Paranoid Dreams

Dear Reader

Time to celebrate this week, you clever monkeys shot Osama Bin Laden in the head, proving that America always gets its man, even if it is ten years and one trillion dollars later. So expensive was the hunt for Bin Laden that the White House was hoping to recoup some of the money with the film rights to helmet-cam footage. They were planning a director's cut in the style of Apocalypse Now Redux. Instead of the raid taking 40 minutes, it lasts 4 hours with an interminable dinner scene involving French colonists and a CGI fat Brando spouting nonsense. Also in the pipeline was a Navy Seals blooper reel,  including one hilarious mix-up where they got their famous bearded Muslims confused and almost shot Cat Stevens. But some politically-correct killjoy has now decided it would be bad taste to release a picture of man with half his head blown off, so don't order those mouse mats just yet.

Still Bin Laden has hardly reached the bottom of the Arabian Sea and the conspiracy theories have already started. It is a government cover up as Bin Laden has been dead for years, killed by the same Peugot that did for Diana, but Bush and Obama have to conceal the truth because they are working for Freemason lizards who plotting to take over the world using Kofi Annan,  a black helicopter and gay rights. Some of that may be in wrong order, but much like fridge magnets you can rearrange these conspiracies any way you want. The trouble with the conspiracists is you cannot win. Even if the White House released gory pictures, a video or a statement from Al-Qaida's no. 2 saying he was sorry his boss was dead but he relished the challenge of keeping a medieval death cult relevant for the Twitter generation,  there is no standard of proof that would suffice. Much like a schizophrenic on public transport babbling scary nonsense, the general principle is not to react to conspiracists as it only encourages them.  In the case of the bus nutter, you may get a screwdriver in the leg anyway, but it's worth a try.

What this typing ape finds most peculiar about conspiracy theories is you find them on both sides of the political spectrum and there are not solely the preserve of the educationally challenged. They even get turned into award winning documentaries such as The Power of Nightmares,  expertly produced and edited programmes which suggested that Al-Qaida was to an extent invented to serve the neo-conservative agenda. An intriguing idea as long as you ignore just one thing: reality. In particular those pesky Al-Qaida operatives, who are not RADA graduates between jobs, but go round preaching jihad and setting off bombs.

Likewise Nigel Lawson and many other people who should know better are claiming there is a conspiracy of the world's leading scientists to falsify evidence about global warming. Again, a beguiling idea until you think about it properly using all your brain rather just than reptile bit that keeps you breathing. Ignoring for a moment that he has no scientific expertise whatsoever, Lawson is seriously suggesting that leading minds of our age and all the worlds scientific institutions are engaged in the greatest fraud in human history for the sake of grant money or perhaps because they own shares in windfarms.

The diversity and range of conspiracy theories in the modern age is truly awe-inspiring. Makes you wonder if someone's behind it all. No but seriously, the bigger question is why in an era of modern communications with overwhelming volumes of evidence to the contrary do strange movements such as the 911 truthers persist. Your gorilla thinker believes you monkeys have a passionate need for magical thinking. Before science and reason,  you could easily indulge those urges by burning a witch, exorcising demons or sacrificing some random animal to a grumpy deity. These days, however, irrationality is pushed to fringes of public debate, lurking in newspaper horoscopes or the pages of Psychologies  magazine. Like a cartoon bruise, the irrational urges pop up elsewhere. The world is more exciting if it is run by shadowy forces and agents of global reach and power. Any humdrum office worker, who would otherwise lead a life of quiet desperation and borderline alcoholism, can thanks to conspiracy theories feel like they are part of their very own Bourne film.

If, dear reader, you still think that the government, the Met Office or the Pentagon are part of some vast conspiracy, consider one key word: government. These are the same bureaucracies that struggle to deliver your post, spend £7 billion on aircraft carriers we then have to sell and claim for duck houses on expenses. If there really was a conspiracy, someone would leave a laptop on train, get drunk and tell somebody or they would get sacked from the plot and then expose it all in a bestselling book. Let's not forget, Project Kill Bin Laden is a classic government programme, 9 years and 999 billion over budget. These guys really could not manage a conspiracy, even they could insert mind-control chips into people - they would use the wrong sort of chips, the software would be incompatible and the batteries would run flat.