Musings From The Edge: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
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As if we in this country did not have enough suspicion and divisiveness in this country True TV has brought us a new venture to screw with the minds of the people. Former governor of Minnesota, wrestler, actor, over all, over dramatic Jesse “The Body” Ventura has a show called Conspiracy Theories which explores various urban legends/conspiracy theories about government secrets. Using a news magazine format and as little hard evidence as possible Jesse and his gang seem to jet around the country and capture secret meetings with all seeing and all knowing sources which provide convincing, at least to him, information that these stories are true. With all that being said, this is much ado about nothing.
I was hanging ten on the other night on my trusty remote as I surfed through the hundreds of channels offered by my cable company seeking something that wasn’t trying to sell me a gadget, make my penis larger, or both, when I landed on one the episodes of Jesse Ventura’s shows. I have to admit I have somewhat of a bias against “The Body” going back to his wrestling days when he was a typical loudmouth showoff as many of them tend to be. That wasn’t helped any when I saw him in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator when one of his buddies noticed that he was bleeding and he said, “I ain’t got time to bleed.” And, though he is generally considered by a few to have done a fair job as governor of Minnesota, I thought he was a loose wing nut then. Between he and Michelle Bachmann I have two more good reasons to stay away from Minnesota. The first one is that it is too cold up there. Anyway, this particular show was called “Secret Assassins” and was a revisit to the viability to the development of a “Manchurian Candidate.” He gives as examples of their existence by pointing out that Sirhan Sirhan and Mark David Chapman still claim they do not remember killing their victims. But wait, his evidence of their existence gets stronger. He asks for and gets proof that a person can be hypnotized and receive post hypnotic suggestions to do things they don’t remember. So some strange guy gets another strange guy to allegedly hypnotize another strange guy and have him start to limp with the word “rosebud” and stop with the word “flower”. As we might expect the subject claims not to remember anything. I think I saw that on “the Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson one night. But the evidence gets stronger and more dramatic. Two of Ventura’s investigators meet some guy in the back of a van who tells them about a real life Manchurian Candidate and arranges a meeting with him. Jesse gets to meet him in a darkened parking garage and he tells all about secret assassinations in Central and South America. This highly trained killer had only just discovered his own secret after an auto accident sent him to have a MRI which detected chips implanted in various places in his body. Supposedly, the accident and the MRI had messed up the chips and he was getting some of his memories back of his missions. According to him he has been on missions in Central and South America and has has killed people at our government’s request, or at least at the request of someone in our government. (Did Dick Cheney know about this before he shot his friend himself?) If my tone here is a bit cynical it is because, well, I am. If we had these highly trained secret assassins Osama Bin Laden and his like would die long before their times. It only makes sense that we would just keep sending them after them until one of them got lucky.
First of all let me say that this is strictly my opinion and not that of MadMikesAmerica, but Jesse Ventura has always appeared to be an overly dramatic blow hard to me. He tends to overly simplify complex problems with a serious Machiavellian complex. While there there is no doubt that there are always those who have schemes of some sort going on in government. After all, they are politicians and that is what they do, but not on the grand scheme that Jesse wants us to believe. There was no earth shattering evidence presented in this show concerning the existence of a “Manchurian Candidate”. Hypnosis is a part of psycho-therapy and controversially used to have people do some things with post-hypnotic suggestions. Having people kill and then forget about it, that’s a stretch. To have them carry out a complex mission to kill someone and then forget it, that’s science fiction. And, at least to me, a guy in a wheel chair in van, plus a guy in a clandestine meeting in a dimly lit parking garage does not equal a grand conspiracy theory, except perhaps in Jesse Ventura’s mind. Actually, the conspiracy is a very simple one and a very old one. Find something that people want to believe and tell them its true in a very secretive manner, for a price. Its been going on for centuries and is part of the pitch of any snake oil salesman. The only problem here is that we have a bunch of loose right wing nuts who may get the idea that it is OK to kill off folks they do not agree with on certain issues and then claim they don’t remember.
Is this dangerous? Probably no more dangerous than the idiots already are. What is the problem? Just another terrible waste of television air time by someone making a buck off the paranoia of other people. It just irritates me that someone continues to feed the conspiracy nut cases in this country and it is those folks who worry me the most. They are the ones who make me … AFRAID
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People love this shit. Anything they don’t understand or anything they don’t know a damn thing about they want to believe in.
you can convince almost anyone of anything using absolutely no facts or substantive information whatsoever. Watch the MonkeyGirl Palin drone on sometime. It’s amazing how she can talk and talk, sound like she knows what she’s talking about, but not say a single thing with the slightest bit of substance.
We live in a pitifully nonintellectual society.
I watched this recently by one of America’s best intellectuals. . . “argument from ignorance.”
You are right about that Hillbilly.
It’s amazing, the reputation of folks from the northern plains, is one of stoic, hardworking, down to earth, sensible, hard to fool people. So much for all that reputation thing.
LOL! Yup! So much for that 🙂
I actually met some reasonably intelligent people in Minnesota once. However, they were all in the Mayo clinic and were all from other states. 🙂
I used to like Jesse Ventura, at least until I got to know him. He has been interviewed dozens of times on Howard Stern and he is Looney Tunes! He is convinced that the 9/11 attacks were manufactured by the government, along with all sorts of other wacky ideas. He is a nut job. I am not surprised he was governor of the land of Michelle Bachmann…Good post Bill.
Very true Mike. In this series his nuttiness comes across even more while he is trying to be serious and intelligent.
Well, it is a factual part of history that there was a lot of research done in this field, mostly as a response of seemingly strange “confessions” by some in the Stalin Purges and also during the Korean war. As mentioned, it was greatly expanded during the MKULTRA years.
But a lot of it was cold war paranoia and covering all possible research so the Soviets wouldn’t get the jump on anything. They covered everything from psychic spying to brainwashing to telekinesis. About the only thing that ever got lasting attention was the psychotropics like LSD and some synthetics. No doubt, the CIA did (doing?) some crazy stuff, including assassinations, but they weren’t involved in EVERY one of them like some of these conspiracy fanatics write about.
It really is surprising that Jesse has stooped to some of this stuff. Like most conspiracies, there is some facts to act as a seed for growth. But he really plays the part to sensationalize after that.
I always liked the technique of asking the question to imply…like “Did aliens implant thoughts into Nixon’s mind to control the election?” to throw the b.s. out there. But I guess that’s entertainment.
To bad he doesn’t go after some of the REAL stuff going on, sort of like….oh what is that called….oh ya “Investigative Journalist”.
But that would probably get him labeled as a terrorist or something.
Interesting stuff!
Very good points Krell. I would feel a lot better if he were looking into some of the real conspiracies like, say the health industry and the banks owning congress. Anything that is halfway useful.