Remember, If You See Something, Say Nothing, and Drink to Forget

"A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome... to Night Vale."

Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast produced by Commonplace Books, written by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor, and narrated by Cecil Baldwin. The best way to describe it is as a cross between This American Life and The X-Files. In it, we listen in as Night Vale Community Radio host Cecil narrates the news of a desert town swept up in the middle of intrigue and worldwide conspiracies. As Cranor describes it in an All Things Considered interview, "[...] it's a small community town. It has the mundane qualities of everyday life in small-town America. As you hear more about the dog park (the first "news piece" read in the first episode), you realize it is completely locked down, not only physically but somehow spiritually too. You have no concept of what's happening in there. And there aren't even people in the dog park, just hooded figures that are in and around the area. [...] here's a mundane, quaint American town, sort of overrun by ghosts or spirits or conspiracies or underground societies."

The radio show itself is informative about Night Vale, albeit not in any straightforward way. Each biweekly podcast centers around one main news story (e.g. the opening of a new dog park, a sandstorm threatening the city, history week) spread in chunks throughout the twenty minute show. In between these chunks, we get various snippets of other items. In the community calendar, we discover what's happening in the next few days, and which days are still scheduled to occur. In traffic, we receive poetic statements about the action of travelling interspersed with actual advice. In words from the show's sponsors, nonsensical and bizarre advertisements for normally mundane products tell us what we should buy. In the weather... well, this is the only "weather" piece that so much as discusses meteorological occurrences. Recurring themes and arcs appear every so often, like Intern Dana, who got trapped in the dog park trying to see what was inside, or Carlos, a scientist visiting Night Vale whose hair enthralled Cecil at first sight. But, most of all, we get a sense of a pervasive and strong conspiracy, whose existence is undeniable fact and relatively unnoteworthy, as we see from this snippet of episode 19a "The Sandstorm":

Steve writes, "The sandstorm is clearly a cover-up. I believe this was a government-created project. Our government has long been participating in cloud seeding experiments and trying to suppress the people with pharmaceuticals. I believe that this government will stop at nothing in order to..."

Now you listen here, Steve Carlsburg! You're not saying anything new, Steve. Of course the sandstorm was created by the government! The city council announced that this morning! The government makes no secret that they can control the weather, and earthquakes, and monitor thoughts and activities. That's the stuff a big government is supposed to do! Obviously, you have never read the Constitution.

Okay, sure, government can be very inefficient, and sometimes bloated, and corrupt, but the answer is not to complain about everything that they do. Without government, we would never have schools, or roads, or municipal utilities, or helpful pandemics, or black vans that roam our neighborhoods at night, keeping us safe! So please, Steve Carlsburg, I've had enough of your government bashing!

Does that sound like how anybody talks about the various JFK conspiracy theories? Welcome to Night Vale is a totally strange and wonderful upheaval of the way we look at conspiracies. Everything that you may assume has, in our world, a normal explanation, in Night Vale, probably has one connected to "a vague, yet menacing government agency" or "the Sheriff's Secret Police" or some other group. "[The podcast is] trying to take the dystopia model and actually make the people who live there quite happy with it," says Cranor elsewhere in the NPR interview. It's a small little town, where everything is just off.

I contrast this especially with conspiracy theories in our world, the real world. Whereas Cecil exasperatedly agrees with listener Steve Carlsburg that the government would naturally be manipulating the weather, people in our world wouldn't even give him the satisfaction of believing him if he said the same thing here. It's interesting to me how Welcome to Night Vale flips the idea of the government conspiracy on its head; it would be more unbelievable if everything went exactly as it should. A commenter on some internet forum explaining how there had to have been a second shooter on the grassy knoll would be ridiculed by the average person if he were talking about the knoll in Dealey Plaza. Assumably, it would be different if he were talking about the knoll out by Old Woman Josie's house, in Night Vale. I wonder, what about a covert government action makes people automatically decide that the person they're dealing with is out of their mind?

The Aesthetic of Conspiracy

As we break into Libra and specifically following the Frontline piece ("Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald"), it always fills me with wonder to see the people who decide to step out and comment on something with their own "correct" version of the story; just look at the comments on the Frontline webpage for the piece for several examples. Certainly, readers will note a sense of superiority in correcting a news source as lauded as Frontline in their own comments section, but what struck me was my reactions to each. If it was a short comment, (to me) it was just some uninformed idiot who didn't know what they were talking about. If it was a long comment, it was somebody trying to justify their ridiculous premise by launching words at me. If it was a poorly written comment, the commenter's inability to type properly ruined their attempts to persuade me. If it was a grammatically infallible comment, it still didn't change anything because what they were saying was still preposterous. No matter what, they couldn't win.

I wonder why I immediately presume that these commenters couldn't possibly be correct. My first thought comes to the stereotype of a conspiracy theory buff. In the television show Fringe, about a FBI team that investigates bizarre and weird occurrences and crimes believed to be connected to an international (and later interuniversal; it makes sense in context) terrorist group (very similar to X-Files), one episode in the first season sees the team meet Emmanuel Grayson, a "conspiracy monitor" who they think might be able to help them explain apparent cases of spontaneous combustion. First, however, they must be passed through his security system containing no less than eight locks. When they speak to him, you can see three computer monitors behind him, open to various conspiracy theory webpages or with a background featuring a flying saucer hovering just beyond the earth's atmosphere. Behind where members of the team sits are stacks upon stacks of manilla folders filled with various documents. On the wall hang several paintings of an abstract space vista. He insults the FBI agent for being "[a pawn] being used by the government to spread their propaganda." But when they convince him to help them, he lays out what proves later in the episode/series to be correct; a bizarre and ludicrous theory that an extremely powerful weapons and technology company (who frequently contracts with the US government) was founded so that its owner could build up a team of "supersoldiers" to fight an upcoming war. Then, Grayson goes back off the rails, saying that the war will be between the United Federation of Planets and the Romulans (from Star Trek), and that he himself is Spock. Yet, in the middle, he was completely correct, and if the team ignored him outright for his later completely unbelievable statements, they would miss out on critical leads to solve the case they were working on. Just because he looks like somebody they couldn't put their trust in, didn't mean he was never right.

Now that's interesting, isn't it? Surely the conspiracy theorists commenting on the Frontline piece would try to convince you they are even more correct than Grayson. The fact of the matter, though, is it's very hard to believe them. Just look at any of their websites. Here's one to explain the solution to the JFK murder. Here's another, that tells us that all the world's governments are run by lizard-like aliens. One more for you, about Denver International Airport. In large part, these websites share a lot in common. They were designed early in the age of the internet (and show it). They give huge and detailed explanations that are, to a non-believer, hilarious to read through. But, they bring up interesting points. The JFK murder is questionable. The Reptoids page detailed a technology that is both interesting and surprisingly similar to Elon Musk's upcoming hyperloop project far before he outlined it. Not only is DIA a creepy and weird place, but various tours of the place have been met with closed doors that could not be entered and odd vibes. Is there an underground city beneath DIA? Probably not, but it's still fun to think about.

My memory goes back to walking on Green St. a summer or two ago. There was a man on the street corner handing out fake dollar bills and brochures, both containing information about his 9/11 truther website. He looked like a nice enough guy, but my friends and I looked through his information to see what we could make of it. It was interesting, but ultimately extremely unlikely. But, specifically before I knew what this guy was handing out, I didn't think anything of him. He wasn't somebody I had to distrust, nor was he someone I implicitly wanted to believe. Once I knew what he was telling people about, I just laughed. It was silly! I tried to sneak a picture of him without him noticing. The spectacle of a conspiracy theorist was enough to entertain me by itself.

I suppose this post reads like a defense of conspiracy theory buffs, and I'm not really trying to tell anyone what to believe about anything. How should I know what's right? But, really, it's crazy how immediately we either assume somebody is believable or unbelievable based on what they believe.

Sacrificial L[i]mb

Foreword: late post is late. Apologies from the team of monkeys. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Truthfully, there is no more visceral a reminder as a change to one's body. You may not remember the wild night, but the butterfly tramp stamp will be with you until after ten painful laser removal treatments. Injuries and illnesses that take away mobility are a constant reminder of what you lost. I was only two when I was diagnosed with cancer; I remember almost nothing of the treatments, but there remains a surgical gash on my stomach to this day. It's always present in the back of my mind. So it is with Dana's arm in Kindred.

Of course, it's not a stretch to say that Dana's missing arm is an omnipresent reminder of the bizarre and harrowing experience she endured. Dana can't get Rufus off her mind, even in her own time. Her fifteen days in LA with Kevin after cutting her wrists are fraught with worry over coming back once more. But, when Dana returns after killing Rufus and losing her arm, the experience is apparently over. She begins to travel again, going to Maryland to check out records of what happened after she left. We don't hear anything about any more time travel. There is no Rufus to call her back. In much the same way, the tramp stamp person learns an important life lesson about the dangers of excessive drinking. The injured/ill may be much less able now, but they're certainly still alive. I may have an unsightly line across my left abdomen, but the cancer seems to be gone. The marks that remain are a constant reminder both of what we went through and that we aren't dealing with them anymore (Note: this doesn't really work for people with deteriorating conditions, like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's).

Dana losing her arm has a sense of finality to it. It feels like she sacrificed some of herself so that she could be free of the curse (of time travel). In a real sense, she sacrificed a part of herself when she killed Rufus too, both considering his status as her ancestor and their relationship. But, Rufus's ruthless love could only be ended or satiated with hurt. Imagine, for a moment, that Rufus and Dana are playing tug-of-war and between them is a portal between their worlds. For the portal to close, there are only three possibilities: Dana pulls Rufus through (unlikely), Rufus pulls Dana through (he is satiated), or somebody cuts the rope. Their connection is ended, and like any games of tug-of-war when the rope breaks (looking at you, Spirit Assembly) everybody falls down. Rufus dies, Dana loses her arm, but Rufus's love for Dana can no longer hurt her. So it goes.