Coincidences

 My reading and blogging life is made possible entirely by a series of fortuitous coincidences—"Synchronicities," as the New Age types could call them. Here I am, talking to my sister about the problems with the modern educational establishment, say; and I just happen to be reading D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, which then includes an extended narrative section in which the heroine Ursula Brangwen goes to work at a miserable government-run school and compares it to a prison. The basis for some future blog post starts to form, for every Six Foot Turkey post is, in honesty, nothing other than a clump of three or four such occurrences pulled from disparate sources (literary, political, autobiographical) and strung together through some such dimly-perceived connecting line. 

This post is not the education post, however, which the above synchronicity made possible. I'm still waiting for a third or fourth element to come my way in order to finish that one. This post, rather, is about the more fundamental underlying phenomenon of the synchronicities themselves, because The Rainbow furnished me with two even more striking examples of the same. The education/schooling connection, after all, is easily dismissed. It is a common enough theme in English literature, school being a close-to-universal experience in modern society, and I knew going in to the novel that Lawrence had worked as a school teacher as a young man, so perhaps I subconsciously sensed the connection, or might have been able to predict, if asked, that this experience would figure in a novel he published at age thirty. 

Getting Away With It

In this airplane-avoidant age of COVID I have had to make multiple long road trips to and from Boston over the past year, and I have done it enough times by now to have developed a routine. When I need to pick out some listening material for the journey, I always go with a Trump/Russia-related book. I don't know why this has become so compulsory to me, but nothing else seems to go as well with a long day on the road. It's something about the fact that these sorts of journalistic accounts alone manage to marry the guiltier pleasures of the true crime yarn with the ability to tell myself that I am just doing my patriotic duty of catching up on the last few years' political news and keeping abreast of current events. 

Whatever the reason, I have tried to have a Trump/Russia book at my side—or rather, piping through my phone's speakers—on every multi-day road trip I have undertaken since last fall; and the trouble with that plan is that they are finite in number. Having exhausted some of the more staid and cautious among them, I didn't know where else to turn. That is, until I learned from The Guardian that a new book had come out offering some of the more sensational revelations on this subject yet—including a former KGB agent who claims to have seen a memo circulating in the Washington Rezindentura in the 1980s that named Trump's full-page newspaper ads of the time (calling for things like the abandonment of the U.S. strategic alliance with Japan) as the Soviet intelligence "active measures" they were long rumored to be; a convoluted argument somehow linking these events to Jeffrey Epstein's secret blackmail operation; and so on. 

Conspiracy Theories

We are obviously living in an age of conspiracy—one of those great flare-ups of conspiracist thinking that are recurrent in American history. Once-fringe theories about global elite sex-trafficking rings and child murders, and even enormous space lasers,—all of them riddled with centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes hiding in plain sight—have migrated into the mainstream of one of America's two major political parties. As Francis Fukuyama recently observed, in a passage I've quoted now in multiple contexts: "There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship [...] reflected in poll data showing that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of QAnon theories about Democrats drinking children’s blood."

As Fukuyama rightly recognizes, this is a partisan phenomenon (only one of our two parties currently makes room for these cracked theories at the highest levels, and it is impossible to both-sides the issue). It is all too tempting, therefore, to see it as exclusively that. We can portray this as a delusion or psychosis that is rooted in the collective psyche of the Republican party alone—and viewed from that angle, there are in fact a few potential explanations for it that are inviting.