You Might Be a Zombie . . . (28 page)

Dave’s been drinking again.

Naturally, the chipmunks are kept pantless, forced to clothe themselves in modified burlap sacks. The fact that Alvin, Simon, and Theodore never attempt to escape suggests that the entire show is an exercise in Stockholm syndrome, and the mere
existence
of the Chipettes implies an organized ring of abusive slave-parents exploiting their children for the good of the vast and powerful novelty-song industry. At least the Powerpuff Girls got superpowers.

CONSPIRACY
theorists rank alongside Scientologists and urine-soaked hobos as people you should general y not believe: 9/11 was not an inside job, vitamins don’t cure everything, and that dog cannot read your thoughts. That said, it’s not as if the concept of conspiracy is a purely fictional thing. In fact, there are five little-known conspiracies that manynon-urine-soaked individuals believe nearly brought down the United States of America.

5. THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION

Remember when John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan? Imagine how weird it would have been if he actually succeeded and if, instead of being some crazy bastard who’d seen
Taxi Driver
too many times, he’d been Robert De Niro. That’s the WTF scenario Americans woke up to the morning after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous and respected actors in the country.

The plot behind the assassination is also far stranger than your textbooks might have let on. They probably told you Booth was just a murderous lunatic with unknown motivations, rather than part of a far-reaching plan to overthrow the entire U.S. government that came terrifyingly close to succeeding.

Back then, the government was a much less stable system. If modern politics is a game of Jenga in which careful maneuvering is needed to alter even the small est piece of legislation, then old-timey politics was also like a game of Jenga, except that it wasn’t against the rules to just uppercut the whole damn stack off the table and declare yourself winner for life.

Unhappy with the outcome of the Civil War, Booth hatched a simple plot: He and his coconspirators would murder the president, vice president, general-in-chief, and secretary of state simultaneously, toppling the U.S. government so the South could rise again. And if they’d pull ed it off, no safeguards were yet in place to protect the sanctity of the administration. Historian Jay Winik is of the opinion that even a simultaneous assassination of the president and vice president would have done the trick. Luckily for the United States, murderers aren’t that reliable: most of the assassins chickened out, except Booth and Lewis Powel , who went to Secretary of State will iam Seward’s home and overdosed on stab crazy, perforating Seward, the Union general guarding him, his nurse, his children, a messenger, and probably any pets that Seward had. However, the joke was ultimately on Powel : Seward survived despite dozens of stab wounds because, as Teddy Roosevelt would later prove, politicians were mostly carved from wood back then, and nothing short of a forest fire could put one down.

4. THE BURR CONSPIRACY

Aaron Burr is what is known in the political realm as a “total bastard.” In 1800, he narrowly lost the presidential race to Thomas Jefferson, which he blamed on his political rival Alexander Hamilton and
not
the aforementioned bastard issue. Due to the somewhat bizarre rules of the era’s politics—more
Thunderdome
than
Primary Colors
—coming in second made him the vice president, a position in which he served admirably right up until 1804, when he was informed that Jefferson was essential y firing him for his second term. Burr responded by running for governor of New York, losing, blaming Alexander Hamilton again, and then murdering him in public.

Some might consider going from being the nation’s third vice president to unemployed murderer a bad year. Instead, Burr decided to embrace the supervil ain role he was so clearly born to play. After murdering Hamilton, he set his sights high and began a decade-long plot with the endgame of—ready?—becoming king of the western United States. He began buying up most of Texas from the Spanish government and hiring a modest army of well-armed “farmers” to work it for him. When America went to war with Spain over the western territories, he planned to use his army to seize territory for himself. If you’re thinking Burr was just a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, you should know that he had the commander in chief of the region’s army and a young Andrew “Craps Thunder and Pisses Murder” Jackson on his side. If the Spanish had gotten off their lazy asses to start the Spanish-American War thirty years earlier, Texas very wel could have ended up as a monarchy with Burr its first king.

He was eventual y arrested for conspiracy, but, despite the best efforts of Thomas Jefferson, he was never convicted. That’s not altogether surprising since he also got off for Hamilton’s murder despite having shot him in a public duel witnessed by some of Hamilton’s best friends. We weren’t kidding around about the bastard thing.

3. MR. BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION

If you think the power-crazed Burr was the highest a conspiracy ever got in the U.S. government, we’d like to introduce you to President Buchanan, who took office with one noble and lofty goal in mind: to deal with the slavery problem once and for all . It’s just too bad his way of “dealing with it” was to legalize it nationwide.

Buchanan first tried to accomplish this by meddling in the landmark Supreme Court case of
Dred Scott v. Sandford
, which in 1857 set a precedent that
all
persons of African descent were to be regarded as nonhumans and therefore property. With part A of Operation Worst Goddamn President Ever accomplished, Buchanan moved on to aiding the South in its quest for secession.

That’s right, the president
encouraged
secession. While Confederate skirmishes raged on unchecked in the state of Kansas, Buchanan claimed that it was wel beyond his ability to interfere in matters of secession—despite the fact that he’d just finished doing it to the Mormons in Utah. Due to his stal ing, the Confederate army was able to arm itself with the stolen weaponry that made the Civil War possible. Hey, but at least he kept the Mormons from taking over Utah, right?

2. OPERATION SNOW WHITE

Sometime during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided its religion wasn’t getting the respect it deserved. Instead of converting to a slightly less sil y set of beliefs, it did what any reasonable alien-god-fearing American would: declared a covert war on the U.S. government.

The goal was basical y to destroy every single sensitive document that made the religion look bad, in hopes that it would help in their prolonged war to become an official y recognized (as in tax-exempt) religion. The incredible scope of the plot came to light when two men were arrested trying to enter the U.S. Courthouse in Washington with fake IRS credentials. One of the men was sent to jail where he refused to talk, while the other, Michael J. Meisner, gave a fake name and disappeared.

According to
Time
, a year later Meisner “turned himself in, identified himself . . . and said he had just escaped from two months of ‘house arrest’ by cult members.” He went on to describe how the church had planted employees in the IRS and Justice Department “for the express purpose of stealing documents concerning investigations of Scientology.” He also said they’d broken into the IRS and planted a bug in a conference room, and stolen mind-boggling amounts of sensitive information. After humoring what they must have assumed was just a crazier-than-average Scientologist, the FBI obtained search warrants, just in case, and conducted a raid on Scientology offices that confirmed every word of Meisner’s account.

Scientology’s crack commandos had wiretapped and burglarized various agencies and stolen hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. In the end, 136 organizations, agencies, and foreign embassies were infiltrated. According to the
Phoenix New Times
, Operation Snow White was the largest infiltration of the U.S. government in history. Ever. Of the many thousand hostile governments and criminal organizations that have wanted to get their hands on sensitive U.S. intel igence, the people who actually managed to pull it off also believe that
Battlefield Earth
is a documentary.

It’s impossible to say if the church was able to use information pilfered from the IRS toward its intended goal. But it’s certainly strange that it didn’t seem to hurt: In 1993 the IRS, the very organization it had freaking wiretapped less than fifteen years before, gave the Church of Scientology exactly what it was after, granting it recognition as an official religion. Toppling the U.S. government may not have been the stated goal, but of all the conspiracies on this list, Scientologists probably walked away from the ordeal with the most reason to believe that, should it ever become necessary, Washington, D.C., was as easy to take down as Grenada.

1. THE BUSINESS PLOT

Notice how not-fascist America is right now? It’s nice, right? well, just a few decades ago there was a plan to end this whole democracy thing, and some pretty heavy players were involved.

In 1933, a group of wealthy businessmen, which all egedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, and the Du Pont family, and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and instal a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And, yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one U.S. president and was grandfather to another.

What went wrong? well, as they say, never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup. Smedley was both a patriot
and
a vocal FDR

supporter. Apparently, none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.

Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none were brought up on criminal charges, presumably because the defendants were each independently wealthy enough to hire the Supreme Court as their legal representation. still , the House’s McCormack-Dickstein Committee deemed the general’s testimony credible, before it was promptly swept under the rug of history (a gorgeous oriental number the people involved in the conspiracy paid for).

The lesson here? No matter how wealthy you are, you don’t do business with guys named Smedley and you never piss off a man named Dickstein.

IN DISASTER MOVIES

THE
good news is that most of the spectacular natural disasters Hollywood and the mainstream media worry over are either exaggerated or totally made up. The bad news: nature is chock-ful of ticking time bombs quietly waiting to turn the world into one of the scary books in the Bible, and you’ve probably never heard of any of them.