Steamshovel is the magazine edited/published by Kenn Thomas. Some issues ago Thomas adopted the slogan (or mission statement): “all conspiracy - no theory”; and that is on the front cover of Popular Paranoia, along with: “Conspiracy! UFOs! True Crime! Mind Control! Parapolitics!”; a pulp crime scene painting, sprawling woman, man with gun in hand; and the title, in pulp magazine typeface, Popular Paranoia. Is Thomas telling us that Steamshovel is the successor to the pulp ‘true crime/ true confessions’ mags of the 1950s and 1960s?
This soft-back, A4, 314 page book is issues 14–18 of Steamshovel, with the text reset but with the illustrations retained. This typographic change makes it appear more serious, less ‘pulp’ than the magazine originals. Thomas’s list of nouns and exclamation marks above kind of covers the contents but doesn’t catch his particular bent.
Thomas’s heroes are the likes of Wilhelm Reich, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac - counterculture figures of the 1960s and ‘70s. And it was in that counterculture, rather than in the orthodox American left, that the political cultural fringe (including Kenn’s subject list above) - what is now perceived as today’s conspiracy culture - began to appear. Despite the book’s cover, Steamshovel is an incarnation not of the true crime/true confessions genre but of the 1960s and ’70s underground press, with the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll replaced by paranoia about the American state.
All of which may convey less than the following, the first four articles in the anthology: AIDS heretic Alan Cantwell ruminating on “paranoia/paranoid: buzz words to silence the politically incorrect”; an interview with assassination/ conspiracy writer John Judge from the Committee on Political Assassinations (Judge comes out with something very good: “Michael McClure said years ago that even paranoids have enemies. But that doesn’t mean that the paranoids know who their enemies are”) ; a portrait of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a New Age Christian mystic; and an interview with Stan Gordon about the Kecksberg UFO Mystery. Heresy! Assassination! Mysticism! UFOs!
Len Bracken writes for Steamshovel and his book would slip easily into the same genre. Bracken thinks there is something fishy about 9/11 and the anthrax incident which swiftly followed, though he hasn’t decided if those events were “facilitated or engendered by [American] statesmen” (p34), “something of an inside job” (p115), or that “the United States allowed it to happen” (p142). Bracken rehearses the main elements of the conspiratorial view of 9/11 in the context of many historical examples, going from the Greeks in 400 BC through to the “strategy of tension in Italy in the 1970s”, showing that states have always been prepared to perpetrate acts of terror against their own citizens.
The best place to pursue the 9/11 story remains the Internet, but Bracken’s rather slim book - 268 pages but big type, double-spaced - is infinitely better than the two by Thierry Meysann, Pentagate and 9/11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot) on the same subject.
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