Last night, a handful of Atlanta skeptics attended the world premiere of G. Edward Griffin's new documentary, What in the World Are They Spraying?, which was screened last night at the Atlanta History Center, an otherwise respectable institution. We were there not just for the show, but also for the political spectacle that took place in the hall outside the screening room.
In much the way the 9/11 Truther screening of Engineering Destruction brought with it a coterie of politically naive activists hawking conspiracies, we expected much the same at the movie. We were not disappointed.
In fact, we were terrified.
After buying our tickets, I hit the display tables. The first was the table of georgiacarry.org, which declares that its mission is to restore "the right to bear arms in Georgia." (Christ, if you have spent any time in the pawn shops here, you can only wonder which rights are being withheld. Concealed tactical nuclear weapons, fercrissakes?) Of course, the scary upshot of this table's presence at a chemtrail event is that people who think that evil elites are spraying us all day from the engines of airplanes are arming themselves to the fucking teeth and want more guns. That's some scary stupid.
Next I wandered over to the table with the CDs and DVDs on it. An amiable chap was distributing disks with conspiracist audio and video and chatting with people:
"The beauty of this is that nobody knows you got this information," he said, referring to the CD format. "They don't have your IPO or whatever; they don't know how many times you watched it." (He's right. I'd hate for "them" to know about my initial public offering.)
"You handed a lot of these out last time I was at the Federal Reserve," an older guy next to him said. (The region's Federal Reserve branch is near me in Midtown Atlanta, and sometimes you can see protesters outside distributing literature.)
Indeed, much of the modern conspiracy theory movement is about distributing information; in this sense it is quite evangelical. The guy behind the table told me, when I asked if I could take some CDs: "The reason that there are two of the same [disk] is that you can keep one for yourself and give one to a coworker or someone at church or something, and with two people having the same information, you can start a conversation and draw people into it and create what I call 'buzz.' If we can get six percent of the population educated on just whats on these CDs, then it's just a matter of time."
(I'll be sure to distribute them the next time I'm at church, I thought.) Why six percent?
"Six percent," he continued, "is the point on the bell curve where it becomes common knowledge. That's not a whole lot of people." I was apparently wrong to think that "common knowledge" meant knowledge that was common to everyone. Stupid words.
At this point, Masala Skeptic arrived, and there was much hushed and nervous chatting among the reasonable. We expressed both fear and the desirability of beers. I came back to the table where the guy was handing out videos.
"They wanted $700 plus 40% of court costs for not having my vehicle registered," he was saying. "I had a license plate on it, it was insured, it had been registered--they knew exactly who I was, they could pull it up on the computer--it wasn't registered as collateral on the national debt. [...] That's why they wanted $700."
"How's that?" I asked.
"Ok...I can't prove this quite yet, but there's a guy out west who has been doing the research. Everything you own is used as collateral on the national debt [dramatic pause]...including your social security card, your birth certificate [dramatic pause]...That's some really weird stuff."
"Who's researching that?" I asked.
"A lot of people. If you just..." At this point a woman, who was worried that the gummint was ruling us under admiralty law, jumped in, failing to understand how conversations progress. I redirected the man back to my question.
"I didn't get the guy's name," he said. "But if you look at 55 Waters Street, New York, New York, the depository trust company or corporation [which, it turns out, trades in Treasury securities] it'll give you some sort of idea of ..." and he trailed off, saying that he had to be working. "That's just kind of a rabbit hole to go down [Ah, the inevitable, Alice in Wonderland/Matrix reference!] I haven't exactly figured out how they do it..." Then another one of his friends came in and the conversation was over.
At this point, the skeptical away team had assembled: Masala Skeptic, Krelnik, Cabana Boy, Animala and Bing, and we were off to our seats.
The place was disturbingly full. We sat in business class, which meant that we were only out $10 a pop and sat off to one side. As we took it all in, a cadaverous undertaker-looking guy handed out slips of paper about the swine flu and advertising a site called, AmericanPatriotNews.info, which actually has "the earth is growing" conspiracy.
He mentioned that up to 80% of humans were going to be killed by depopulation tactics, which he called "genocide."
"Hell, that's omnicide," I remarked, and the couple in front of me sort of snickered.
"Yeah, that's sort of extreme," the boy-half said, "but when you read about the vaccinations and how toxic they are..."
"Well, that's the thing about the great vaccine scares...there's just not a lot of evidence to support it. Vaccines are incredibly safe." I told him that I had recently talked to a person from the CDC, and he showed me a study of the shingles vaccine. A double-blinded study. Freaking beautiful work of art, that study. Conclusion of the study: the vaccine works and it does not kill people. "So, they work, and they're largely safe. I mean, have you heard something else?"
"Well, yeah I've read that they suspended them in the UK, India, Australia, they suspended giving out the flu vaccines because they...the under fives were basically going into epileptic shock and seizures, and so they suspended them."
I can't find any evidence of this from reputable sources. Indeed, India is asking for vaccine and developing a new type of flu vaccine production program, according to the sources I looked at. OK, the website birdflu666.com had something about this, but it's called "birdflu666," fercryinoutloud. But this does not help my new friend. He said that it was all about Big Pharma earning money. I said it really wasn't, that you don't make money on something that you give out once and never have to administer again; you make it on drugs you take every day for the rest of your life.
I thought I was exquisitely clear, had good solid answers for every single question and assertion that he made. I know he was not convinced in the slightest.
Then the feature presentation. First, G. Edward Griffin came out and got a preemptive standing ovation, which creeped the shit out of all of the skeptics, as far as I could tell. I wasn't expecting it, because he's a crazy guy. Wrote a book about Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society. Yikes! But that's besides the point. The filmmakers, to use the term loosely, had recruited him in what seems to have resulted in their raising money to make a movie about chemtrails. Fucking chemtrails.
Remember, we were in a room full of armed grown-ups.
Mike Murphy and Paul Wittenberger were the director and producer. They are politically naive and scientifically illiterate, but at least their technical prowess as reporters, documentarians and "conspiracy historians" were non-existent.
The flyer that was being handed out with the tickets read: "Tonight, Griffin, co-producer Mike Murphy and director Paul Wittenberger will personally screen the results of their perilous journey of fact finding and gathering of scientific data. They will not only confirm that 'chemtrails' are a reality, but also ask the questions of what they consist of, are there adverse effects, who is conducting these activities--and to what end?" Murphy and Wittenberger systematically and categorically failed in all of these endeavors, and their parents, who I suspect live upstairs from them, should be deeply ashamed.
The "peril" we were promised was non-existent. They farted around in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, on beaches of Hawaii, and in Belgium. The biggest hazard they faced was their ears going pop while they were landing (in a fucking plane!!!) in these various delightful locales.
So, what were they doing in these various places? Well collecting scientific data, of course! Using ph strips they seem to have gotten at Walgreens!
Wait? Really? You're going to make a movie about that? Mega-feeble.
So they go to these places, stick their strips in the mud and then ooh and ahh about how bad the soil is. And the cause? Aluminum. Who is putting it there?
The Aluminati, of course. (Just kidding. They aren't clever enough to think that one up.)
The premise of this unfortunate flick is that the aluminum that is changing the ph of the soil comes from airplanes. They perfectly avoided demonstrating anything like a link between airplanes and ground ph, and they never once addressed, when they examined the soil, that
the ph of soil is variable depending on the time of year. Absolutely all of the movie is based on the premise that contrails that linger in the air longer than others (they don't give a real figure on how long a water contrail is
supposed to last--and it will vary depending on atmospheric conditions) those that linger longer are actually
chemtrails. The people responsible for this botch further claim that the metals in the soil, especially aluminum, originate in the chemtrails. The problem with that is that there is an easy way to test this hypothesis that they do not consider. They could sample a "chemtrail." If there is aluminum in them, then you can speculate and test the proposition that the aluminum in the soil comes from the aluminum in trails. But they haven't even bothered to do that. Perhaps it would be impractical to, I dunno, fly behind one of these, and, honestly, I'm not sure how one would sample what came out the back of an airplane engine, but I'm guessing you could do it by analyzing the change in the spectrum of light passing through it as a "chemtrail" crossed in front of the sun. Easy peasy.
As far as I can tell, they managed to find no qualified experts. They are willing to interview absolutely anybody as an expert, including a former Arizona politician with a grotesquely incontinent uterus and who fears the Illuminati, a bunch of Hawaiian hippies who don't know how shirts work, Muriel Hemingway, and a 16-year old high school student. Climate scientists? Fuck 'em. They don't need knowledgeable experts when they have a vague sense of conspiracy!
Perhaps the low point of the evening (besides the beginning of the film) was the end of the film, the last 30 minutes before the end credits, when the people with the cameras went to Washington to raise awareness of the issue of the uninstitutionalized mentally ill.
Now, when I lobbied in D.C. there was a protocol. We had to call ahead and make appointments to see the staffs of the various reps we were visiting. The people with cameras people charged up into the faces of unsuspecting representatives and asked, "What do you think about geoengineering [the pretense of saving the world from global warming that justifies spraying]?" Until a week ago, I did not know what geoengineering was. How the fuck is some suit going to a meeting going to actually be able to sit down and discuss this topic intelligently? Indeed, if they were concerned about their topic, they would have sat down with their reps
while they had time to talk and listen, not while they were in transit! That's the worst time to talk about something. Indeed, the whole incident was about the spectacle of the ambush, not about the issue. And every rep acted as if they had never heard of what the guy with the square head was talking about. They came away looking very shabby, immature and naive. This movie is what would happen if the
crazy rainbow lady had a production budget.
And the editing. Holy shit, was the editing incompetent! In one scene, I think they were going to meet Griffin for the first time (yes, he's in the fucking movie too, the shamelessly self-promoting garden gnome) and when Square Head goes to shake his hand the film inexplicably slows down, clearly to ponder the moment's complete insignificance. It made about as much sense as, I don't know, going into bullet-time during a cafe scene in a romantic comedy. It was conspicuously bad.
I suspect that these poor fucks were taken by Griffin--it really looks like they did all the work for him. They didn't seem to realize that when you interview the person who is funding your project, what you are doing is technically an advertisement for the person paying you, not journalism. When the scientific and political product is so devastatingly shabby, it seems that their project was hijacked as a platform for Griffin to promote himself. The whole movie was self-referential and "meta". I almost feel sorry for them.
But not quite.
HJ
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