And then I saw the fnords…
Between Adam Weishaupt and Dan Brown at the conspiracy
banquet table sits Robert Anton Wilson (www.rawilson.com), keeping the
conversation lively. (He and Umberto Eco provide the best banter all night
long.) In the wake of the Da Vinci Code,
you might think that a few of the conspiracy classics could creep onto the
bestseller lists, but we are a fickle people. Wilson is responsible for some of the most
engaging entries in the secret societies library: The Illuminatus Trilogy (co-authored with Robert Shea), along with
a shelf worth of related tomes (The
Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Schrodinger’s
Cat Trilogy). As opposed to Brown, Wilson
was never satisfied with one or two hidden puppet masters. His work tries to
find the synchronicity between every bit of vaguely believable real-world
idiocy (Casanova and Watergate, for instance), those edge-of-vision
unbelievable facts (North American Vikings, Nazi occult research), and the
full-blown manic wah-wahhs (Area 51 aliens, Templars in space). Despite the
weight of all this combined weirdness, Wilson
succeeds where so many have failed because he uses levity to significantly
lighten the load born by his prose.
If his name otherwise sounds familiar, Robert A. Wilson was
a quasi-celebrity a few years ago when the officials in Santa Cruz, California,
made him their first citizen to receive medical cannabis, which had been
recently legalized. That was a short-lived experiment for Wilson once the federal government
intervened. Sometimes the conspiracies are large and thoughtless.
Sometimes the conspiracies are miraculous and blessed.
Nowadays, Wilson
is in the process of dying from post-polio syndrome. Word went out a few weeks
ago that he had been reduced to destitution. A community of Internet angels
conspired to let one of the good guys die at home in peace by raising funds for
his continued care. Fnord.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2006.
