The United States of Paranoia (40 page)

He was making a pun. I assume that Dobbs didn’t actually believe that Obama is an illegal alien. But jokes have meanings, and Dobbs—perhaps intuitively, perhaps by design—was bringing an implicit link into the open: the connection between the fear of foreign settlers and the fear of a foreign president.

Where Dobbs will only joke and wink, others spoke in earnest. Later that month, on the cable show
Hardball
, the old Watergate hand G. Gordon Liddy was asked what Obama would be if he had been born abroad and never naturalized. “An illegal alien,” Liddy replied.
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While the obvious anxiety here involves the influx of immigrants from Mexico, that wasn’t the only factor at work. It isn’t a big leap from the fear of foreign Muslims to the fear that a powerful figure is covertly foreign and/or Muslim. (In addition to the birther theories, Obama has been plagued by rumors that he secretly subscribes to Islam.) And there was already plenty in Obama’s biography to fan nativist anxieties about the Enemy Outside. He spent a chunk of his childhood in Indonesia. His father came from Kenya. When young Obama did live in the United States, he was in Hawaii, the one American state that isn’t actually a part of the Americas. If you don’t conceive of the United States as a multicultural nation, the president’s life is reason enough to consider the man metaphorically foreign. And if there’s one thing conspiracy theories are good at, it’s transmuting the metaphorical into the real.

Excessive reverence
. In a perverse way, birtherism is the flip side of Obama’s fervent fan base: It’s a way to keep your respect for the Oval Office intact while hating the man who occupies it. In his 2008 book
The Cult of the Presidency
, Gene Healy noted that although trust in our presidents has declined since Watergate, “the inflated expectations people have for the office—what they want from a president—remain as high as ever. . . . From popular culture to the academy to the voting booth, we curse the king, all the while pining for Camelot.”
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What happens when someone who reveres the presidency despises the president? In the past you might, say, denounce Bill Clinton as a “stain” on the institution, thus mentally separating office from officeholder. But if you can challenge the president’s legitimacy entirely, that’s all the more satisfying. The throne is still the throne; it’s just that the man sitting in it is a pretender.

I can’t claim credit for that metaphor. Surf through the birther hangouts online, and you’ll see a lot of semiroyalist rhetoric on display. One writer declared that “when Barack Obama officially entered the office of President, he became, in essence, a ‘pretender to the throne.’ ”
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Another called him “our present Pretender to the Presidency.”
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Another suggested that the man might be a “usurper.”
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Yet another, mixing monarchist and nativist rhetoric, jumped from describing Obama as “the quasi-Muslim, marginal American in the White House” to calling him—yes—“almost certainly a Pretender to the Throne.”
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Birtherism wasn’t just paranoid in itself. It fed the paranoid narrative about “rising right-wing violence,” as when Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center told NPR that birther-style theories might presage another Oklahoma City bombing.
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To hear some people tell it, just about
anything
might presage another Oklahoma City bombing. On January 8, 2011, a young man named Jared Lee Loughner attempted to assassinate Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona in a parking lot near Tucson. She survived, but he killed six others in the process. The airwaves and Internet were quickly clogged with claims that Loughner had been incited by talk radio, by violent political imagery, by right-wing conspiracy theories, even by a map the former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had released during the 2010 elections, in which the congressional districts that she was targeting (including Giffords’s) were illustrated with crosshairs icons. Right after the shooting, Markos Moulitsas of
The Daily Kos
tweeted: “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.”
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Michael Daly of the New York
Daily News
wrote that “now that Palin may have the blood of more than some poor caribou on her hands, I wonder if she will continue putting people in cross hairs and calling on folks to RELOAD!”
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An article in
The Guardian
strained very hard to find traces of the Tea Party movement in Loughner’s YouTube videos, at one point noting that “The US constitution, the bible of the Tea Parties, features heavily.”
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The narrative fell apart when Loughner’s actual worldview began to emerge. Instead of revealing a passion for Tea Party politics or an interest in Sarah Palin’s PAC, the texts and videos the killer posted on the Internet advocated an “infinite source of currency,”
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warned that the government is using grammar to control people’s minds, and expressed what one journalist described delicately as “indecipherable theories about the calendar date.”
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Here is a typical Loughner
passage
:

If I define sleepwalking then sleepwalking is the act or state of walking, eating, or performing other motor acts while asleep, of which one is unaware upon awakening.

I define sleepwalking.

Thus, sleepwalking is the act or state of walking, eating, or performing other motor acts while asleep, of which one is unaware upon awakening.

I’m a sleepwalker—who turns off the alarm clock.
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Even then, there was some confusion about just what forms of crankery were influencing Loughner. Mark Potok, for example, wrote a day after the shootings that it was “pretty clear that Loughner is taking ideas from Patriot conspiracy theorist David Wynn Miller of Milwaukee,” a claim that has yet to yield any substantive supporting evidence.
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Loughner’s friend Zach Osler provided a more useful clue when he told ABC that the killer wasn’t interested in mainstream political debates and that he was a fan instead of Peter Joseph’s 2007 documentary
Zeitgeist
. Joseph’s movie is one-third arguments that religion is a fraud, one-third trutherism, and one-third conspiracy theories about bankers. Its online study guide cites a rainbow coalition of sources—libertarians, leftists, Birchers, even a cameo by Lyndon LaRouche—and the results do not easily fit the label
left
or
right
. In 2009, Joseph founded a full-blown Zeitgeist Movement, with a platform heavy on futurism, sustainability, and utopian economics. There’s no sign that Loughner’s love of the
Zeitgeist
movie extended into a love of the Zeitgeist Movement. That isn’t likely, given that Joseph now calls not for a new currency but for the abolition of money altogether. Whatever Loughner got out of the video is obviously just one element of his worldview.

Loughner was also interested, for example, in lucid dreaming, in reality-bending movies such as Richard Linklater’s
Waking Life
(2001) and Richard Kelly’s
Donnie Darko
(2001), and in the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick, a writer whose paranoid plots often hinge on the idea that reality itself is a fraud. Another friend of Loughner, Bryce Tierney, told
Mother Jones
that the shooter was “fascinated” with the idea that “the world is really nothing—illusion.”
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Interviewed by MSNBC on the day of the shooting, Potok gamely tried to link lucid dreaming to the radical Right, noting that the conspiracy theorist David Icke is interested in the subject. A much more plausible hypothesis—but still just a hypothesis—is that Loughner’s interest in alternate realities was at the core of his worldview and that he was attracted to those elements of fringe politics that seemed to reinforce his suspicion that the waking world is a lie.

Not that this in itself would be enough to drive a man to murder. Many, many people have been playing with those ideas recently, and most of them do not try to kill anyone.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a wave of cult movies drew on the most extreme form of the Enemy Within story—the narrative where life is a masquerade and what we experience as reality is a false and perhaps malevolent illusion. The idea wasn’t new, but suddenly it was everywhere: in
The Truman Show
(1998),
Dark City
(1998),
The Matrix
(1999), the Canadian
eXistenZ
(1999),
The Thirteenth Floor
(1999), the TV series
Harsh Realm
(1999–2000),
Vanilla Sky
(2001), and other motion pictures.
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The broader idea of prowling about in a virtual world, possibly located in someone else’s head, turned up in still more pictures, from
What Dreams May Come
(1998) to
Being John Malkovich
(1999) to
The Cell
(2000) to one of Loughner’s favorites,
Waking Life
.

You can credit part of this glut to imitation. But too many of the projects were created simultaneously and independently for that to explain everything. For whatever reasons, audiences at the turn of the twenty-first century were receptive to paranoid thrillers about inauthentic realities. Call it the Demiurge cycle, after the Gnostic notion that our world is governed by a mad ersatz God.

The most influential of the Demiurge films was
The Matrix
, an extremely popular picture written and directed by Andy and Larry (later Lana) Wachowski. It told the story of Neo, a computer programmer played by Keanu Reeves who learns that our world is just a simulation, something to occupy our minds while we live in tiny pods and malevolent machines harvest our bioelectrical energy.
The Matrix
and its two sequels could pass as a capsule history of baby-boom rock. The first film is a three-chord riff of a movie: a simple, familiar idea—“What if reality is a great big fake?”—amplified and transformed into an irresistible hook.
The Matrix Reloaded
(2003) is a 1970s prog-rock concept album: sprawling, pretentious, and ultimately incoherent, but brimming with ideas and virtuoso displays. And
The Matrix: Revolutions
(2003) is an over-the-hill pop star recycling someone else’s material: the sort of music you’d hear on a Michelob commercial, circa 1987.

The Demiurge genre didn’t die when the
Matrix
trilogy ended—
Inception
, the most notable recent specimen, was a critical and commercial success in 2010—but
Revolutions
did signal that the boom was coming to a close. Unlike its two predecessors,
Revolutions
barely bothers to engage the idea that set the
Matrix
series in motion. No longer trapped in a false world devised by an evil intelligence, the heroes are now trapped in an anthology of war movie clichés; no longer skeptical and alienated, they proclaim the tritest sort of faith. When critics comment on the Demiurge cycle, they often cite Philip K. Dick as its patron saint. There is no trace of Dick in
The Matrix: Revolutions
.
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If the king of the world builders was J. R. R. Tolkien—the man who devoted so much of his life to creating the Middle-Earth of
The Lord of the Rings
, complete with an elaborate philology of his imaginary languages—then Dick was the fellow who confessed, in an essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” that he liked “to build universes that
do
fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem.”
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In a Dick story, true as well as false realities threaten to crumble away, and false as well as true realities are waiting to be discovered.
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Only a few entries in the Demiurge cycle, notably
eXistenZ
and
Being John Malkovich
, take things that far. As a result, most of them never acknowledge a curious social fact that lurked in the background while they flickered on our Cineplex screens. In a Demiurge movie, either the protagonist or the whole world is trapped in an alternate universe of someone else’s making. Yet the films became popular as more and more people were willingly immersing themselves in ever more elaborate alternate universes, many of which they had helped to build.

The paradox at the heart of the
Matrix
movies is that a story about people struggling to free themselves from an imaginary world should evolve into an imaginary world that millions of people are eager to enter. You can become a
Matrix
character by playing a best-selling video game; you can explore the
Matrix
universe by playing a collaborative online puzzle game; you can build unauthorized add-ons to that universe by devising your own
Matrix
parody or fan fiction. People might not like to be forced or tricked into a false world. Evidently, though, they’ll jump at the opportunity to enter and exit one at will.

That brings us back to the hunt for clues. The Web, multiplayer computer games, and fan communities are not merely places where people adopt or construct their own fake realities; they are places where those realities bump against one another in unpredictable ways, leaving trails to entice or confuse the devoted clue hunter.

Look at what happened when music lovers across England mourned the death of Jamie Kane, the scandal-tinged veteran of the boy band Boy*d Upp whose solo career was, to quote Wikipedia, “mildly successful.”
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He was killed in a helicopter crash en route to a video shoot in 2005; the BBC’s
Top of the Pops
website reported that Kane’s aircraft “experienced some technical difficulties on the flight, and crashed into the sea some miles from its destination.”
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Some suspected foul play.