mystoryorhistory

It could be argued that most of American history can be interpreted through visions of unreality. My family loves to watch The Masked Singer and The Masked Dancer. They get a big kick out trying to figure out who is behind those exotic costumes. I grew up more in era of Sergeant Joe Friday: Just the facts… not cloaked in some shroud of fantasy but a man in a gray suit with narrow lapels and wearing a thin tie taking notes.

Recently I was watching HBO’s documentary on QAnon, Q: Into the Storm. As I watched the first episode I could not help but think how Americans love a good fantasy especially if it is cloaked in a mystery and salted with sexual behavior, particularly if it is prurient. For some reason sex makes it more believable.

Now I do not know much at all about QAnon, nor do I really want to. The internet search for the masked “Q” is beyond me with encrypted messages and social media platforms: 4chans or 8chans. It sounds more like what George Smiley and The Circus would be doing in a John le Carre novel. Or a more complicated game of Clue: Hillary Clinton did it with the Rope in the Pizzaria. And I think this is where we are at in time. Reality reads more like a game or fantasy/spy novel. It makes for great reading or a movie; but really. The problem becomes one person’s fantasy starts to creep into another’s reality.

I think of how Americans love a good story–the truth be damned. We love the missing pieces so much we get reeled in hook-line-and-sinker hitting at anything. We have even fought wars over phantom torpedo boats attacking US Navy Destroyers. We searched high and low in Iraq for Weapons of Mass Destruction and found out that maybe it was just a Saddam scavenger hunt. I really think we want to believe in the absurd. Who killed JFK? Was it the lone gunman in the book depository, Cubans behind the grassy knoll, the mafia or the CIA with exploding cigars? As far as Kennedy goes, it might as well be as the Rolling Stones sing: “well after all it was you and me,” There is always enough truth in the story to get us all fired up. When we cannot figure it out we make stuff up and extrapolate the story from there.

But on more benign level of fakery, take PT Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid. Americans flocked to see this freak of nature. Barnum, like many hucksters today, was media savvy. His use of the 1840’s media, peppered with expert opinions on the poor beast, created an insatiable interest, particularly the rare opportunity to see a bare-breasted mermaid. People were laying down good money and making PT Barnum rich in the process. Afterall, as Randy Newman sings: “It is money that matters in the U-S-of-A.” If anything, that has been the one constant fantasy in America. Who wants to be a millionaire?

As I continued watching the show I became lost in the technical workings of social media. The speculation that Q was sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom and riding on Air Force One–for all we know he may be piloting it. The more I watched the more it reminded me of the television series Lost. ABC hit the mother lode for a story. People surviving an airplane crash on a tropical island. Nobody ever survives an airplane falling from 35,000 feet. But that ain’t gonna stop us from believing it could happen. Get out the tackle box load up the boat because we are going fishing.

What started out with a an unbelievable plot turned into multiple realities; an island that can move about; a mysterious smoke monster; “others” who also inhabit the island; and characters named after historical figures like Locke, Faraday, Roussou and Boone. I watched that show to the end, and probably like people who follow the Q, I liked it. I was always wondering where the writers and J.J. Abrams were taking us. They tied everything together in science, fiction and mythology. I imagined the writers, sitting around stoned and coming up with these weird plot twists. Every episode required an even weirder plot twists to explain the previous plot twists. Pretty soon the whole show was out there in the ozones and I had to wonder if the only way to make any sense of the show is that you had to be stoned to get it.

After watching the first episode of Q: Into the Storm I felt glad I was living in a state where recreational marijuana is allowed because QAnon seems to be just as bizarre as LOST. It made me feel like I really missed something by not playing Dungeons and Dragons in my youth. I think I would have had better insight to this realm of the reality that is being foisted upon us: pizza with pedophilia toppings. We go in the opposite direction of the Sherlock Holmes maxim: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

So who is Q? Maybe he is today’s alter ego of LOST’s Smoke Monster: somebody blowing a lot of smoke up our knickers.