Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

across the avenue and affected the man in the street as never before. People could not escape strife and controversy, not even in the smallest backwater burgs because television brought Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Manson and the Viet Cong into the living room each evening at six o'clock.

A breakdown in the Official Reality Department had spawned all sorts of itchy problems. You couldn't believe the Government, you couldn't believe the media, you couldn't believe your best friend—who, it often turned out, was working for the Government. Even the Pope suffered a credibility gap. The hell of it was, you had damned good reasons by the end of the Sixties not to believe anyone anymore.

An intolerable situation! It sent people scrambling for cults, gurus, ethnic revivalisms, McGovern, CREEP, The Washington Post, bisexuality—anything at all resembling a belief system by which one could tell the good guys from the bad guys. Left wing, right wing, liberal, radical, conservative—it didn't matter; you could jump from one to another, like Rennie Davis, like Tim Leary. The only important thing was to have a system to explain why the world was screwed up and who was to blame for it—the result being that everybody had a different explanation and a different enemies list.

Thus the kaleidoscopic array of fears facing us today. They are not simple fears, like those of our forefathers; they are vague and complex. Often, you can't exactly put your finger on it, but you know that evil forces are manipulating you, perhaps via marketing research, when you buy a useless product merely because its bright-red package stimulates your medulla oblongata. It's a feeling best summed up by Woody Allen when he said, "Paranoids have real enemies, too."

Which is why the word fear is out the window these days. The unthinkable has become real: irrational fears have become rational. You say, for instance, "I'm paranoid about Larry; I think he's a narc." Now, Larry may not be a narc, and in that case, since you have smoked grass with him for three years, your fear of him is irrational, maybe even disgraceful (since he's always laid so much free stuff on you). By using the word paranoid, you acknowledge that possibility. But at the same time, saying that you're paranoid is an acknowledgment that while you might be off your rocker, so is the whole world, and, damn it, you would not be a bit surprised if one day old Larry whipped out a badge and busted you!

Webster's, take note: If things stay bad, a new definition may have to be added to the dictionaries. But for the time being, we shall distinguish between the word's present dictionary meaning and its popular connotations by referring to the latter as the New Improved Paranoia. It's basically the old fear but with some new ingredients added, bright new packaging and an unprecedented number of sponsors.

Recently, CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid was commenting on a speech by President Ford. Ford had just announced that he was opposed to wage and price controls and was absolutely not going to impose them. Sevareid squinted into the camera and speculated that the true meaning of Ford's speech was that wage and price controls were due any day and that Ford was really signaling the business community to hurry and jack up their prices before he put the freeze on them.

A few illustrations:

In other words, suggests Sevareid, the President uses a sort of secret language with veiled messages to special listeners. There are people confined to rooms with padded walls who maintain nothing more than that. But what Sevareid says is more akin to the political maxim developed by journalists during the Watergate years: Whenever a politician announces that he's not going to resign, it means that the guy's already got his desk cleaned and his bags packed. This bit of newspeak is actually a symptom of the New Improved Paranoia. Sevareid,

Speaking of Eric Sevareid, by the way, isn't it peculiar that you never see his legs? The camera is always focused on the top of him, so you begin to wonder: What about Eric Sevareid's legs? What is CBS trying to hide?

other journalists and, indeed, all of us respond in this suspicious and distrustful manner because of our many experiences with political double talk. We may be paranoid in the new sense of the word, but we're not crazy.

Actually, the New Improved Paranoia is a calm, well-reasoned state of mind, closer, perhaps, to apprehensiveness than to either old-fashioned, jitterbugging paranoia or outright, pissing-in-the-pants fear. It is, in fact, the entire purpose of the New Improved Paranoia to eliminate the terror of doubt, to replace chaos with order and to provide a sort of psychic seat belt in the face of continual world crack-ups. The meat shortage, stagflation. Agnew's resignation, Kohoutek, the Russian wheat deal, the energy crisis--all these bewildering catastrophes were made bearable by the New Improved Paranoia.

Consider the energy crisis of the winter of 1974. A parade of oil-company spokesmen appeared before TV cameras, swearing that the shortages were genuine, yet it was universally assumed that the whole thing was a wicked ruse. Not one housewife or commuter waiting in those endless gas lines swallowed the official explanations. Instead, with the aid of the New Improved Paranoia,

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