Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Conspiracies!



Have you read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? I just finished it. Mostly I was bored, but his idea of making wingnut-flavored theories about history appealed to me. The basic idea is to use accidental connections and pure happenstance to make up impressive edifices of deep conspiracy theories.

It immediately occurred to me that there is something Eco-like fishy in the fact that the wingnuts are all reading a series of books called Left Behind, in which the head of the United Nations turns out to be the Devil and so on, and that the Bush administration named its education program No Child Left Behind. See what I mean?

Clearly, the intent of the administration is to make sure that all children are given the values that would make them first to be vacuumed up by the Heavenly Hoover. And what are we going to do about it? Hmh?
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Just in case I failed miserably, this is intended as satire. But I think that my smart readers could make up lots of similar and more interesting theories to explain everything in our current faith-based society.