In the following blog I am going to explain all conspiracy theories and, if lucky, offend and alienate far more people than usual. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about offending anyone who thinks, just the conspiracy theorists. OK, here goes:

The big thing these days for an apparently large portion of people who subscribe to the Internet are conspiracies. That should probably be “is conspiracy” or maybe even “is conspiracies” because, while that sounds grammatically incorrect, there is only one conspiracy out there. It has more heads than a Lyrnian Hydra and there is an unwritten rule (it probably IS written somewhere, that’s part of the conspiracy) that any conspiracy articles have a minimum of three grammatical errors and at least twice that many spelling errors for every eight paragraphs. (There’s probably something about the number eight, but we won’t go into that now because THEY’RE watching, MAN!)

I have a formerly rational friend who sends me a lot of these conspiracies. Well, he doesn’t actually send me the conspiracy. He sends me a link to a web site (which conforms with frightening uniformity to the above-mentioned grammar rules) with a URL like www.truestuffandyoumustbeoneofTHEMifyoudon’t believeit.guv and an article detailing the latest irrefutable (unless, possibly, you approach it with something groundbreaking like common sense) piece of “fact” (“fact” being defined as “whatever @#$% thing I just made up and you must be a freakin’ COMMIE if you disagree, you NIV-reading punk!”).

Besides the poor grammar and spelling, these sites hold in common a strangely fraternal fear of all things Mason, or Masonic. At first I thought they were referring to the guy I knew in high school named “Paul Mason” with whom I once entered into one of the most phenomenally unsuccessful lawn-mowing businesses in the history of the modern (post-Hiram) world. I found it hard to believe he was responsible for so much and in control of so much considering between the two of us we rarely got the mower started.

Now, are there several conspiracies out there or just one? At first, it seems like a simple question, but then this was all created by simple people so the answer is, of course, complex. Conspiracies abound if one knows how (and why—but that’s a dissertation in itself) to look for them. Recent events such as the power blackout are not what they seem, having been caused by foreign agents disguised as disgruntled religious fanatics, or religious fanatics disguised as members of a bizarre cult, or cult members disguised as (you’d be surprised how often this happens) attic fans. This event on the surface seemed completely unrelated to other unfortunate events such as the repeated failures of the Mars probes and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Super Bowl victory but they are all intricately related if one has only the temerity to dig beneath the surface like a podiatrist attaching a particularly noxious nail infection. Each “separate” event has a group, or several groups, behind it, usually identified as either the Masons, anyone who reads anything other than the King James Bible (including soup labels and traffic signs), the Illuminati (so-called because the only thing ever concretely pinned on them was the invention of those chem-light glow-in-the-dark necklaces one finds at Six Flags and which were intended to be a secret transmitter—like the strip in the twenty dollar bill—allowing the controlling power to track the whereabouts of all wearers except that they are most popular with teen-age girls which isn’t really a problem because they’re heavily into white slavery), and most of your street hot dog vendors.

They are not, of course, separate. The failure of the Mars probes can be definitely (if not categorically, empirically or logically) attributed to the Masons, a secret society on earth predating the birth of Christ (according to their own papers, Christ himself was a Mason*), the flood, and even their own existence. According to voluminous unsited sources, the Masons are in direct contact with a race of super-beings from outside this world who sent a probe to earth in the early nineties whose path just happened to intersect with and destroy our Mars probe** (whole big galaxy, two objects traveling super fast, and they couldn’t even steer well enough to miss!) and their own probe as well, which was to deliver the final message necessary for the Masonic take-over of the planet—which is, of course, stupid, because most conspiracy theorists are already convinced the Masons already control the planet.

After the destruction of the probe from the outside influencers, the Masons and Illuminati conspired to put Bill Clinton on the throne. Once out of the restroom, they put him in the Presidency. According to one theory, he then set about creating the One World Order which may or may not be prophesied in the Bible, which may or may not be a divinely inspired book. This is a key point because the conspiracy theorists like to tell us that the whole point of all these Masonic plots is to promote a false gospel (i.e. anything that’s not the King James Version of 1611—which is not to be confused with the roughly four billion KJV editions that have been released since 1611 and mistakenly corrected the mistranslations of the infallible original), destroy America, promote or possibly eradicate Israel, and generally behave in such a way as to indicate that their over all master plan of galactic domination is as poorly conceived as a Tim LaHaye novel—as if that were possible.

To this end, the conspiracy has assassinated Kennedy and Oswald, protected Reagan by insuring that more Jody Foster movies were made, overturned governments, raised taxes, lowered taxes, released “Gigli”, eliminated David Koresh, sent Elian Gonzales back to Cuba, canceled “Joanie Loves Chachi”, and generally rewritten the world to its own liking until we’re all so gullible and confused we think “2001: A Space Odyssey” meant something. It’s at this point, when we are nothing but a slobbering mass of disgruntled “Survivor” watchers that they will finish their takeover and we’ll be powerless to stop them due to the subliminal messages they have been etching into the molecular make-up of our fluoride-infested drinking water for years.

I’m not worried, though. I still have one of the business cards from the lawn mowing business so I figure to let myself in for a cut. If only the power doesn’t go out.

* I’m not kidding. There’s a “serious” book out there called “The Hiram Key” in which the authors claim to prove that the Masons not only predate Christ, but that Christ himself was a Mason.