Conspiracy Theories Gone Wild!

In the world of spectacle, everything is up for debate, even our greatest tragedies. About half of our population believes that global warming is a myth, many that evolution is a conspiracy hatched by science to undermine the truth of religion, that we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Justin Bieber has talent and that taxes are always bad. There are a plurality of Americans that believe that 911 was a plan of the Bush administration to push through their right wing agenda, many others that Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya, still others that the Holocaust never happened. As Marshall McLuhan predicted 50 years ago, we have reentered a world of mysticism and spirituality where group think and tribalism dominate the individualism of the "literate man" (established with wide access to books). Any theory, as crazy as it might sound to a rational being, can be spread seemlessly and widely to a population that seems intent on believing that everything is a lie, everything a conspiracy and everything up for debate. The latest crackpot theory to spread across the lunatic fringe on the Internet is that Sandy Hook never happened: Salon.

This is not just the work of the birthers or right wing "truthers," they even have a professor on their side. The foundation of the theory revolves around a Emilie Parker, a 6-year-old victim of the tragic events, who they claim is seen in an image after her purported death. They also question the parents, who just seem a little too upset about their children's premature death, a pre-interview moment where a parent was laughing and a number of other "inconsistencies." One popular video, which already has 134,000 views, was made by the producers of a popular 9/11 Truther film. It states, “Just as the movie ‘Operation Terror’ shows the 9/11 attacks were a made-for-TV event, so too were the mass shootings … There can be no doubt that Sandy Hook was a staged event." 

While, like everything in the spectacle, there is an element of staging that followed the shooting, it might just be a sign of our collective radical skepticism that anyone would actually buy such a theory. Is it the lack of empathy we feel in the electronic age (one could make a compelling argument that replacing human interaction with technologically-mediated communication might lead toward this end)? Could it be our sense that there is no longer anything to believe in (the postmodern foreboding finally coming to full fruition)? Or is it merely a burgeoning immunity to the constant social pathos toted out in reality television, movies, TV shows and the 24-hour news cycle? Maybe it is a combination of all of these, but there is a distinct possibility that we are suffering from spectacle-burn out. When everything is sculpted into an event that maximizes contrived drama, emotion, pathos and stimulation, reality just feels like TV. As Dr. O'Blivion opines in the 1983 film Videodrome, "Television is reality and reality is less than television." 

Guy Debord argued that the spectacle society invited us to live in a world of representations rather than a world of reality. Everything was commodified and everything essentially fit into a narrative that ultimately made us viewers of a fictitious world that reinforced the underlying capitalist world. There was no reality anymore, just its representation in a world that existed as a self-perpetuating selling machine. The participants in the spectacle create the imaginary of Lacan and the rest of us live in that fantasy world, unable or unwilling to see behind the curtain to our own lives. How else can you explain people that waste their time watching the lives of others, knowing that "reality" TV is an oxymoron when people know they are on film? Unless we take the next step to enact The Truman Show (1998) in the desert of the real, reality television is about as far from reality as everything else in the spectacle. It seems like the American people don't really want to escape the spectacle. Let's think of the Iraq War as a videogame until someone lifts the veil -- at which point the people turned against the war. Sure we can share a collective empathy for people who seem less than real in places like Ethiopia and Haiti, but when our own citizens suffer, money doesn't roll out from the public at nearly the same level. And when a tragedy is fit into the spectacle world, maybe it just seems too real to some people. One can't really revel in this emotionally-detached connection when the tragedy feels too real. And thus they create an absurd theory that places it right back into that spectacle in a more believable way. The charge from truth and consequences continues unrepentant!