Conspiracy of the week

For a long time I thought that Americans had a corner on the trade in conspiracy theories, but I now see that we command less market share than I had believed. What the newspapers insist on calling the "Islamic World" may, indeed, have already eclipsed us.

The best conspiracy theories should involve the Jews and/or the President of the United States, with bonus points if you can work both of them in. The first major conspiracy of which I was aware was the Pearl Harbor conspiracy. Around 1949 my Uncle Oscar assured me that President Roosevelt had intentionally invited the Japanese attack by ordering our battleships to be lined up in the harbor, against the most basic tenets of military practice, like so many tenpins or avian decoys. That intelligence staggered my 12-year-old brain, and the presidential motive adduced defeated it entirely. It was "so that every Jew in Palestine can drive a Studebaker." But of course the great and continuing presidential conspiracy theory has to do with the assassination of John Kennedy, who obviously could not really have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, the only communist in Texas, and one of only three in all America, and who therefore certainly was murdered by the CIA, with or without the help of Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson and the New Orleans Mafia. This theory somewhat compensates for its paltry showing on the Jewish side (but don't forget Jack Ruby!) by having the "magic bullet" and the "grassy knoll."

According to the New York Times it is very widely believed in the "Islamic World," and nearly universally among some millions of Muslim militants in Pakistan, that the attack on the Trade Towers was a Jewish conspiracy. The evidence advanced by the mullahs and uncontested by the military dictator who is our temporary point man is locally compelling if transcendentally obscene. It is that not a single Jew was killed in the attack, because, having been forewarned, all Jews stayed home from work that day. Bear this in mind when you are instructed to enter sympathetically into the "perceptions" or the "experience" of the mobs whose prayer meetings culminate in loud shouts of "Death to America!" And, yes, they are talking about you.

Until last Friday I thought that the only Americans to suggest that Americans conspired against themselves were Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Falwell briefly floated the opinion — not widely applauded, indeed since retracted, though presumably embraced by at least 19 hijackers — that the murder of 6,000 people was God's answer to American godlessness.

But on Friday I heard on NPR a forum from the "First-Amendment Center" in New York that considered a different form of American conspiratorial culpability. An earnest Ph.D. type was arguing that "Bush may not have launched the attack, but he and Ashcroft will use it to try to restrict civil liberties." I had little time to bask in the relief of hearing that the President may not have bombed New York, for I had to weigh the evidence of his conspiracy against civil liberties. When Bill Maher, the impresario of a television program, had said that American Air Force pilots but not Islamic suicide bombers were "cowards," Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, had responded — are you following all this? — that people like Maher "need to watch what they say." Thus President Bush's agent Ari Fleischer — and incidentally the name does sound Jewish to me, very — had had a "chilling effect" on Mr. Maher's first-amendment rights of free speech, because following his news briefing some sponsors of Maher's program had taken the position that if Maher was going to make speeches like that, they had better be free speeches rather than ones compensated for with hundreds of thousands of their advertising dollars. Obviously, people like Fleischer need to watch what they say. I presume this is why he later excised the offending remark from the published transcript of the news conference.

Mr. Fleischer is a professional 'spokesman' or spin-doctor and Mr. Maher a professional television 'personality.' We may regard them as practitioners of cognate professions. "Chilling" is actually one of the milder adjectives to describe their typical products. Yet in my modest opinion all this is not of ineluctable relevance to the actual conspiracy that faces us. The word "evil" has largely dropped out of our discourse as being a thing too crude to serve our postmodernist subtleties and moral evasions. But the United States of America is the victim of an international conspiracy that is vast, cunning, brutal, obscurantist, violent, fanatical and, in a word, evil. It is this evil conspiracy that just for this week at least must make first claim on my attention. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.