Conspiracy Theory Gone Wrong

by Kristina Curkovic

The American public has always had a love­hate relationship with conspiracy theories. From JFK to Roswell to Barney the Purple Dinosaur, people have always found the conspiracies revolving around icons and incidents twisted and dubious, but irresistible. Popular cult hits like The X­Files and movies like Conspiracy Theory take advantage of such fascination to create elaborate theories for great American mysteries, which involve a variety of government and other­worldly influences.

But what if all the oddities of our country - including UFO's, OJ Simpson, Timothy McVeigh and the Mafia - were connected to the CIA? What if, more specifically, they were all somehow a part of secret CIA mind control experiments? Such a hypothesis might have proven fascinating - and perhaps even entertaining - had it not been brought forward in the form of Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America, a study in impotent rage.

The book spans across the country and a multitude of currently popular subject matters, including the O.J. trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and amazingly the inexplicably profuse number of deranged postal workers involved in shootings across the US. Constantine claims that the CIA has been conducting mind control experiments via implants in unsuspecting (and therefore unconsenting) citizens. He backs up his theories with a multitude of sources (each chapter closes with a lengthy bibliography), from news clippings and interviews. Yet, such sources often lead us away from the issue at hand. Take, for example, his idea that Timothy McVeigh, convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing trial, was actually a victim of such mind control experiments. "It was in Buffalo that McVeigh's rage peaked. He complained," Constantine writes with a straight face, "that federal agents had implanted him with a microchip and left him with an unexplained scar on his posterior. It was painful, he winced, to sit on the chip." The majority of the rest of the chapter deals not with evidence that the government had forced McVeigh, somehow, to detonate the infamous bomb, but with semi­relevant information dealing with cases somewhat like McVeigh's that is, a lot of dancing around the issue by talking about a lot of other somewhat similar topics.

The same beating around the bush is true for most of the rest of the book: although Constantine seems convinced about the subject matter and his evidence, we are hard­pressed to find an absolute, decisive conclusion reached in any of the chapters. Rather, the author drops names throughout each chapter like a tortured socialite, perhaps hoping that the reader will be able to follow the tangled web of names toward the truth. But we don't. Every new name takes us away from the central figures of the chapter - whether they are the Nazis, the CIA, O.J. or McVeigh - so that Constantine's point is eventually lost.

Constantine still manages to raise a few intriguing questions, one involving the Simpson case. Was O.J. framed? This question is discussed in detail: perhaps Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered because of ties to the Mafia (her sister dated a well­known mafioso), and because of a ring of drug use. The author offers a variety of possible killers to suggest that OJ was perhaps framed. How this is related to the CIA or to mind control experiments is, however, unclear, and the possibilities are dubious, at best.

While it is difficult to determine any conclusion in such situations, Constantine's book is a very poor example of efforts to uncover government cover­ups, expose the exploitation, and create furor over it all. He attempts to tackle too many issues, leaving only a string of names that leads us into a labyrinth of possibilities possibilities that probably don't exist. Taken as a form of entertainment or satire, conspiracy theories can raise public awareness and questions; as a work of rebellious and ambiguous finger­pointing, this leaves the reader wanting. MR

This article was published in the 11 March 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 16, Number 8).
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