In 1966 Robert Kennedy gave a speech in which he said, “There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May (you) live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times.”
I thought about this the other day because I had Bobby Kennedy on my mind (as liberal white men of a certain type often do) and so I thought to look up the quote and was quickly informed by the fabulous site QUOTE INVESTIGATOR that while Kennedy did say it, there is no evidence at all that what he said was an old Chinese curse. There is however evidence of lots and lots of white men attributing the saying “May you live in interesting times” to the ancient Chinese.
Similarly, there is a famous Mark Twain quote, “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over” that was never actually said of written by Mark Twain.
It sure does sound like Twain though, right?
Because we live in interesting time, there is often too much for us to think about and so we all develop our own little cognitive shortcuts. For instance, I trust Roxane Gay. If Roxane Gay is upset about something, I trust that it is worth being upset about. I don’t have the time of the bandwidth to investigate everything out there in the world, so to some degree, I rely on Roxane Gay to guide me.
Similarly, I do not trust Tucker Carlson. If Tucker has an opinion about something, I can rely on the statistical likelihood that I believe the opposite thing. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for me to pay attention to everything he says, so I have to cut some corners.
We all do this. It is not a great system, but it is the best one we have.
Or it used to be.
You probably already know that we are currently toiling under a post-truth American President. He’s not simply a liar, he’s that weird, special type of liar who seems in any given moment to believe the truth of what he says because he is saying it.
How is that for a ouroboros of logic?
The President though is just a symptom of the larger disease. A certain quality of tail-eating, conspiratorial thinking seems to have been moving from the fringes into the mainstream consciousness. There seem to be more flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers now than their used to be. I feel like every fifth white man I meet believes that water fluoridation is somehow nefarious (I don’t know what white men love to hate about fluoride).
From Cesar Sayoc and his pipe bombs to the Pizzagate shooter Edgar Maddison Welch to the fact that Jenny McCarthy has been permitted a spot on a network television show like she’s just another kooky celebrity and not a person whose advocacy has literally placed children's lives in danger, one has to wonder where all the crazies are coming from.
My guess is that once you start to believe a not-true-thing, it becomes easier to believe the next one, then the next, then the next, because the world is a busy place and so we have all had to cut some cognitive corners.
Once you begin to believe something as simple as “all politicians are the same” it becomes easier to then believe “all politicians lie” then “the government is lying” then “the government is lying about vaccines” and then “the government is using vaccines and chemtrails to keep us docile while they take our guns before they round us up and force us into FEMA death camps because: Socialism!”
And it isn’t just the 2nd Amendment types either. Talk to a Bernie Bro for 15 seconds and he’ll explain to you how Clinton rigged the Nevada primary, you don’t even need to drop a hat to get him to do it.
I grew up on Fox Mulder and so personally I have a soft spot for the Aliens-Are-Real-And-The-Government-Has-Been-Working-With-Them-Since-Roswell people.
Did you know that there are even several elaborate conspiracy theories about who really assassinated Robert Kennedy? There’s a whole podcast about it.
Since it only seems to take a little nudge to begin pushing us in the direction of crazy, I thought it would be fun to explore that and game out a dumb thing to believe. Anyone can discover something that’s real, but it takes real inventiveness to discover something that isn’t real.
In an homage to the NEW CHRONOLOGY theory (which attempts to prove that the Middle Ages never took place), I will now prove that there never was an Old West and that it was invented by Hollywood, but they left us a trail of breadcrumbs back to the truth.
All of these facts are true, real and google-able:
In the Stanislaus National Forest of California there’s an old Gold Rush ghost town called Bodie.
One of the buildings in Bodie is the abandoned Swazey Hotel.
In the 1991 film POINT BREAK, Patrick Swayze played a surfer/bank robber called “Bodhi”.
Do you think that is just a coincidence? Well then explain this:
- The term “bodhi” is Sanskrit and means “enlightened” and it is often used to describe the spiritual awakening of the Buddha.
- In the 1989 film ROADHOUSE, Patrick Swayze played the unflappable Buddhist-inspired bouncer Dalton.
- Timothy Dalton starred in the 1989 James Bond film “License to Kill” alongside a very young Benicio Del Toro.
- In 1992, Del Toro starred alongside Marlon Brando and Tom Selleck in the John Glen film CHRISTOPHER Columbus: The Discovery.
- Columbus is the namesake of the South American nation of Columbia.
- Columbia State Historic Park in California was the primary shooting location for the 1950s television anthology show DEATH VALLEY DAYS.
- Season 6, Episode 5 of DEATH VALLEY DAYS, entitled “Fifty Years’ a Mystery” starred Patrick Waltz as a night watchman and bouncer working in the Gold Rush town of Bodie, California!
Or do you think that is just a coincidence too??? #sheeple
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