The Turk's Head

 One might not think it would be possible to be more incensed about the banalities of modernist architecture than Tom Wolfe was, in his book-length screed on the subject (the unforgivably named From Bauhaus to Our House). But apparently there is a contemporary online conspiracy theory that has managed to outdo even the seersucker suit–wearing author of Bonfire of the Vanities for sheer vituperative fury on the subject of Mies van der Rohe's creative offspring. 

As angry as Tom Wolfe was about boring and drab buildings, after all, he at least attributed their construction to nothing more sinister than the cloistered elitism of contemporary architects. But now, not content with this explanation, a generation of online crusaders has apparently become convinced that the shift in fashions from the splendors of Beaux-Arts and Art Deco of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the glass boxes of Philip Johnson can only be explained by a massive coverup and conspiracy. 

Specifically, devotees of this theory hold that the highly-ornamented pre-modernist architectural marvels that still retain their place in some historically-preserved districts of American cities are the last, embattled  remnants of a lost Central Asian superstate named "Tartaria," which formerly spanned the globe and shared its Xanadu-like splendors with every great capital of the Earth—before being overthrown and mysteriously erased from the historical record by some powerful, unseen force acting for unclear reasons, but which seems to have loved high-modern functionalism. 

Now, I owe my knowledge of this piece of pseudohistory, and the architectural conspiracy theories it has spawned, to that great podcast archive of eccentric lore, the Omnibus Project. And the number of times I have experienced some mysterious "synchronicity" in the presence of this podcast is legion, such that I can hardly be surprised by them at this point (I mean, two episodes before this was the one devoted to the subject of Stafford Beer, whom I had just been reading about for wholly unrelated reasons the week prior—even to the point of looking up his books on Amazon). 

Besides, there is nothing truly mysterious about these odd coincidences of thought. The Omnibus has even done an episode about the very phenomenon: the psychological experience known as the "Baader-Meinhof Effect," when something you've only just learned about appears to suddenly be everywhere. The true explanation for it, of course, is not a mysterious alignment in the universe, but rather the brain's ability to seize on these newly-acquired details—and notice/emphasize anything that relates to them—precisely because they are novel and therefore are most readily accessible to the mind. 

Even knowing the pitfalls of this cognitive bias, though, I still feel compelled to share the reasons why this episode's topic felt eerily timely to me. 

I recently started a new summer legal internship in Providence, Rhode Island, and on our first day, our supervisor showed us around the buildings of the city's small downtown financial district. They are largely nineteenth and early twentieth century Beaux-Arts and Art Deco style edifices—of exactly the sort that online conspiracy theorists are presently obsessing over and attributing to "Tartaria." And one of them is graced on the front, incongruously, with the glowering face of a man who appears to be Central Asian. 

Our supervisor, in her temporary role as tour guide, gestured to the grimacing visage and said, "Oh, and that's the angry Turk." "Who is he supposed to be?" I asked. "Why is he there?" It seemed like a mystery. Our supervisor just shrugged. "Who knows?" A fellow intern offered: "He looks like Genghis Khan." Then, one week later, I hear for the first time about this "Tartarian" conspiracy theory.

Now, of course, there is an actual history of this building and an explanation for the "Turk's Head" that appears over its front entrance. You can read all about it on the building's Wikipedia page. But for a moment at least, it was delightful to think: aha! Here is maybe a clue that the conspirators didn't catch, in their efforts to erase history and deprive the masses of the stately pleasure domes that were our birthright, and which our former Tartarian overlords meant to bequeath us! Or perhaps, in their arrogance, they didn't think that we would ever be smart enough to put the pieces together and uncover the truth. But in either case, here clearly is a forgotten monument to the lost superstate of Tartaria—and here is the towering Central Asian visage of one of their ancient lost rulers to prove it!

This, of course, is the true peril of these conspiracy theories, of which our era has been so prolific: they are fun. If they weren't so entertaining, they wouldn't be a problem—because a lot fewer people would be drawn into them to the point at which they lose touch with reality, and start believing in the frankly ludicrous.  

The dirty secret of our time is that most of us can see the appeal of conspiracy theories, even as we know all the reasons why they are preposterous, dangerous, and untrue. There's a reason why even many of the greatest American authors continually mine the vein of conspiracy theory in searching for literary tropes—Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and others have all made use of them. They do so because these theories are interesting—even if patently bogus. 

There are few things the human mind delights in more than unraveling a mystery. And most of the great mysteries that still linger in the domain of fact are beyond our cognitive ability or education level to fathom. I'm not going to be solving any Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics anytime soon. And so, we find delight in transforming the mundane and easily explicable into the sinister and mysterious. Maybe there is a Wikipedia article explaining the presence of the Turk's Head on the Providence building, we may admit—but.... that just shows how deep the cover-up goes!