aleX joneS is the Fred Flintstone of our time

WWW--The fascination--even my own--just continues to boggle my mind. He has no real ideas of his own, but he's burly and loud and shows absolute certainty and credulousness at all times. There's no conspiracy theory he wouldn't love to have thought up. It seems he's the last guy on earth to have heard of Bohemian Grove. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the gathering place of the elites decision-makers in the California redwoods way back in 1956 in his book The Power Elite, when rock was being born and Eisenhower was president.

America's global power had reached an apex, and it's been downhill ever since. Mills didn't think Bohemian Grove amounted to much and that it was simply a place for the influential to unwind and sometimes talk shop. I don't think he was mistaken, but even reading the implications of what Mills concluded, you can presume that deals are made and consecrated there. And? That's not a conspiracy, it's reasonably out in the open. Were that not so, Jones himself would never have been able to sneak in, but then you begin to realize that this is more about oversimplified explanations and the cult of personality than anything else.

With all of his yammering about government being evil, you'd think Alex Jones was merely an extremist Republican, not that that's saying much these days. Perhaps this is why he's becoming more mainstream. It's beyond my understanding why Slacker director Richard Linklater has placed Jones in two of his computer rotoscope films, Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), based on the paranoid meditation on informant and surveillance culture by Philip K. Dick., except that he literally sees him as a cartoon character. If that's what he means, I'm with him. Jones is a symptom of a very sick body politic.

While he espouses being against the wars in the Middle East on the one hand as Ron Paul does, he's also spreading misinformation about the current president and his birth certificate on the other. Jones is a clown at best, but I have to wonder if he's around to bad-jacket information that's actually valid and true. But most of all, he really just looks like a shaved ape with a Halloween mask on, yelling at the top of his lungs that there's a fire in the crowded theater of America when there's merely smoke. He is alarmist in his rhetoric. He is a conflater and a spreader of hysteria. He is not the answer, and he is a demagogue. What he constitutes is a great example of delusions of adequacy, and the dark underbelly of Populism. He is a very dangerous man.

Postscript 10.17.2009: And if you don't believe me, look at the one you're with! We'll just say that Ted Nugent is Jones's Barney Rubble.