I don't know if what "they" want me to do is to fear a falling sky or watch less of the news, but I did recently learn that my sister and one of her daughters – the lesbian – are avid followers of a very large group of conspiracy theorists. After the simplest of Internet searching, I learned that this group believes, among other things, that the world is controlled by about 14 individuals, each of whom is wealthy enough to keep his or her name – though mostly his – off the lists of the world’s wealthiest. Conspiracy theories and those who subscribe make me nervous in the same way haunted houses and psychics do: I am terrified that they might reveal something true. So I exited the page I’d happened across and returned to my regular business.
On Friday, I skipped both the News Hour and Washington Week. Instead, I got comfortable on my couch to read a biography of Flannery O’Connor that I found at a branch of the Multnomah County Library I’d never visited until Thursday afternoon. On NPR, I heard the newscaster announce that “The looming government shutdown has been averted by a last-minute …” at which point I switched to the jazz station. A government shutdown that includes airports operating as usual and regular mail pickup and delivery isn’t a shutdown at all: It’s a crude, unimaginative brand of show business, and until the real deal comes to pass and the Tea Party is forced to “message” the consequences of its stupidity, please, shut up. In the meantime, even though I don’t think Brad Gooch’s biography is particularly well written, I do believe that Flannery O’Connor’s life story is not only more interesting and more honest than what passes for news, I think it’s more relevant to the state of affairs in 2011 as well. Kind of shockingly so, actually.
I did see a very interesting article posted on Facebook late last week. A columnist in Seattle wrote that if you’re going to repeat and subscribe to the notion that “education should be run more like business,” do not bitch when your youngsters don’t get into the UW because the out-of-state applicants have taken most of the spots. The out-of-state students, after all, are a win-win for the university: They pay higher tuition and are not subsidized by Washington tax payers. That’s how businesses in a capitalist economy function, wrote the columnist. Don’t advertise the fact that you don’t think before you declare your position by taking it personally. Beyond the Internet, on printed pages, I read more: “The people … couldn’t have gone past the fourth grade but, for the time, they were mighty interested in education,” said Flannery O’Connor, not about the grousing in Washington but about a KKK cross burning in the 1940s to protest racially integrated meetings hosted by a state college in Georgia. It is tragic that she’s not alive and posting on Facebook.
Finally, early Sunday afternoon, the single weirdest radio commercial I’ve ever heard. In 1999, the world’s population topped 6 billion for the first time, said a female voice. And today you can get your oil changed at Jiffy Lube for $19.99. I’m not sure if I’m paying more attention to commercials because I’ve been watching less news, or if I’m just in a more mistrustful state than usual, or if the commercials have become even more offensive, or what. Fortunately, I was at part in my book that detailed how Flannery O’Connor’s characters in her early fiction were composites of the unlikeliest combos of people from her daily life and how many of her plots were taken directly from the local newspaper, so I didn’t ponder the relationship of the world’s population in 1999 to the advertised price of an oil change for long.
