The United States of Paranoia by Jesse Walker

The United States of Paranoia by Jesse Walker

Author:Jesse Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-07-30T16:00:00+00:00


University Books, 1956

“The diehard fanatics who dominated sauceriana during the early years were a humorless lot,” Keel wrote in Mothman, “and Gray’s mischievous wit baffled and enraged them. At times it baffled me, too.”18

Barker’s playful deceptions bring to mind the second wellspring of the ironic style: the pranksters—most notably, a prankster named Paul Krassner, who launched a magazine in 1958 called The Realist.

The Realist’s great innovation was to refuse to label which articles were truthful and which were jokes, and sometimes to add just enough truth to a piece of fiction that readers would be left completely befuddled as to what, if anything, they should believe.19 With time Krassner would make that a matter of policy: “The Realist never labels an article as either satire or journalism,” he wrote in 1991, “in order not to deprive you the pleasure of discerning for yourself whether it’s actually true or metaphorically true.”20 But the practice didn’t begin as a deliberate attempt to confound people. Krassner had simply assumed that everyone would be able to tell the satiric from the sincere. When it turned out that many readers found that difficult, he didn’t look for ways to clear up the confusion; he looked for ways to have fun with it.

The result was one of the most infamous hoaxes of the 1960s. “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” published in 1967, posed as a series of outtakes from William Manchester’s popular account of the JFK assassination, The Death of a President. Krassner’s piece began with a true story: When LBJ had been competing with Kennedy for the 1960 presidential nomination, he had called his rival’s father a Nazi sympathizer. The article went on to describe the president’s infidelities, which were well known in journalistic circles but had not yet been reported, and then it grew steadily less reliable, concluding with a scene of Lyndon Baines sticking his Johnson in the president’s throat wound. It is a testament to Krassner’s literary skill—or the average reader’s gullibility, or LBJ’s unpopularity—that many people were fooled. When Krassner met Daniel Ellsberg, the famous leaker confessed that he had believed the Johnson story. “Maybe it was just because I wanted to believe it so badly,” he said.21

The hoax was not, at its heart, about a conspiracy, but the penultimate paragraph had a paranoid touch. In the margins of the Manchester manuscript, Realist readers were informed, this handwritten note appeared: “Is this simply necrophilia or was LBJ trying to change entry wound into exit wound by enlarging?”22

As Krassner strove to top his Kennedy piece, and as his personal interest in conspiracy theories grew, secret plots moved to the center of his hoaxes. He began to conceive of himself as an “investigative satirist,” detailing plots that didn’t exist in order to expose the deeper social truths that did.

After Robert Kennedy’s death, the magazine announced that it would reveal “the rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology hierarchy.”23 The article hadn’t actually been written yet, but the title alone was enough to prompt the Church of Scientology to file a lawsuit against the magazine.



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