They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent by Sarah Kendzior

Author:Sarah Kendzior [Kendzior, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250857880
Google: 3H1UEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250210720
Barnesnoble: 1250210720
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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In the summer of 2021, I attempted to travel back in time. This was a coping mechanism in response to Missouri spawning a plague variant after a year of mass death and intermittent lockdowns and heartbreak so encompassing, it left me feeling removed from reality, or like reality had been removed from me. That this grief was not at all unique, that it was shared by almost everyone, provided little comfort, because grief was being weaponized in endless ways for baseless reasons.

There is a pool down the street from me that was built nearly a century ago, when St. Louis was a guiding light of America instead of a harbinger of its demise. It looks like a Spanish fortress and costs five dollars and is surrounded by a park across from a row of abandoned lots and storefronts rendered vacant by the pandemic. Every day I would walk to the pool with no cell phone, just a towel, a book, and a Walkman. The Walkman was a source of amusement to everyone at the pool who was older than forty, and of intrigue to everyone younger than twenty, but I clung to it like a security blanket. I bought it to play cassettes I had found in my basement, unlabeled tapes from middle school in the early 1990s. I wanted to know what was on them. But most of all I wanted to escape. I wanted something no one could take from me. I wanted my memories back.

At the pool I would lie back on a plastic chair and let the sun shine down on me and disappear into political songs that in the early 1990s were considered mainstream. George Michael on materialism and the death of God, Sinead O’Connor on state brutality in Thatcher’s England, Guns N’ Roses on the military-industrial complex, En Vogue on racial profiling, Poison on homeless veterans, Living Colour on political personality cults, Tracy Chapman on generational poverty, Don Henley on the end of America. These were songs I had taped off top 40 radio or that friends had put on a mix. They were songs that you watched on MTV or heard at the dentist’s office. They were not esoteric, because it was normal to have serious political concerns and express them. They were relics from the anomalous era of American accountability: the late 1980s and early 1990s, when white-collar criminals went bankrupt or were sent to prison, global warming was considered an urgent crisis, and the Cold War had ended and no one, except possibly Leonard Cohen, understood that the mafia had won.

I would stare at the clear blue sky and soak in the cynicism and passion of this bygone age, one that seemed to be commenting on 2021 more than twenty-first-century pop culture was willing to do. And I would notice, a little each day, how the blueness of the sky was fading, and a bitter scent had arrived, not the familiar aroma of Missouri summer barbecue but something acrid and dying.

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