Everyone’s favorite topic, right?
But first, an announcement: I’m going to take a hiatus of about two months, mostly because I’m miffed that the previous post had so few views. Those who did look at it thought it was one of my best, so some of you snooty burgers might want to take a look.
No, the real reason is fun news, for me. The jerks down the hill sold their house, so I’m going to have to get their buyers to sign a document adding them as parties to our neighborhood well agreement. I looked for my old legal forms, but they weren’t on my old computer. To make a long story a little shorter, I found them on an old external hard drive that we used to use before Carbonite. I also found there a copy of a novel I wrote over twenty years ago.
I was tempted…and opened the first chapter and read it and thought “not bad.” The second chapter: “Pretty good!”
So I’m going to revise it one last time. My only real desire in life was to publish a novel, and it was very difficult to realize that I didn’t have the talent to make that happen. Oh hell, whom am I kidding: it was truly the disappointment of my life. I have an MFA in creative writing, right? I’m CERTIFIED. Well, certified, yes.
So at my advanced age, I’m going to take a couple of months and try it one last time. I’ve read fiction frantically over the last ten years (my annotated reading list is over 60 pages) and suddenly I can see what needs to be fixed. I’ve learned stuff. The only question is whether I have the talent to execute my pitches, so to speak. I’m going to find out, and, to continue the metaphor, I’m going to leave it all out on the field, and to explode the metaphor, type/pitch till my fingers bleed. It’s now or fucking never. See you in a couple of months if not before.
Wish me luck. Maybe by then we won’t have to wear…again, whom am I kidding?
************
Conspiracy theories. There are several huge problems with them. This should be obvious but apparently isn’t to some people.
The main issue is that the conspiracies that people like to talk about are nearly impossible if only because they would require impossible numbers of people to keep a secret. Can your Aunt Minnie keep a secret? No. Of course, government employees etc. are not your Aunt Minnie in that they’re even less likely to be able to keep a secret.
Attend to one of the great conspiracy theories of all time: JFK’s assassination. The Warren Commission famously held that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy. In the moment, there was speculation that there was at least a second shooter—remember the “grassy knoll”?
But if we assume Oswald acted alone, recall the other parties who had an interest in seeing JFK in a coffin: The Mob was involved, either because (1) Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt labor leader who was mad at Bobby Kennedy for coming after him, got the Mob involved, or (2) the Mob itself was angry because JFK hadn’t been able to do anything about Castro, so the Mob’s casinos in Cuba were closed down at great cost to everyone.
Some speculated that the CIA wanted JFK dead because he refused to provide air support to the invasion of Cuba that led to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Many CIA and Cubans died or were imprisoned.
Those less sophisticated simply averred that the Russians and Cubans hated Kennedy and wanted him dead. That ignores the gentlemen’s (?) agreement that we don’t kill each other’s leaders. Which, if you think about it, is stupid—kill Putin and Trump, and the world is immediately a better place.
Nancy and I were driving one night somewhere—maybe on I-95 between Baltimore and Wilmington, DE, so sometime in the 1990’s—and for some reason we had a talk show on. I don’t remember much of it, but there was speculation that JFK’s brain had been removed from his skull and taken somewhere.
The caller became incensed: “Where IS the president’s brain?” he demanded to know. He had that impatient northeasterner’s accent, and he sounded very much as if only he could be put in charge of the investigation, he would himself find JFK’s brain. To what purpose? By the 90’s, JFK’s brain, if indeed it had been spirited away somewhere, wouldn’t be of much help to anyone.
But I’ve never gotten over the urgency and impatience of that guy. “Where IS the president’s brain?” It became for us one of those phrases that couples use between themselves—“Where ARE the car keys?”
But look at the supposed conspirators. Though the Mob is known for omerta, it’s known even more for its silence being broken by people with axes to grind or prison sentences to avoid. The CIA? It is a famously competitive and vicious organization. A conspiracy among them was sure to leak. What about Russians and Cubans? I seem to recall some famously mouthy Russian KGB defectors, and anyone with a gripe against Castro would have trouble keeping such a conspiracy a secret.
Come on, if nothing else, a conspiracy about JFK’s assassination would be the Story of the Century for any Seymour Hersh wannabe who wouldn’t rest until the story came out.
QAnon’s theories. No doubt we shouldn’t even mention them. In general one theory is that any number of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles--liberals, politicians, Hollywood types, etc.--were involved in a world-wide child-trafficking ring, perhaps run out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor. Trump was, at some point, going to defeat this cabal and put everyone, especially Hilary Clinton, in jail. When he lost the election, Q and his buddies quietened down.
It’s pathetic that people actually believe this. Simply based on the statement of facts, they’re either stupid or crazy or a bit of both. Again, how can such a wide-ranging conspiracy subscribed to by so many be a secret? Who has the biggest egos around? Actors and politicians. Some one of those would have been sure to blow the scheme during an alcohol or cocaine-inspired session with a reporter. And the conspiracy involved children being trafficked. That’s going to be kept secret by anyone with an ego?
Now to my personal knowledge of conspiracies, other than how Joyce Jackson and her friends conspired to shut me out of their social circle in the 8th grade. Those girls were out for blood. You’ve never seen so much eye-rolling at a pudgy kid. (I'm sure it happened to Sam Alito, which is why he's so angry today.)
Every once in a while, the few subsidiaries of AIG for which I was responsible would be sued in antitrust. That generally requires some people getting together and discussing an issue and agreeing on how to act in concert. If I remember correctly, at some point AIG was accused of freezing certain brokers out of the annuity business and conspiring with other annuity issuers to freeze them out.
As the only member of our department who’d ever been in a courtroom, I was appointed to handle all of this litigation. The best part of it was that I got to go around the corner to the office of a lawyer for the international life insurance company, Tim Slattery, and shoot the shit with him for a while.
He had been an assistant U.S. attorney in the antitrust division before coming to AIG, so in theory he knew a lot about it. Mainly we just kidded around, but his expertise gave me cover in case one of our bosses happened by.
Anyway, trying to track down any documents in AIG relevant to an antitrust inquiry was impossible. People (probably intentionally) didn’t keep files on anything. When I looked back at old files for this or that written agreement, I might find one, but no one had signed it. Was there a signed copy anywhere? The monolith that was AIG shrugged its collective shoulders.
So now I had a new argument for why we couldn’t be liable for conspiring to lock certain brokers out of the annuity market: we weren’t organized enough to conspire to sign even a legal agreement. Who was organized enough to do more? Anyway, why would we do that? Weren’t we in the market to sell annuities? Why would we lock certain brokers out of the market?
There was, no doubt, a good reason for that. Someone pissed someone else off. But, finally, no one was talking, at least not to me.
I did get a good trip to San Francisco out of it. That’s the true measure of a successful conspiracy. The litigation threatened to carry on for years (may indeed still be ongoing), and AIG hated to pay outside lawyers—or claims by policyholders, for that matter—so we settled relatively early.
So my best argument: our business people were too disorganized to conspire to order a stapler. No one communicated anything to anyone, and, if they put it in writing, the prose would be so confusing as to make the message hopelessly ambiguous. This is a sad thing to say, but AIG had a lot of stupid people. They made even me feel smart. No, our people couldn’t conspire to do anything.
And if they had been capable of it, would anyone have kept it a secret? That’s the real problem with conspiracies. Everyone blabs, whether to make themselves feel important, or just to share a cool thing they did, or out of incompetence.
Everyone blabs. That’s my expert take on it, anyway.
Comments