PERVERSE CONCEITS of the SO-CALLED NORM

Normative Content Farm The Millions is at it again, reassuring its pajamas-wearing audience that they are still The Norm and that the sky is still blue, grass is still green and barns are redder than ever. Even under Trump. Good Catholic Nick Ripatrazone has just reviewed a biography  (Pale Horse Rider)  of  20th century Parapoliticalist William Cooper, a figure so tonally Other, compared to the standard Millions-reader’s standard fare, that the choice of this book to review can only have been motivated by a perverse impulse to scare said Millions readers into kissing their kids, and their mortgages,  with whinnies of relief, after hugging their wide screen Televisions. But don’t worry, kids: the naughty naughty wacky man is dead.

Ripatrazone identifies Cooper as “Host of The Hour of the Time, an infamous shortwave radio show that opened with an air-raid siren, commanding voices, barking dogs, screams, and stomping jackboots. Author of Behold a Pale Horse, one of the most shoplifted books in America—and one of the most-read books in prisons. There was a warrant out for Cooper’s arrest: He’d been indicted on tax evasion and bank fraud.”

Ripatrazone writes: “Cooper would often give his audience a suggestion: “Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you, yourself, can prove it with your own research.” Such advice sounds reasonable, but democratization of knowledge tends to make expertise less important than personal experience.”

Notice how Ripatrazone deftly (or sloppily) conflates “knowledge” and “opinion,” because, surely, the democratization of actual knowledge makes for a generally more knowledgeable (and less effortlessly hoodwinkable) electorate. It’s the democratization of the authority of opinion that muddles and nullifies the authority of expertise. Big difference… the eliding of which is necessary if one somehow wants to poo poo Cooper’s sound, reasonable and radical advice to learn how to learn and learn a lot.

The problem with Cooper being, at the very least, that the last thing he expected, or needed, was for most of his audience to follow up on such advice. The jury is out (and will remain so until the end of time, probably) on whether William Cooper was just a slightly unhinged revival tent Jeremiah with a great radio voice, goosing his trucker-culture target demographic to generate ad revenue and sell books (along with precious metals, vitamin supplements, paralegal services and survivalist camping gear)…  or something more genuine and deranged. Or… even better… a government plant. A Designated Regional Boogieman,  a Serfy sheepdog, spooking the core of the herd away from its fringes? Which is, of course, the esoteric category of far-fetched (or Realpolitik) theory Cooper lived on.

“His interest in conspiracy theories began with Roswell,” observes Ripazatrone, who subsequently fails to note that Cooper’s venue was actually the smallest media presence broadcasting, and stoking interest in, that particular meme. I certainly did not hear of the hoax that is “Roswell,” first, from Cooper. I saw it on TV. Many, many, many times over the years. Read about it in magazines like People, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, et al. Newspapers such as the NYT and the Washington Post. Dozens of books, from major publishing houses, from the 1970s on.

Rispazatrone writes, “Jacobson writes, “Now the weakness of the Roswell narrative—the insufficient eyewitness testimony, the lack of compelling physical evidence—became the case’s greatest selling point. If Roswell was relegated to obscurity, someone at the top must have wanted it that way.” 

Ripazatrone and Jacobson, the Pale Horse Rider’s author, would appear to have failed to notice that “Roswell,” as I say, was, in fact, anything but “obscure”. And that (therefore) “someone at the top must have wanted it that way.”

So why do Ripazatrone’s book review, and Jacobson’s book, presumably, concern themselves only with the fringe-y ness of the Gubmint-baiting nutball William Cooper when Cooper was operating (huckstering/ entertaining) within the greater context of a media culture he was clearly the small-potatoes offspring of? Why was Cooper an oddball for talking about “Roswell” (and taking the obvious hoax seriously) whereas CBS, say, talking about “Roswell” (and taking the obvious hoax seriously, for millions of viewers)  remains… normal? If Cooper was a little (or more than a little) off,  can’t the same be said of his parent culture? Aka America? Aka The Norm?

Ripatrazone wraps up the essay with the sententious (and grammatically peculiar) stinger…

“Pale Horse Rider is a request that Milton William Cooper is worthy of our sustained attention. It is a hypnotic dive into a world where theory is considered fact.”

I commented:

steven augustine

September 5, 2018 at 3:46 pm

Cooper was a classic American type and not really fringe at all. From Elijah Muhammad to Father Divine to Father Coughlin… to Billy Graham, Falwell and Robertson… to Clare Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, Bhagwan, Jane Roberts, Garner Ted Armstrong, Carlos Castaneda and all the rest (with Marshall Applewhite, Jim Jones, Charlie Manson and David Koresh on the genuine fringe)… there’s a long American tradition of charismatic hucksters blending Millennarial thought-systems with entrepreneurial zeal and (occasionally) stockpiled weapons. Some of these hucksters are “respectable” and some (like Cooper) aren’t. Cooper was a “wacko” because he had fewer followers than Billy Graham. Well, in fact, Cooper really was a wacko. As was Graham.

What makes Cooper extra interesting was the overlay of ’50s Sci Fi that lent his spiel a little interplanetary resonance (he must have read some Charles Fort as a kid). If he isn’t a figure straight out of Ray Bradbury’s stuff, his spirit certainly went directly to the spiritual plane of one of Philip K. Dick’s pulpiest stories when he died, with his old testament cadences and pseudo-Mystery School vocab and all that juicy UFOlogy (later recanted).

Cooper’s dark, imaginative scripts map territory that overlaps not only with PKD but with Edgar Cayce, as well… the American neighborhood it covers is so large, in fact, that any biography of Cooper that doesn’t touch on all these above-mentioned figures (and more) is missing an opportunity and the point. Which being (and I’m sure that Greil Marcus would agree with me here): the vast network of spooky crawlspaces under all those faux-green American lawns of the 19th and 20th century… be they Republican, Democrat or Third Party as well as Undecided. Paging David Lynch.

Consider (this in a Rod Serling voice) the American ability to somehow imagine a categorical distinction between the unfalsifiable “conspiracy theories” of a huckster like Cooper, and the similarly unfalsifiable theories of a huckster like Rachel Maddow. Forget weighing the actual evidence: the stack of (carefully vetted, cross-referenced) books one must normally read in order to be conversant in just about any topic of importance, under debate, is not necessary when one is the choir being preached at by a charismatic huckster super-charged with her/his and your own absolute certainty: you go with your stupid gut. From stupid to crazy is not only merely a skip and a jump but fun… especially when you have lots of company.

From “WMD” to “Russiagate” to “magic bullets” to “the Right Wing Conspiracy against the Clintons” to “OJ is innocent ” to “the lizard people” to “the gulf of Tonkin incident was real” to “Michelle Obama is a man” to “Ross Perot was a kook” to “flat earth” to “Cosby was framed” to “JFK and/or Obama wanted to end all War” to “gender is fluid” to “Native Americans are connected to the Earth” to “the Universe is teaching us something” to “my house plants like it when i talk to them” to “god gave this land to his chosen people” and all that preposterous jazz…

… “It is a hypnotic dive into a world where theory is considered fact,” and in which every side of every ridiculous debate is justifiably convinced that the other side is insane.

Two days later came another carefully-considered comment on Ripatrazone’s Normative Essay…

The Devil

September 7, 2018 at 12:48 am

Dank.

 

Ripatrazone, the good Catholic (who therefore believes in nonsense even more preposterous than “Roswell”), is clearly connecting with his audience.

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(One can imagine how evocative an experience it would have been to listen to Cooper’s richly imaginative,  incantatory broadcasts in an eighteen-wheeler’s cab,  crossing the Great Plains late at night… as good or better than listening to X-Minus or CBS Mystery Theater.  Too bad the attendant video ruins it with horrible graphics…)

 

 

ADDENDUM: My comment on Ripatrazone’s good Catholic essay is worth a read, too, as it mentions JJ, the Pope’s scourge