter are very instructive as to how the conspiracist mind works. It is a printed demonstration of how a conspiracist defines authority and performs research.

Ventura's use of sources is irresponsible from the first time he tries:

"But here is what John Farmer, a Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission who drafted the original report, has to say in a new book: 'At some level of government, at some point in time . . . there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.' What more do we need?"

Well, a whole hell of a lot more, actually, Jesse.

Farmer's book, and presumably the comment, is about the response to the attacks of 9/11, not about obscuring the causes of 9/11, or about who knew what ahead of time. It is mostly about the Bush administration and other interested agencies obscuring systemic incompetence. And this is important, because the book actually sheds no light on the hypothesis that Bush-and-friends knew about what was going to happen or made it happen. Farmer is in fact writing in response to conspiracy theories and trying to air out some places in the narrative where people were acting in their own self-interest AFTER the fact. Indeed one of the conclusions of the book, which seems important if you are saying the book is "all you need," is that the administration was irrelevant during the hijackings. Don't take my word for it; take Farmer's, who says, that the Defense Department "would remain largely irrelevant to the critical decision making and unaware of the evolving situation 'on the ground.'" This doesn't sound like the omnipotent cabal of ne'er-do-wells who are pulling the strings behind the scenes. Or perhaps they are trying to make themselves look bad so that we'll think that, eh, Jesse? Of course this can't be true, since Farmer's whole argument is that they were trying to make themselves look better.

Despite an attempt to begin with a reputable source, his sources degenerate rapidly and completely. He pulls quotes from the following Internet sources, in order, www.911truth.org, the Dylan Avery's 9/11 documentary Loose Change, 911review.com (not a peer-reviewed journal, you'll be surprised to hear), Loose Change again, and again, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Loose Change a fourth time, and a fifth time. Of the first 13 citations, 8 of the sources come from the prestigious Internet where not just any idiot can... oh, wait. He also cites a press release from "Political Leaders for 9/11 Truth," an eyewitness account from Los Angeles of a missile hitting the Pentagon, a Danish TV interview with someone who did not publish in a respectable journal about nanothermite, an unsourced document that I found originated from Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, and lastly David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor. Griffin is, for those of you who do not know, by the accounts of his peers a respectable theologian, but he is also one of the early superstars of the 9/11 denial movement. The title of his book comes from a document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," released by a neo-conservative think tank, the Project for a New American Century. The document relates to updating military technology, but suffers from an admittedly evil group of advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, and international smooth-talker John Bolton. Loose Change, what I would call the most widely disseminated conspiracist text in history, is also one of the most devastatingly and thoroughly busted ones, as when, for example, Avery's assertions were repeatedly annihilated by the editors of Popular Mechanics and by a point-by-point refutation by Mark Iridian in his counter-documentary, Screw Loose Change.

This is a feeble collection of sources, and the only reputable one is misused. Indeed, because Farmer's book makes use of recently declassified documents and was written by someone on the inside, the way in which it is used demonstrates a grotesque missed opportunity to gain real insight. This indicates how self-limiting the conspiracist movement is, not looking beyond its network of believers and, when confronted with outside beliefs, selecting only those elements that they believe can be used to bolster their opinions. Indeed, if you were to read these notes without knowing the contents of the chapter, you would be forced to conclude that they annotated a chapter about the 9/11 movement itself.

My last example, for the purposes of this post at least, draws on one final source and illustrates how cockeyed the conspiracists' take on authority is. They cite a source whose word seems as if it should carry immense authority on matters of national security, former chief of army intelligence Major General Albert Stubblebine. If you saw The Men Who Stare at Goats, you will recognize the Stubblebine character as the one who tried to run through his own office wall. It's the opening chapter of Ron Jonson's book and one of the funniest things that I have ever read.

So, a psychic soldier, a theologian out of his discipline and a kid with a laptop and an inability to feel humiliated. Ventura relies on these people instead of referring directly to the Commission Report or any other credentialed authority. He even gets his uncontroversial assertions (like the temperature of burning jet fuel) from unreliable sources, assiduously avoiding contact with anyone who might harsh his mellow and casting every single factual assertion into doubt, not just his conclusions. At least his shoddy showing is well documented.

HJ