There are
days when I contemplate middle-age, and rejoice in my ever-more apparent
mortality. It means I will not have to long inhabit the ap-addled abattoir that
society is building for itself, and which the poor kids will have to inherit. I
swear I would rather jump from a moving bullet-train into a burning sulphur-pit
than face the feckless future the tech-bros are planning for us.
Such a
moment cam upon me again the other day, shortly after a grade-9 student told me
in all sincerity, that Stranger Things was based on a true
story. That by itself was not the moment of my all-encompassing weltschmerz;
that came later. At first, I merely iterated, in the admittedly
condescending manner that grown-ups will often inadvertently adopt when
confronted with childish fancies they are not altogether in the mood for
dealing with (around the time when the elapsed hours since lunch are roughly
equal to the remaining hours before dinner, and the longing for caffeine is
slowly replaced by the longing for alcohol), that it was “just a story”.
“Oh no!” my
little friend persisted, informing me that one of the actors of the program,
the otherwise wonderful Gatan Motarazzo who brought the ever-so-loveable Dustin
Henderson to life, told an interview that it was a true story.
I felt my
heart sink into my boots, and maintained in an even more condescending manner,
that actors, bless ‘em, aren’t always the oracles of wisdom and truth we take
them to be.
“Yeah, but
other people have said it!” came the paraphrased puppy-dog. At which point he
whipped out his phone for indisputable proof, and I wished for the roof to
collapse on top of me.
“You Can’t.
Believe. Everything. You Read. On. The. Internet.” I slowly, slowly squeezed
through bitten-bleeding lip in what I hoped was my most condescending tone yet.
“But
there’s so much of it!” he says, and I wished someone would sticks dynamite up
my nostrils and light the fuse. (“You
see how that’s worse? You do understand how that’s worse???”).
I’d had
just about had it at this point, and rather clumsily (for I was caught off
guard and not prepared) threw out some such canards about verifying sources and
evaluating veracity of information, when he’d opened up youtube to Mysteries
Decoded: The Montauk Experiments, and I prayed for someone to dump liquid
drano down my throat.
We’re going
to pause here for a moment, and in violation of those abhorrent 5-paragraph
essay templates I am state-mandated to force-feed our innocent youth, get to my
main point/idea/topic/thesis here, having failed to mention it any earlier, in
the event my audience’s no-doubt formidable-but-not-infinite attention spans
may waver. The point is not that Mysteries Decoded was wretched even by
the abysmal standards of Youtube docs. Nor is my failure to dissuade my young
charge from believing that the US government was conducting mind-control-time
travel experiments in 1981 the reason I wanted to throw myself into a wood-chipper.
It was that this young man, far from atypical, had no capacity to tell reality
from fiction. No critical faculties. No ability or even willingness to flag
fraud or fantasy.
That
fucking depressed me.
You may ask
what the big deal is, and what business I, who once obsessed over Bigfoot and
the Loch Ness Monster, have in judging? Different
times, different contexts, higher stakes, I would maintain.
Look, when
I researched my cryptids, I was much younger than he is today. I had to go to
the children’s department at the library and sign out – a book. I had to
read – a book. If nothing else, I was reading – a book. The
benefits of which are manifold. I was also surrounded by adults who valued
education, had years of science and media literacy classes ahead of me, and,
well, other books. He on the other hand is barraged by videos, memes, and
soundbites, every single hour, and he believes all of it. He will come
across other, nastier ideas, with no greater ability to discriminate. Today
it’s the Montauk Experiment, tomorrow it’s the Protocols of the Eldars of
Zion. He will encounter voter fraud conspiracies, anti-vax tirades, 9-11
Trutherism, Sandy Hook denialism, Holocaust denial, New Age quakery, religious
fundamentalism, great replacement theory, whatever the hell Putin’s pushing at
any given time, and Q-Anon Pizzagate conspiracies.
Indeed,
compare nonsense. If a kid thinks there’s a plesiosaur in a Scottish lake or a
hairy ape man wandering BC, it’s not much different from thinking there was a
jolly toymaker living at the North Pole (which most of us recently believed).
The Montauk conspiracy holds that the US government did mind-control time
travel experiments on (unnamed) kidnapped children. It’s Pizzagate in
germination. An unverifiable, unprovable, but unshakable conviction that
genuine harm is being done to real people. Somewhere. Folks who believe that
can be driven to extremes.
I have no
doubt that every government, and the US government in particular, does some
pretty nasty things behind closed doors. But I’m much more concerned about what
we know to be true than what almost certainly isn’t. I’d rather break open an
ICE detention facility where I know children are suffering, than some empty lab
in Montauk, Long Island. Those concerned with the latter show precious little
concern about the former: they certainly don’t churn out youtube and tiktok
channels about it. Nor about child-poverty, childhood leukemia, child casualties
of war zones, nor indeed any genuine issue facing actual, verifiable, children.
You know, the ones with names. Energy
and indignation are wasted chasing shadows. It’s maddening.
I am neither the first, nor will I be the last to pull out
his beard with frustration at the baboons who for years obsessed over an
imaginary child sex-ring run by a non-existent global elite, yet now seem to be
fully onside with a genuine child-sex ring run by the actual global elite! Yet this is what happens when critical faculties
are turned off. This is the danger of conspiracy theories. Millions have died due
to them; Democracy itself may not survive them.
I wish I were being hyperbolic.
