Among the Truthers (19 page)

The next day, he walked into one of the island's portside
kafeneia
for breakfast, and looked up at footage of the attacks on the café's flickering television set. In an instant, he became a different man: “I spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about, sensing that the world had changed irrevocably and that there were no more enclaves of safety and recreation, no more ‘Greek islands' where one could enjoy time out of time,” he later recollected. “I submitted myself, perhaps for the first time in my life, to a kind of Cartesian interrogation, a relentless scrutiny of the values and beliefs I accepted as gospel.”

Until that point in this life, Solway's political attitudes had hewn faithfully to the left-wing cant expected of a man who makes his living with poetry. He was anti-American, anti-Israeli, antiglobalization. He read Chomsky with approval, railed against George W. Bush, expressed solidarity with the Palestinians, smoked pot, went to demonstrations, lived off government grants. As a young man, he'd even spent time at Berkeley with Mario Savio during the Free Speech Movement.

As the weeks passed, and the images of the World Trade Center flitted again and again through Solway's brain, he became convinced that his leftist past had somehow made him complicit in what happened on Sept. 11. He felt ashamed, guilty, useless—overpowering feelings that, he says, “jarred me to the very foundations.”

After returning to Canada, Solway quit his job as a college teacher, put aside his poetry, and began work on manifestos against terrorism. His mortgage payments began to pile up. Lifelong literary friends began to drift away, estranged by the monomania of the erstwhile leftist. But Solway didn't care. “I wouldn't accept apostasy—even from a wife,” he told me as his wife silently slipped back and forth between the kitchen and living room, serving us coffee. “I would not accept her living a lie, refusing to uncover the truth. If you can't do that, you're not my friend.”

Inevitably, Solway's search for the truth led him to the Internet. From the right-wing sites he surfed, and his own extensive study of Islamic theology, Solway became convinced that the enemy facing Western civilization wasn't just al-Qaeda, but Islam itself. In our interview, he described the Koran as a “war manual,” and the Prophet Mohammed as a “master of hatred.”

What's worse, the Islamists have a stooge on the inside—none other than the president of the United States. Over the last several years, Solway tells me, he's been collecting a whole “closetful” of information about Barack Obama, all of it pointing to “world cataclysm.”

“I fear Obama more than I fear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” he says. “Obama is the one who's going to let Iran go nuclear. It's the same instinct that causes him to bow down to the Saudis, and shake hands with Hugo Chavez. His thinking is Far Left—very anti-Israeli. You can't listen to Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not be an anti-Semite. And do we even know where he was born? He hasn't even released his school transcripts from Occidental College [in California]. Until proven otherwise, I believe the reason he won't release those transcripts is because they're marked with the fact that he's a foreign student.

“I still haven't seen a facsimile of his original birth certificate despite diligent searching for almost two years now and, in point of fact, no one else has,” he tells me. “Again, there is only hearsay about its existence—from a Hawaiian official, Robert Gibbs, and Obama himself, and a short form certificate of live birth with no specific information, which actually doesn't count. Draw your own conclusions . . . We know next to nothing about this man's inscrutable past, his academic records are under seal, his financial statements from his time as a senator are lacking, and even his Columbia thesis has gone missing . . . Deep down, we all know something's terribly wrong, but we're too afraid to risk ridicule and animadversion, or to be lumped in with conspiracy mongers and denounced as fruitcakes, so we steer our attention to other problems and issues involving this most disastrous of presidents, which is fine since there are so many of them. Myself, I don't know for sure whether Obama is a ‘natural born American citizen' or not, but I have my strong suspicions, which have yet to be allayed. And I'm not afraid to write about or air my doubts.”

These days, Solway spends his time in front of a computer, exchanging information about Obama with Birthers, and writing more essays about the Islamist threat. Once a poet whose name was known only to a few thousand literati, his articles now get tens of thousands of hits on websites such as FrontPage Magazine and Pajamas Media. While much of what he writes consists of stock anti-Islamist polemics, he also produces genuinely insightful flourishes that reveal his deep knowledge of literary culture, such as this gem from a FrontPage article, explaining why the Left is drawn to make common cause with Islamists: “The eloquent Imam, the jihadist [and] even the Palestinian gunman are only the latest incarnation of the [West's] anthropological romance with the ‘pure primitive' who redeems us from our own evolved complexities and etiolated belief-systems. The new aborigine, as the contemporary embodiment of the Noble Savage invented by European exploration, thus acts as the counterfoil to our own repressed and guilt-ridden civilization. The enemy who commands our sympathies becomes the heroicizing projection of our own bad conscience. Because he possesses what we lack and desire, we are willing to live in a state of contradiction and hasten to pardon his atrocities. Thus feminists will wink at the monstrous usage of infibrilation.”

As Solway ticks off the many corners of the world from which he gets fan mail, his tone is exhilarated, triumphant. His only regret, he tells me, is that he wasted all those years before waking up to the truth: “I've been a poet all my life. My first poem was published at the age of twelve. It's all I ever wanted to be. But that's changed. As Auden said, ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.' ”

O
n the spectrum of geopolitics, Truther Richard Gage and quasi-Birther David Solway lie at opposite ends. The former views the war on terrorism as a fraud. The latter views it as the defining struggle of our time. But in their psychology, the two activists appear to have been set down the road of radical politics by the same psychological impulse.

To understand these two men is to understand the strangely sudden, strangely radicalizing effects that middle age can impose upon the male psyche. This is a time when life can lose its luster. The children grow up, the hair falls out, careers plateau, physical powers ebb. Amidst the resulting ennui, the prospect of overturning the familiar patterns of life and starting over from scratch seems tempting. Some men do this by joining an ashram, moving to Tuscany, or reuniting with childhood sweethearts. Gage and Solway have done it through conspiracism. In their new role as radical truth-seekers, they have an opportunity to reinvent themselves in front of a new audience of strangers who have little knowledge of their past lives, and who evaluate them entirely on the basis of their newly created identity.

Like all forms of midlife crisis, this sudden lurch into conspiracism offers middle-aged men a sense of revitalization and adventure. In some ways, in fact, it offers an even more complete escape than the proverbial mistress and sports car. For a middle-aged man who's grown tired of life's familiar patterns, conspiracism provides more than just fresh surroundings: It offers an entirely new reality.

The Failed Historian

Many things that do amount to tampering with the effects of logic do not in our field necessarily present themselves as dishonesty to the man who practices such tampering. He may be so fundamentally convinced of the truths of what he is standing for that he would rather die than give new weight to contradicting facts or pieces of analysis. The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

—
History of Economic Analysis,
Joseph A. Schumpeter

A good starting point for understanding the psychology of conspiracism's “failed historian” is Sigmund Freud. Not his theories, but his actual life: To the great embarrassment of many dedicated Freudians, it turns out that the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry spent years of his life pursuing the most durable and ambitious literary conspiracy theory of the twentieth century.

In 1898, Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published
William Shakespeare
, a book described as “perhaps the most authoritative work on Shakespeare, not principally intended for an English-speaking audience, which had been published in any country.” Like many Shakespeare scholars of the age, Brandes was interested in the connections between Shakespeare's life and fiction. The creation of
Hamlet
, in particular, Brandes argued, grew out of Shakespeare's grief for his own father's passing in 1601.

As contemporary Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has observed, Freud became fascinated by Brandes' theory at a critical point in his life—his own father had died in 1896—and incorporated its claims into
The Interpretation of Dreams
, in which Freud argued that
Hamlet
“is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex.”

“It can, of course, be only the poet's own psychology with which we are confronted in
Hamlet
,” Freud concluded. “He was still mourning his loss, and [wrote the play] during a revival, as we may fairly assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father.”

In chapter 5 of his great work, Freud not only put forward Prince Hamlet as a foundational case study in his Oedpial theory, but wound into it an ambitious explanation for the protagonist's hesitation in killing his uncle: “What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his father's ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father's place with his mother—the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood . . . If anyone wishes to call Hamlet an hysterical subject I cannot but admit that this is the deduction to be drawn from my interpretation.” Over the next twenty years, the play would become a central part of the psychoanalytic canon.

Then, in 1919, tragedy struck: Brandes repudiated his theory about
Hamlet
, citing the discovery of marginal notes, by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, showing that the play actually had been written between early 1599 and early 1601—before Shakespeare
père
died in September 1601. In an instant, Freud's elaborate claims about
Hamlet
went up in smoke. More than that, the revelation implicitly cast Oedipal theory itself into doubt: If Freud's elaborate diagnosis of Prince Hamlet were this wildly off the mark, what did that say about the legions of flesh-and-blood patients who'd become convinced by Freud to trace their problems to similar intrafamilial causes?

Unless . .
. and this was Freud's unconscious taking the reins—unless Shakespeare's life could somehow be altered in the eyes of history. Could it be that the man who wrote
Hamlet
somehow was other than the son of that Stratford-upon-Avon glover and borough ale taster?

As it happens, Freud seems to have dabbled casually in Shakespearean conspiracism since early days. But in the 1920s and 1930s—right up to his death in 1939—he became fixated on the emerging theory that Shakespeare's plays and poems had been written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford—a spoiled, hysterical, and violent man who, as Freud later described him, “lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage very soon after her husband's death.” What a coincidence.

M
any of the writers who've pronounced the Bard of Avon a fraud (“anti-Stratfordians” is how they sometimes refer to themselves) expanded their theories into elaborate political narratives. Some nineteenth-century anti-Stratfordians, for instance, believed that the works attributed to Shakespeare were in fact coded manifestos written by a group of closet protorepublicans led by Francis Bacon as a means to undermine Elizabethan tyranny. In the most ambitious version of this fantasy, it is imagined that Shakespeare's plays actually created the template for the United States Constitution—and that Bacon's plot against the monarchy, had it succeeded, might have preempted the need for an American Revolution. Nevertheless, even the most far-fetched claims about the origins of Shakespeare's writings do not fall into the classic
Protocols
-type conspiracy-theory template outlined in Chapter 2.

Even so, biographer Ernest Jones' reflection that Freud's theories about Shakespeare suggest a wish that “a certain part of reality could be changed” applies to the many conspiracists who fall into the category I call “failed historian.” For this group, conspiracy theories are a tool to eliminate the cognitive dissonance that arises when the course of human events doesn't cooperate with the results demanded by their ideology.

Often, this type of conspiracism arises on the militant fringes of nationalist, religious, or identity-politics movements whose membership must explain away their failure to dominate their enemies, gain power and influence, or fulfill some ordained purpose embedded in their scripture or dogma. Radical Islam—with its obsessive focus on the Jews' role in thwarting Allah's will—supplies an example. So does Afrocentrism, a pseudohistorical movement that confers an expanded dignity on troubled African American communities through the conceit that they are heir to a black civilization that once created the guiding forms of Western culture.

(Afrocentrism itself is not a conspiracy theory per se—even though it is often wrapped up with ancillary theories that accuse white historians of conspiring to suppress the Afrocentric truth. But on street corners and disreputable websites, it sometimes can be found side by side with the teachings of Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam, which
are
genuinely anti-Semitic and conspiracist—not to mention bizarre, in that they declare the white race to have been the creation of a mad scientist named Yakub 6,600 years ago. Yet this conspiracist strain in American black nationalism is rarely discussed in polite American society—much as we avert our eyes from the copies of the
Protocols
openly on display at black bookstores. Thanks to lingering guilt regarding America's appalling treatment of blacks until relatively recently in the country's history, there is an implicit assumption among whites that such conspiracism is more understandable, and perhaps even less reprehensible, than other varieties.)