If I hear about one more conspiracy theory I will absolutely lose my mind, which is, of course, exactly what the ghouls are hoping so it only makes me feel worse.
It is disheartening to watch so many people succumb to lies, disinformation (what the fuck is that anyway I am tired of that word it is way too polite a term for lies), manipulation, abuse.
They don’t think Trump will burn this entire country, world, earth to blackened char but he absolutely will if given the chance. And too many people who should stand in his way don’t.
Last night my husband and I had a heated argument about the QAnon bullshit. He doesn’t believe it but he wants to know what the people who believe it believe.
It was a stupid fight as so many are but round and around we went about what is to be gained if anything by digging into the muck and trying to make some kind of sense out of it.
And somewhere between his passionate points and mine I thought: this is how it happens. This is how it makes us tear ourselves apart. How it makes us do it to ourselves, little by little. The fabric tears.
Little couples, little friends and family and people all over the world in their little homes smoking their silky Parliaments and screaming about what is true and what is not and not hearing a single word of it for what it is.
Not knowing.
But wanting to. Needing to. Trying to.
Not being able to ignore that one tiny shred of doubt.
But what if…?
But what about…?
But how can you be sure…?
But who told you and what is their angle?
Really, tho?
They will tell you not only that we need not tell the truth anymore but that the truth doesn’t even matter at all. And so the war blossoms like a desert flower underneath the raining ash. The war against thinking. The persecution of the scientist, the writer, the intellectual.
The rage against the mind.
The merciless bludgeoning of the psyche.
And so begins the newsfeed. A couple dying together in an overcrowded ICU. Smothered by a disease they do not believe exists.
This can’t be happening. It’s not even real.
Fear is fear and truth is fake.
The people dying are not dying. They aren’t even there.
He tells me he just wants to understand. He just has to get to the bottom of it so he knows how to defend his position. Our position.
Protect us. Protection. Against?
Know thy enemy.
I know. If I know one thing it is that the enemy is invisible as he turns you against me, me against you.
I pour more wine and watch the smoke curling in gray circles up inside the dark brick cavern of the fireplace. And I think about how the point of their conspiracy theory games is to make sure you want to get to the bottom of them.
And that you never will.
There is no bottom. Once they’ve got you, it is an endless fall.
Falling and falling, grasping for invisible walls.
.
Photo by Sonia Kardash
Allison Marie Conway 