Conspiracy Theory

Or, Jesse Ventura is batshit crazy.

I’m an Occam’s Razor kinda gal.  I can more or less date my skepticism to pre-Kindergarten or there about, when introduced to the idea of Santa Claus.  I recall briefly pondering the overall mechanics of the thing (around the world in one night using flying reindeer?), taking a good look at the fireplace, and thinking something along the lines of, “Hmmmm - prolly not.” I figured the whole thing was a story, and not something I was expected to believe.  I was wrong about the latter, apparently, but I never made any pretense about believing and knew enough not to spoil it for those who did.  In short, I learned early on that when it came to explaining things, the simple and direct almost always trumped the convoluted and complicated. 

I have a great aunt, though, who has always been inclined to prefer those convoluted and complicated explanations; she buys into just about every conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard, and probably many I’m not familiar with.  She lives on the computer and believes that if it's on the intertubes, it's probably true.  So it was with her in mind that I started to sample a show on TruTV called Conspiracy Theory, hosted by Jesse (the Body) Ventura.  Ventura, who leaves his wrasslin’ career out of the mini bio he presents in the opening of each episode (but - why?), is apparently on a quest to further every quacktastic conspiracy theory he can find.  Thanks to vertigo-inducing leaps in logic on The Bod’s part, I haven’t been able to make it through the every episode, but I found Friday night’s concoction just so richly bizarre, I had to share. 

This one was about the gulf oil spill, and how it was part of a government conspiracy to depopulate the south coast of the US so that that area might be turned into an open drilling zone for the oil companies. 

Oh, you didn’t know?  Well, let me enlighten you. Jesse didn’t exactly present things in a logical, progressive, or chronological order, but as I reconstruct what appear to be the salient facts, we have:

- Hurricane Katrina was a dry run.  Of something, although I’m not sure what; Jesse didn’t ‘splain that.  However, clearly, we (we being President Bush and possibly Dick Cheney, near as I could gather) caused Katrina to hit the gulf coast, so something something something, something something.  Or other.  But it IS part of the conspiracy.

- Subsequently, BP planned the oil spill.  They were in cahoots with Halliburton, the source of all evil in the modern Western world, who BOUGHT AN ENVIRONMENTAL CLEAN UP COMPANY mere weeks before the accident, and also controlled the company that did the drilling itself.  You see, they could make more money by causing a natural disaster than by drilling for oil.  And BP KNEW.  (I guess Jesse doesn’t know that Halliburton has been in the environmental clean-up business for decades, or that many large petrochemical companies - I’ll give you DuPont as a more neutral example - have in-house or closely affiliated remediation companies.  So for a company that is in the drilling business to have a remediation arm...  makes sense.  But hey, he’s on a roll.)

- President Bush was a Manchurian Candidate installed into office by an international conglomeration of oil interests that is In On the conspiracy.

- Democrats, don’t get too smug: So was Barack Obama.  Hey, don’t look at me.  Just ask Jesse’s expert.

- The Army Corps of Engineers (motto: “We flatten mountains! We straighten rivers!”) is In On the Conspiracy.  In fact they have a 40 billion dollar plan to evacuate the gulf coast, to get the people out of the way so the oil companies can do their thing and not have to answer to anyone.

Frankly, the woman from the ACoE who he interviewed made the most sense of anyone on the entire program.  It was very obvious - to me, anyway - that she is one of those painfully earnest types for whom the truth just lands you in deep shit, because you’re prone to laying out facts, not equivocating, and the listener tunes you out after you (probably unintentionally) give them a tidbit or sound that "proves" their point.  (I have been that woman.)  She spoke to what I presume is an emergency evacuation plan, most likely prepared at the specific request of congress, that dealt with the unfortunate reality that a lot of the New Orleans area is in a flood plain, below sea level, and very vulnerable to natural disaster.  She had the unmitigated gall to suggest that we may, as a nation, one day realize that perhaps living in such areas isn’t all that bright an idea because nature tends to remind us of who’s boss from time to time. (Seriously, can you believe that?  Never mind that our population growth has vastly outpaced that of our infrastructure, which makes emergency planning a real bitch.)

But the ex-mayor, ex-governor, ex-wrassler, posits that it’s all part of a plan to destroy Our Way of Life, destroy Our Homes, and give it all to big oil.  And hey - the show is on TruTV, and their motto is, “Not Reality: Actuality.”  You do the math.