Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (56 page)

Gordon is about to find out exactly how that works.

HIPGNOSIS

E
ver since his inebriated interlude with Jimmy’s Uncle Lloyd on Halloween, Gordon has had a nagging sense that he’s forgetting something–
something important.
He’d expected the feeling to go away eventually, but it continues to gnaw at him.

Hints and suggestions of that forgotten knowledge seem to pop up at Gordon everywhere: in the books he reads, in articles from magazines, flipping through channels on TV. It’s there as a hidden subtext in Terry Southern’s
The Magic Christian
and in a
Newsweek
story about AIDS. It lurks behind the eyes of Andy Kaufman, the Son of Sam, and Saddam Hussein. It’s in the low white noise of greed and treachery running just under the ego-stoked chatter on
The 700 Club
and on time-wasting game shows like
Let’s Make A Deal!
and
Wheel of Fortune
(but whenever he sees that slender blonde who turns the letters on
Wheel of Fortune’s
game board, Gordon thinks,
I don’t care if Vanna White is an agent of the Illuminati–she’s still one hot babe…
). Somehow, all those things and more are tied together, like some Grand Unified Theory of how the world operates–a sinister secret history. Gordon’s gut tells him it’s something the adults are willfully concealing from him. Information the hypocrites-in-charge don’t want him to know.

On the other hand, he could just be having a bout of teenage paranoia.

Gordon is sixteen, after all. Everything seems like a conspiracy at that age–even the food they serve in the high school cafeteria.
(Especially
the food in the cafeteria. That tuna casserole they serve on Fridays smells so foul that it could make a dog vomit.)

Although he might be having a hard time believing the adults are just as clueless as he is about almost everything, Gordon is observant enough to realize that for the majority of people, maturity brings on a dulling of the senses and an incurious, cow-like acceptance of the world’s ways. Deep down, everyone must intuitively understand that they’re not being given the whole story about the things that matter most to them–but they’ve either grown past caring, or they’re so scared of what the truth might reveal that they don’t want to know anymore.

Admittedly, the search for truth usually just leads to more problems. Gordon knows what Ecclesiastes has to say about it: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow…” and so on. Gordon’s trouble is that he still wants answers. And his questions keep expanding in an ever-widening gyre, like the spiral that Alfred Jarry drew on Ubu’s belly in his illustrations for
Ubu Roi:

When did my mother start hating me?… Who levitated and killed the Doberman in the Smiley’s backyard and why?… How come Doctor Smiley’s medical treatments always make me feel sicker?… Why did my dad have to die?… What’s up with the nudist business and my mom playing hide-the-salami (and maybe the lumberyard’s assets) with Uncle Gerald?… What was the rationale behind Bank of America picking Fresno County as the first place to try out credit cards, and why does it now have the highest rates per capita in the state for violent crime?… And why does California, in general, attract so many murderous weirdoes, like the Zodiac Killer, the SLA, and the Manson Family?

That whole Zodiac Killer thing especially gets to him. Gordon remembers taking the bus to Washington Elementary in the first grade and hearing about the Zodiac Killer’s threats to blow up a big yellow school bus full of California children. All of Gordon’s little friends talked about it on the playground like a ghost tale around the campfire come to life. And even though the Zodiac Killer murdered at least eight people and left behind a litter of clues, he was never caught.

Why not?

If there
is
a God, why does he allow evil shit to happen? Or, as David Hume unpacked that question: “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

If everything on Earth happens for a reason, then is all this nasty crap part of the Divine Plan?

The more Gordon finds out about the world, the more difficult it is for him to see the world as having any sort of a Divine Plan whatsoever. It’s too cold, too complicated, too cruel out there. The overwhelming sense of nihilism, narcissism, and depravity can seem suffocating at times. Maybe that’s why he’s latched onto Gnosticism. It makes him feel like his life matters, at least a little. It gives him a shot at figuring things out. If the Archons are in charge of this world, why wouldn’t Charles Manson and the Zodiac Killer have the run of it? Maybe the Gnostic perspective isn’t particularly cheery–nobody’s sliding down rainbows and shitting out gumdrops, after all–but ever since he started evolving into that spiritually-daring Gnostic Boy, Gordon has felt like his life has meaning again.

But maybe that’s what paranoia is: the search for meaning run amok. Is it a sign of mental illness to look for meaning where–on the surface, at least–there is none? Or is it a sign of superior mental health? Wasn’t it the
New York Times
book critic, Anatole Broyard, who said, “Paranoids are the only ones who notice anything anymore…” or was that Thomas Pynchon? Surely the slop being spoon-fed to us on the six-o’clock news isn’t keeping us well informed. Could paranoia be the psychological equivalent of physical pain, a kind of early warning signal from the collective unconscious telling us that something’s wrong? Maybe that’s why Gordon keeps tugging at the sticky threads of a bizarre web of interrelationships that runs deep below the surface of the world’s most insane and shadowy events.

Take Charles Manson, for example, who was quoted in
Rolling Stone
as saying, “Total paranoia is total awareness.” Whether that statement is true or not, Gordon isn’t sure. But what he finds interesting is that around that same time, Manson also wrote an article about “getting the fear” for a magazine put out by the Process Church of the Final Judgement. According to a book written by Ed Sanders called
The Family,
the Process Church was a splinter group that had sprung from the Church of Scientology. Manson, too, was allegedly involved in Scientology–even before he started his Family, he went around saying he’d done 150 hours of Scientology “auditing” while he was in prison and had thus become an Operating Thetan. And as Gordon knows now, thanks to Lloyd’s insider info, Scientology was an outgrowth of L. Ron Hubbard’s association with Jack Parsons and the Ordo Templi Orientis. In fact, as Lloyd explained it to Jimmy, most of Scientology’s philosophy and techniques had been cribbed from OTO sourcebooks and rituals–which connects Manson to the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. And through Crowley, it goes back even further, to the Ancient Mystery Cults of Egypt and Babylon.

Black Magick. Terrible Presences. Archons. A Dark Brotherhood….
The more Gordon thinks about it, the more sense it makes. There’s a hidden, malevolent force at work in the universe, something insidious and evil that wants to fuck us up.

Or do I just think that because my mom hates my guts?

Maybe Lloyd could help Gordon figure out the Incredibly Big Gnostic Picture while providing him with answers to some of his more pressing, personal concerns as well
(“What’s the Ordo Templi Orientis take on ass-kicking Easter Bunnies, O Great and Flabby Wise One?”).
But whenever Gordon thinks about Lloyd, he gets a queasy-sick sense of his own social inferiority and, below that, a panicky, almost atavistic feeling of revulsion and dread. It’s like being locked in the same room with an over-muscled, well-spoken, and extremely hungry hyena. Gordon doesn’t understand
why
he feels that way, exactly–but he hasn’t run into Lloyd since Halloween, and he’s in no great hurry to set up another meeting, even though Jimmy has said that Lloyd wants to see him again.

Gordon chooses, instead, to lock himself away in his room, where he hunkers down in a black vinyl beanbag chair with his Koss headphones, his portable stereo, a yellow legal pad, and a big stack of library books. He’s checked out George Johnson’s
Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics,
John D. Marks’
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control,
Donald Bain’s
The Control of Candy Jones
, and quantum physicist David Bohm’s
Wholeness and the Implicate Order,
among other books.

As a visual treat for his overworked eyes, Gordon pauses now and then to thumb through
The Work of Hipgnosis: Walk Away Rene,
a collection of album cover art created by the graphic design firm, Hipgnosis, for bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes, and Black Sabbath. Staring at that famous shot of the two men in suits shaking hands while one of them is in flames–from the cover of Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here
–it occurs to Gordon that creating surrealistic images for album covers and books might be a fun way to make a living. Maybe he’ll study photography and graphic design in college. In the meantime, there’s Manly P. Hall’s
The Secret Teachings of All Ages
to get through.

After a few weeks of such activity, Gordon decides to channel his increasingly paranoid worldview into an essay for his high school civics class. The class is taught by Professor Hironada, a tendentious and smug little Japanese man who patterns himself after the semanticist-turned-senator, S.I. Hayakawa. (He even, annoyingly, goes around wearing the same Scottish tam-o’-shanter that Hayakawa wears as a sort of trademark. He’s also rumored to give pretty girls higher grades in exchange for lap dances–and he got his steely Nipponese wiener sucked by the until-then-flunking captain of the J.V. football team, if gossip from the stoner crowd can be believed.) The essay is supposed to be at least five pages on the separation between church and state. Gordon uses that rather loose criterion as an excuse to write a thirty-three-page history titled:

OCCULT POLITICS:

The Dark Influence of Secret Societies and Corporate Cabals
On U.S. Government Policy

He starts off with the Freemasons, of course…. Gordon cites claims by Masonic historians that the Boston Tea Party was carried out exclusively by Masons meeting in secret at the Green Dragon Tavern, that Paul Revere was a Mason, and that of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, only a few of them weren’t Masons as well. He shows evidence that the Grand Master of the Philadelphia Lodge, Benjamin Franklin, used his Masonic connections in France to help secure financing for the American Revolution. He points to the fact that the designer of the Great Seal of the United States, Charles Thomson, incorporated Masonic and Illuminati symbols into the Great Seal’s design, as can be seen on the back of any U.S. dollar bill. Gordon also quotes from a letter sent in 1782 by a Master Mason whose likeness is on the front of those same dollar bills. George Washington wrote:

“It was not my intention to doubt that the doctrines of the Illuminati, and the principles of Jacobinism, had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more fully satisfied of this fact than I am.”

That quotation leads Gordon into a discussion of how secret societies throughout American history have involved the nation in wars and revolutions by inciting violence and civic unrest on both sides of political conflicts. The Masonic slogan, as he points out, is
Ordo ab Chao
–Order out of Chaos–which could be interpreted as a directive to sow crisis and turmoil with the intent to steer public demand for social change. In other words, create chaos in secret, then openly propose a solution that advances the agenda of the New World Order (or
Novus Ordo Seclorum
, as it says on the Great Seal, which officially translates as “New Order of the Ages”). Gordon provides examples of how that might have worked:

–The War Between the States was fomented by European bankers (specifically, the Rothschilds) who feared that the U.S. would soon become such a powerful economic force that it would threaten their dominant role in global finance. Pitting the American North against the South would create massive war debts, crippling the U.S. economy, while providing the bankers with huge profits on the loans made to both sides. In 1854, conveniently for the bankers, a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle was founded by Doctor George W.L. Bickley–an author, surgeon, and University of London graduate with suspected ties to the Illuminati. The KGC had a grandiose plan to create a secessionist slaveholding Southern nation some 2,400 miles in circumference, which, in turn, stirred up much of the fear and resolve necessary to get the war rolling. Later, when things weren’t going so well for the KGC (they would go underground after the war, only to reemerge in the future as the Ku Klux Klan), one of its members, John Wilkes Booth, conspired to assassinate President Lincoln.

–The Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand, led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, was responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered a complex web of international alliances that precipitated World War I. On August 4th, 1914, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany while the United States proclaimed neutrality. That neutrality lasted until April 6th, 1917, when America was goaded into the war by the convergence of two suspiciously contrived events: the sinking of the
Lustitania
and public furor drummed up over the Zimmermann telegram–the latter a message intercepted by British intelligence from the Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmermann, proposing to form an alliance with the Mexican government to take back Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico from the U.S. (
Fat chance…
). But the true, hidden reason for America’s involvement was, again, banking profits and war profiteering. According to the 1936 findings of the U.S. Congress-sponsored Nye Committee, between 1915 and April 1917, the U.S. loaned Germany about 27 million dollars, while during that same period, U.S. loans to the United Kingdom and its allies amounted to 2.3
billion
dollars, or about 85 times as much. The committee concluded that the U.S. entered the war not because of some ridiculous threat to Texas, but because it was in its commercial best interests for the United Kingdom’s side not to lose. And who was making those loans? Probably the same corporate entities named in Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler’s 1935 book,
War is a Racket
, which described the military-industrial complex long before Eisenhower got around to pointing a finger at it. Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history when he wrote: