Is Karl Rove Just Another Schlemiel?
Speaking of Thomas Pynchon and the yawning talent gap between him and the pretenders to his legacy, I've recently been contemplating Pynchon's ongoing meditations on paranoia. The paranoia that he portrays in his novels is far more profound than the simple notions of conspiracy found in the novels of Neal Stephenson and in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, his enjoyable but ultimately shallow update of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon's is paranoia as religion, with conspiracy theories as expressions of faith. It grows out of a deeply felt need for an underlying order, a need for the events with which we're confronted to be the result of someone's intention, no matter how malevolent. In fact, from that perspective, some might claim that religion is a form of paranoia. Believers see the machinations of an omnipotent God (and maybe of a competing embodiment of evil as well) behind all that happens.
Pynchon manages to sustain that paranoia without ever (to borrow a phrase from quantum physicists that Pynchon himself uses) reducing it to certainty. His novels (like the world in which we live) contain a nearly endless list of possible conspiracies (from media and/or corporate control of society to Pavlovian manipulation of an infant) and conspirators (from the Tristero postal system to the Jesuits), many of which appear to be working at cross purposes and seem to be thwarted as a result. We read his novels and recognize patterns everywhere, but he never tells us which patterns reflect something real and which are our own inventions. Perhaps they're all our own inventions. Perhaps they're all real and, together, add up only to the chaos that they're meant to overcome. That's the underlying reality of our existence: The Author of our existence will never fully reveal which of our attempts to explain that existence are valid and which are not, whether there is order or only chaos. Stephenson, Gibson, and other authors traffic in a far more superficial form of paranoia, elaborating modest conspiracies and then dissolving them with explanations.
This has come to mind as I've tried to make sense of the Valerie Plame affair. Many of President Bush's critics are understandably excited because his administration seems to have handed them a far larger cudgel to beat him with than President Clinton ever managed to hand to his adversaries. They're finding some of their foulest conspiracy theories confirmed. But mostly I'm puzzled. If, as Bush's critics fear, his administration seeks unprecedented erosion of civil rights, invasion of privacy, and silencing of dissent (as events strongly suggest), why would they do something that would so thoroughly undermine their credibility with the intelligence community upon which they would presumably be relying? The great fear is that the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Justice Department, and others, acting through the Office of Homeland Security and with the support of some truly frightening legislation, will unite to form the intelligence apparatus of some sort of statist nightmare largely under the control of Bush's administration. Yet here we have the CIA publicly demanding that the Justice Department investigate that administration. This isn't a very orderly conspiracy. And so it is with all grand conspiracies: They're human efforts and they eventually succumb to the frailties--greed, anger, ambition, vanity, weakness, stupidity, etc.--of their creators. Only the Original Author is capable of a successful conspiracy.
7:34:42 AM 
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