I have a pretty casual relationship with Jonathan Phillips over at Reality Sandwich. He’s extremely hands-off as far as editors go, something which I appreciate. I can generally trust him to make minor edits to these little news items I post on the site from time to time, since I don’t really want to be bothered with okaying every little edit. Unfortunately, he really hacked up the last thing I wrote for him, an item about Alex Jones’s “documentary,” The Obama Deception. Which is a shame, because the whole thing read much better and made more sense the way I presented it.
Initially, the first line of this review was to read, “Everybody knows that Alex Jones is full of shit,” but I assumed that wouldn’t fly with the kids in the New York office. Also, I originally wished to point out the beautiful simplicity in the old religious formulation commonly expressed as: “God is Love. Love is blind. Therefore, Ray Charles is God.” This, unfortunately, was excised due to space constraints.
In the weeks since this review was written, three police officers were tragically murdered here in Pittsburgh by a “white power” type, and for a time, Alex Jones was implicated by some members of the local and national media. It seems as though they both tread in different ends of the “conspiracy milieu,” and in the narrow minded view of mainstream media that was enough to indicate a cause and effect relationship. It’s highly unfair and more than a little irresponsible to connect a madman’s violent outburst with the work of a radio talk show host half a continent away (especially on less than no evidence at all), so it looks like someone owes Jones an apology.
In one of his books, Adam Parfrey writes of the fine American tradition of the “folk researcher,” the type of person with “the audacity to consider themselves their own best authority, in repudiation or ignorance of the orthodoxy factories” of the universities, the State, and the media. Not only is the urge to rebel a fundamental part of the American character, but I’d argue that the ability to “think for yourself and question authority,” as Tim Leary used to put it, is an essential skill in these times of climate change, economic upheaval, and accelerating technology.
It was with all this in mind that I watched Alex Jones’s documentary The Obama Deception the other night. Jones is one of a long line of home grown conspiracy researchers, from Mae Brussell through William Cooper — with whom he shares a gravelly voice and the firm conviction that all of the world’s problems can be blamed on a multinational cabal of Satanists. You have to give these guys credit: they are grassroots historians and media critics, expending heroic amounts of time and effort into the search for a truth that just cannot be found in the mainstream of American society. Still, as a whole, these types generally turn me off: the “conspiracy” crowd has always been far too cultish, too sectarian. Their literature rarely evinces the sort of nuanced thinking or essential humor of Robert Anton Wilson, for example.
I enthusiastically watched the movie, and I really wanted it to be successful. The central argument is, indeed, one that I agree with: That the corporations are corrupt, that in order to become President of the United States one has to be in bed with the corporations, and therefore any President — even one with the charm and intelligence of President Barack H. Obama — is to be watched very closely, if indeed they are to be trusted at all.
But if Americans need a fair appraisal of their President and the dangers facing the world as we move headlong into the year 2012, they are not going to find it here. The film is more of an expressionistic mood piece than a documentary, using dislocated soundbites, montage, and ominous music to scare the bejeezus out of you, without relaying any useful information at all. Unless, of course, you consider the “fact” that humans haven’t (and cannot) cause global warming to be “information.” In which case, you might want to check out the YouTube video that proves that President Obama and Osama bin Laden are the same person.
