Dr. James Tracy and the Paranoid Style in Floridian Academia

Starting December 20th, just one week after the shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dr. James Tracy of Florida Atlantic University began offering a version of the events quite different than that seen on the nightly news. On his blog, Tracy has speculated that the Connecticut medical examiner in charge of the case was an impostor, and claimed that there were two to four gunman in addition to accused shooter Adam Lanza. He has written that “compelling geopolitical and diplomatic conditions” suggested those additional shooters were part of an Israeli paramilitary team. In the culmination of these postings, Tracy wrote that he “is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shootings ever took place, at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described,” and suggested that the event was engineered by the Obama administration to help erode civil liberties. Even in its skillfully hedged form, the claim that Sandy Hook didn’t really happen, combined with Tracy’s position as a tenured professor, has made his claims national news.

Tracy has other odd ideas – his blog refers to weather-controlling “chemtrails,” FEMA-run concentration camps, and a shadowy conspiracy aimed at undermining American sovereignty. These echo a shockingly widespread belief in what is known as the New World Order, conceived by adherents as a massive plot to establish a single, oppressive, authoritarian global government. The New World Order is believed to include such groups as (variously) the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and the Rothschild banking family. These groups and others are believed to have orchestrated everything from the Kennedy Assassination, to first contact with space aliens in Area 51, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Sadly, without the “PhD” after his name, Tracy’s strange beliefs would be unremarkable – the conspiracy industry is big business in America, with figures like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and Pat Robertson peddling versions of the “Master Conspiracy” to an eager audience. Of course, it’s all hokum, part of a long tradition of fabricated pseudo-politics that stretches back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document showing an international Jewish plan for world domination, but which was really cooked up the Russian secret police in 1903 as a way of whipping up anti-Jewish hysteria. The Protocols were eagerly touted by notorious American Nazis such as Henry Ford, and to this day anti-Semetism remains a major underlying theme of New World Order ideas. But conspiracism crops up in many smaller ways; For instance, when the Pinellas County commission voted in 2011 to remove fluoride from county drinking water, it was partly due to New World Order theories that linked the mineral to government mind-control. But isn’t this the province of some narrow lunatic fringe? Hardly. Dr. Tracy’s strange and hurtful outburst illustrates an important point about conspiracism – very smart, sometimes very accomplished people can be pulled in by strange ideas, and they tend to be very good at defending their conclusions. Tracy’s blog is soberly written and carefully argued, for the most part sticking to the common conspiracist tactic of ‘raising doubts’ about the official narrative, and concluding that the discrepancies must mean there’s a larger, malevolent force at work.

Tracy’s descent into the rabbit hole shows the fine line between the healthy distrust that has driven some of the best of American politics, and a growing plague of conspiracism that threatens to erode the common cause that allows our society to function. There are some very good reasons to be skeptical of both government and the media – for instance, the tragedy on 9/11 really was used as a political tool to institute frightening curbs on American civil liberties, and programs like COINTELPRO and FBI surveillance of Occupy show that the U.S. government sometimes works against its citizens’ freedoms. Skepticism of the media, moreover, is vital to real democracy, and Tracy has published respectable academic work unpacking various forms of media bias and institutional failure. In fact, Tracy’s scholarly work is very similar to my own – we even both got our doctorates from the University of Iowa. Where does healthy skepticism cross the line to destructive conspiracism, and why?

The conspiracist fallacy is an emotional as much as an intellectual one. We live in a world of human imperfection, one in which not just natural disasters, but the failures of individuals and institutions seem constant. Depending on your politics, you’re likely to see various failures as causes of the Sandy Hook tragedy – but only a few of us will be tempted to explain those failures as part of a larger, carefully coordinated agenda. In a strange way, the conspiracist viewpoint is comforting – it transforms the complicated and sad reality of our imperfect world into one in which dark, Machiavellian forces are the source of all suffering. James Tracy and conspiracists like him would rather live in a world ruled by sensible evil, than have to confront senseless tragedy.

The Ends of the Forest

I just posted a new fiction work, "The Ends of the Forest," at Wattpad.  It's a short story that you can enjoy in about thirty minutes.

http://www.wattpad.com/9374280-the-ends-of-the-forest

Django Unchained

I just saw Django - the closest to release day I've seen a move in ever - and I thought it was solid.  The most important part, for me, was that it in no way tried to downplay, trivialize, or exploit the horror of slavery for any purpose but to be as gut-wrenchingly awful as it really was.  There are sections of the movie that should be hard to watch even for a wizened gorehound like myself, not because the blood is so over-the-top (that part makes the gunfights spectacular and fun) but because we are unmistakeably witnessing an entire system that forces people to become evil, and rewards those who enjoy being evil the most.

Everything else is somewhat incidental - this movie could not have been good if it didn't face the morality of its subject matter head-on, and the fact that it does is probably the most important thing about it.  Otherwise, as a movie, I'd say the ending is very predictable - which it's kind of supposed to be, but that doesn't make the last fifth of the film any less plodding.  Everything up to that is really great, though.  Basically, every part of the movie that has Christoph Waltz in it is fantastically fun, because he's a genius.

Oh wait, spoiler alert.

All Good Things . . . The End of STOIC and Bradley Kokay's CHEAPER THAN ARROWS, 11/16

Just a quick reminder and endorsement, if you haven't made it out to the current show at the Venture Compound in St. Petersburg, STOIC and Bradley Kokay's Cheaper Than Arrows, this coming Friday will be your final chance.  Starting at 9pm, The Venture Compound is hosting Boston's Pile, along with local bands Ghost Hospital and Just Satellites, and after the performance, Cheaper Than Arrows will close.

Going into it none of us were really sure what to expect, but in the frantic all-night runup to the opening these two guys turned out a truly intimidating installation, with one of Brad's trademark organic collages running the entire length and breadth of a gallery wall, four of STOIC'S iconic hungry skulls marching the remaining perimeter, and each leaking/bleeding out onto the pitch-black ceilings and floor.

This is the most striking, new, dramatic art currently on display anywhere in St. Petersburg, and maybe in Tampa Bay.  After Friday night it will be ripped down, painted over, and DESTROYED.

You've been warned.

Facebook Event w/info:

http://www.facebook.com/events/354133021346203/

Psychonautic Sun Salutations: Yoga and Meditation for Creativity

This Saturday morning at 11am at the Venture Compound in St. Petersburg, I'm very proud to present the second edition of Psychonautic Sun Salutations, a class I'm working on focused on the use of yoga and meditation to foster creativity. If you happen to be in the area, come on out! Details on the event and location can be found on the Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/272087816246307/

The Manchurian Incident and the Alien Act

Eighty-one years ago today, a Japanese Lieutenant set a dynamite charge on the tracks of a Japanese-controlled railway in Manchuria, in Northern China.  The act, blamed on the Chinese, was a successful attempt to initiate sino-Japanese war by the Japanese Kwantung Army.  The army had to an extent gone rogue, engaging in militant acts intended to provoke a Chinese response, and was about to be disciplined by the leadership from Tokyo when it chose to take matters into its own hands by manufacturing Chinese resistance.  This is known as the Manchurian Incident or the Mukden Incident.  What followed was more than a decade of Japanese occupation of and violence against China, including the most brutal single incident in all of World War II, the Rape of Nanking.

Note that I say Nanking was singular in its brutality, not in the number of people it killed.  The statistical honors might go to the Holocaust of eastern European Jewry, or to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States, or maybe even to the firebombing of Dresden by the English.  What's remarkable about Nanking, and what it shares with the Mukden incident that paved the way for it, is the completely uncontrolled and undisciplined nature of Japanese military action.

Perhaps this is the real threat Mukden and Nanking hold for Japanese popular imagination, the reason there has yet to be a collective national reconciliation with the legacy of the war, nearly a full century and several generations later - a phenomenon whose very narrow manifestations in popular music I've documented.   Perhaps it's not the evil of these acts that's so threatening, but the fact that they are out of character.  Certainly, the Germans killed all those Jews, but they did it with a characteristic German efficiency that can be recouped - they may have done something wrong, but they were still German.

Japan's war crimes, though, defied every treasured stereotype of Japanese unity, the concepts so often propagated, not just in the West but within Japan itself, of a 'hive-like' 'oriental' mentality, of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and humility.  In Mukden, low-ranking officers took it up on themselves to undermine the plans of their leaders, including implicitly the Emperor.  In Nanking, enlisted men ran wild, raping, pillaging, and murdering in endlessly creative ways.  These were not strong Japanese collective actions gone awry - they were actions deriving from some other root, something alien and awry, something that, whether deeply human or deeply perverse, were surely not 'Japanese.'  They cannot be recouped, explained, or folded into a narrative of evolution.  For those who believe in the uniqueness of the Japanese spirit, they can only be denied, repressed, dismissed.

Announcing New Student Travel Award, NCA, Human Communication and Technology Division

Via Bree McEwan, Western Illinois University:

The Human Communication and Technology Division is pleased to announce an opportunity for two (possibly three) graduate student travel scholarships ($200-$250) for travel to the National Communication Association 2012 convention in Orlando, FL. Interested communication graduate students are invited to send a cover letter and vitae requesting support by October 5, 2012. Requests will be evaluated by officers of the HCTD according to the following criteria: 1) Current enrollment as a graduate student in a recognized communication program in higher education; 2) Acceptance of a paper on technology and communication for presentation at the 2012 NCA; 3) Evidence of ongoing scholarly engagement with technology and communication issues; and 4) Travel distance to Orlando, FL. Students receiving the awards will be notified before the Convention, but award checks will be issued either during or after the Convention. Officers of the HCTD are ineligible for this travel scholarship. Please e-mail requests to Bree McEwan at HCTDofNCA@gmail.com on or before October 5, 2012.