Expectorating The Fantastical

I’ve been waking up at sunrise
I’ve been following the light across my room
I watch the night receive the room of my day
Some people say the sky is just the sky
But I say
Why deny the obvious child?
Why deny the obvious child?

–Paul Simon

The paradox of the digital age is that the more an event or occurrence is documented and recorded, the less likely we are to believe it’s truth. A measurement’s increase in accuracy seems to conversely create a widespread lack of faith in it’s original base unit. While very few question the mysterious floods and hurricanes of ancient ages, any modern event caught by four cameras or more will have a whole community based around it’s alternate theories and reasoning.

On September 11th 2001, I, like many, tuned in to television and saw, live, a plane hitting a tower and it’s impact and explosion causing the collapse of that tower. I assumed–following every law of logic known to man–that something so clearly displayed before my eyes was what it was. I still do. And yet, hours of footage, pages of engineering reports, witness accounts, and the perpetrators own admissions have not been able to stop a so-called 9/11 “Truth” Movement (whose fellows seem to be becoming more numerous on the streets of this city than apocalyptic faith healers). Where I saw planes, some now see dynamite; where I witnessed fire, some imagine small-nuclear weapons; where I heard Arabic spoken on airplanes’ black boxes, some smelt everything from a tiny group of Jews to FEMA, Bilderberg, and beyond. Are these times so uncertain and complicated, that even our eyes and ears have joined a conspiratorial cabal?

Evolution, a process observed and replicated in every living thing from Bacteria to Elephants, has found it’s own simplicity being attacked lately. Throughout America, a country pumped full of drugs and vaccines created on the evolutionary premise, an anti-theory known as Intelligent Design (ID) has taken hold of churches and even classrooms. The theory is actually an interesting one: Things on Earth are so unbelievably complex that they must have been made by some greater power. How this theory actually works depends on who you ask, it’s conclusions being as up-for-grabs and as numerous as the many villains of the aforementioned terrorist attack. But this concept, Irreducible Complexity, seems to sum up our natural belief in nature (human and otherwise) quite well. Things are just so complex that we can never truly hope to understand them, right?

The first Tuesday of this November, we will go to our local polling places and vote for our next President, a process never once interrupted–whether in times of insurrection or war–since the founding of this republic. The next day, all the technical glitches and numerical inaccuracies found will be put before the public and officials for scrutiny and examination. All the votes will be tallied not as a whole, but in small doses for every thousands of districts. However, as I write this, there’s a growing belief that these votes are so predetermined, that the real numbers are so inconsequential to the actual results, and that this election and the elections for another generation have so already been decided by a small unnamed group, that voting itself is little more than a cosmetic process, meant to give the aurora of democracy.

And all over the web can be found downright assurances that the contender of these previously mentioned elections, Senator Obama, will be assassinated, it’s only a matter of time till the reactionary thems get to him. Yet the list of assassinated President shows that such a claim is as unpredictable as the ideologies of it’s victims were vastly different; grow this list to include attempted assassinations and it becomes more chaotic: rather than a group of Government actors and Masonic patsies, the club of American assassins includes a starlet-obsessed nerd, a homeless lunatic hell-bent, despite no qualifications, on becoming the ambassador to France, a lonesome anarchist, and a leftover member of the Manson family.

There’s an old prank that Math professors play on their students here in the City’s many universities: give them a list of the street numbers for any Subway line, tell them it’s a number list, and ask them to find the pattern. Fierce, young math students will study the problem endlessly, come up with a million different patterns that would be correct if one or two numbers were just slightly different, and then either give-up exasperated or defend their ridiculous concoctions. The point is, there is no pattern; New York Subway stations were placed based on location, not numbers.

Sometimes things really are as they seem and all the superfluous information we add on to it is, well, really superfluous. But the greater the tools get for slicing away this theoretical excess, the greater our need to create more of it becomes, however ridiculous our theories may be. The simple truth, it seems, is often far scarier for human beings than the complicated fantasy.