Last night two documentaries each made a particle contribution to a conclusive explanation of precisely what the hell is going wrong in the land of my birth these days. The first, Conspiracy Files: The Trump Dossier (BBC2), set out to explore some of the conspiracy theories Donald Trump has deployed over the course of his campaign.
One could argue that in these dark times we have great need for programming dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories, but nobody who believes the moon landings were faked is going to be swayed by anything as straightforward as evidence.
Conspiracy Files went one better – shedding light on the motivations of the theorists themselves. Somewhere behind all the paranoiacs and numbskulls are a group of people – for lack of a better term, let’s call them bad guys – who propound and promulgate conspiracy theories for their own ends. People for whom facts are an inconvenience. People like Donald Trump.
Trump rose to political prominence as a leading light of the birther movement, a long and thoroughly disreputable campaign to de-legitimise America’s first black president by insinuating that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US. Though he had nothing to add to the theory beyond publicity, he stubbornly maintained its validity until it stopped helping him, at which point he unceremoniously abandoned it.
One wonders how such disloyalty is viewed by hardcore birthers. Moldovan dentist Orly Taitz thinks Obama’s birth certificate is an anachronistic forgery, because it lists Obama’s father as “African” instead of “Negro”. She seems to view this as a cover-up undone by political correctness gone mad.
“This is so bad, it’s like it’s done by a retarded five-year-old,” she says. You hear this a lot in conspiracy theorist circles: the people who secretly perpetrated the biggest fraud in history are total morons. Later on, a handwriting expert who claims a suicide note written by Vince Foster (the Clinton associate who killed himself in 1993) was fake derided it as “amateurish, sloppy; I’ve seen better by kids”.
Throughout his campaign, Trump has been aided, directly or indirectly, by people who have, at best, a tangential relationship to the truth. There is Trump adviser and former Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone, for whom “History is a set of lies agreed upon” is a motto. There’s the National Enquirer editor who, faced with one of his own headlines, says, “‘Ted Cruz’s Father Linked to JFK Assassination’ – what’s wrong with that?” This wasn’t really a documentary about the triumph of paranoia and fear, but of cynicism. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday to see if it has taken charge.
If you did fancy a documentary about the triumph of paranoia and fear, The Gun Shop: Cutting Edge (Channel 4) fits the bill. It was, if anything, an even more disheartening look at the present state of American affairs. Focusing on the staff and customers of a single premises in Battle Creek, Michigan, The Gun Shop was almost entirely populated by people who believe the solution to America’s gun epidemic is way more guns.
Freedom Firearms sells weapons, operates a shooting range and offers tuition. The proprietor tracks the popularity of guns by “how many people take part in my concealed carry class”. Here he schools people in the “21 foot rule”: apparently if someone within that range fancies stabbing you, you won’t be able to draw your gun in time to save yourself. “So don’t let people get too close,” he says.
His clientele were all nice people who just happened to share a worldview that was irrational, fearful and bolstered by wrongheaded slogans (“An armed society is a polite society”). Folks really do respond to news of gun crime by going straight out to purchase a gun. Single mum Courtney bought a handgun because “my social media has just blown up with all the craziness that’s going on in the world”. Then she taught her nine-year-old son to use it.
In the midst of this chilling portrait of everyday gun-shopping, I thought I detected some reasons to be faintly hopeful: nobody seemed consumed by hate; everybody seemed to take the responsibility of gun-ownership seriously, even if they didn’t seem to give much consideration to the idea of killing another human being; there wasn’t much in the way of right-to-bear-arms pontificating. But I gave in to despair as the shop owner walked staff through an armed robbery scenario. He wasn’t so worried about the 21ft rule. “I’ve got other employees who’re gonna smoke him,” he said. “He’s gonna be in a circular firing squad.”
The notion of a circular firing squad is about as apt a metaphor for the US’s relationship with guns as I’ve heard, and it’s not remotely encouraging.
