It's a conspiracy, don'tcha know?

"I just don't trust the government."

Hm? I inquired -not bothering to look up from the new Gaiman novel I've been enjoying. Maybe if I act semi-interested, he'll take the hint and leave me be, I mused quietly.

"The government. I just can't trust 'em."

I hazarded a glance over the top of my page. The better to assess my friend's demeanor, and was met with a visage of astonishing earnestness. Sighing softly, I abandoned my pursuit of Gaiman's fantastic world and settled into the mundane. The look in my compatriot's eye was unmistakable. He seemed gripped with weighty proclamation. A hard won and weary world view that would brook no delay in it's discussion.

You don't trust the government?

"Nope."

Well... okay. Fair enough. Why not?

"Well," he intoned, "for one thing, they were behind 9/11."

What?

"No really.. Think about it. It's obvious."

Okay. I'm thinking about it. I'll hear you out. What makes you so certain our government was behind it?

"Too many things don't add up. Don't make sense."

Well.. setting aside the possibility that not everything in this world is guaranteed to make sense, give me an example.

"Okay. Think about this. A huge plane crashes full speed into the side of the tower, right?"

Yes..?

"Well.. why didn't the tower fall over? Instead it just sorta, collapsed in on itself. It looked just like those movies you see all the time where they destroy old buildings with explosives. It looked just like that, right?"

Well.. yes. Okay. It did look like that somewhat."

"See! The government blew those buildings up!"

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It's a semi-persuasive argument. One you may have encountered before. It appeals to common sense. After all, if I run my hand into a glass of water on a counter -it doesn't shatter. The glass falls over. The towers didn't fall over, they fell inward. Something's fishy there, right?

Well.. no. Not really. Not if you have any real concept of how the buildings were constructed. Consider the following excerpt of an interview off of http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html with Dr. Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at M.I.T.:

NOVA: The Twin Towers collapsed essentially straight down. Was there any chance they could have tipped over?

Eagar: It's really not possible in this case. In our normal experience, we deal with small things, say, a glass of water, that might tip over, and we don't realize how far something has to tip proportional to its base. The base of the World Trade Center was 208 feet on a side, and that means it would have had to have tipped at least 100 feet to one side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the building out beyond its base. That would have been a tremendous amount of bending. In a building that is mostly air, as the World Trade Center was, there would have been buckling columns, and it would have come straight down before it ever tipped over.

Have you ever seen the demolition of buildings? They blow them up, and they implode. Well, I once asked demolition experts, "How do you get it to implode and not fall outward?" They said, "Oh, it's really how you time and place the explosives." I always accepted that answer, until the World Trade Center, when I thought about it myself. And that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is, there's no other way for them to go but down. They're too big. With anything that massive -- each of the World Trade Center towers weighed half a million tons -- there's nothing that can exert a big enough force to push it sideways.

Upon relaying this information to my friend, he eventually agreed that his assumptions might be wrong. Yet he continued to insist that he still thought the government was behind the attacks.

"I just can't trust them." he explained.

This is, of course, the trouble with conspiracy theory. It's just to neat. Too pat. Too irresistible for the the intellectually lazy to resist. Facts are left unchecked because facts can be "faked". Experts are discounted because "somebody got to them". Conspiracies dwell in shadows. Unseen. Vague. And once that suspicion is cast upon a subject, the subject is wholly tainted. Obfuscated in a web of lies.

Those lies.. half-truths and unsupported suppositions, are usually in the hands of the conspiracists , however. My friend isn't a liar. He's actually quite honest. But he has been duped. Turned into a co-conspiracist through his unwillingness to fact check. And when it comes to citizenship, once you accept as unparalleled fact that unseen government agents lurk behind each and every event or tragedy this nation endures, our government is transformed whole cloth into a tapestry of sinister, whispered motives.

Never mind that our officials are usually far too inept to engage in the kind of massive operations these conspiracists suggest without mucking them up. Or at least getting caught in the act of perpetuating these frauds.

No. Once you accept as fact what is vague and unsubstantiated -incompetence becomes the very cover story under which these ne'er do wells may act. It becomes easier to pay less and less attention to our nation's affairs, all the while kept warm in smug self assurances that we know what's really going on -and that those who keep "informed" are actually in the dark. Left unchecked, this becomes the very mechanism by which we are increasingly divorced from our government. Of the people. By the people. If the government becomes a sinister stranger to us, well.. whose fault is that?

It almost sounds... like a conspiracy.

And it is. A conspiracy of ignorance. Of intellectual dishonesty. A massive conspiracy of who can be bothered. Can't trust the government?

Well.. Who can trust you?