watching the x-files in reruns

[solarbird]

Anna's watching through the first season of The X-Files, having received it as a gift, and I'm looking at it, and remembering how - intentionally - paranoid it was at the time, and I'm sitting here being struck by how naive it actually was. I mean, the idea that Congress - much less individual Senators and Representatives - would matter, would not be massively derelict in their duties, would actually oppose gross conspiracy against law, and Constitution, and even their own power as a branch of the government is just kind of astounding to me now.

I mean, honestly - Agent Mulder first season is being protected in his work from groups like the NSA and other secretive governmental groups by his patrons on a Congressional subcommittee. It's just so... laughable.

Which is, I suppose, horrifying in an entirely different way than originally intended.

Comments

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

what? you mean they're NOT out there? Damn! and after I built my interstellar communication device too.

Actually though...

Kat's brother works for the NSA, and said that, while largely blown out of proportion, there is a lot of truth to the things that we're paranoid about. and people laugh at me for refusing to discard my paranoia.

[poodlgrl.livejournal.com]

Eric and I met the year it premiered. We were huge fans and I have the first few season (5?) I'm missing one season along the way, someone borrowed it and it was stolen while in their possession. Anyway, let me know if you guys want to borrow what I have. I don't think I'd ever watch it again anyway.

[solarbird]

I'm sorry about the associations now and stuff. But thanks, I'll tell Anna. ^_^

[avram]

Conspiracy theories are like that in general. I remember hearing the Bill Hicks routine about how each new president is taken into a room full of dark-suited men smoking cigars, and shown a film of the JFK assassination taken from a different angle than the Zapruder film, and asked "Any questions?". And it stuck me that that idea -- that a president has to be threatened with assassination by a mysterious cabal in a secret smoke-filled room -- was just a story Hicks was telling himself (and us) because he (and we) couldn't bear to face the truth: That America's monied interests buy whatever they want from the government, and anyone who bothers to read through the newspapers and the Congressional Record could assemble the receipts, and we, as a people, just don't care enough to do it.

I recently saw an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement in which he makes much the same point about the "9/11 Truth" movement:

At its heart, 9/11 Truth is a conceit, a narcissistic pipe dream for a dingbat, sheeplike population that is pleased to imagine itself dangerous and ungovernable. Rather than admit to their own powerlessness and irrelevance, or admit that they've spent the last fifty years or so electing leaders who openly handed their tax money to business cronies and golfed in Scotland while middle America's jobs were being sent overseas, the adherents to 9/11 Truth instead flatter themselves with fantasies about a ruling class obsessed with keeping the terrible truth from the watchful, exacting eye of The People.

[solarbird]

Oh, that's quite nice. I like that.