Check it out: there are people who actually believe that the moon landing never happened. Lots of people. Not that it didn’t happen, necessarily, but that it was an elaborate, carefully staged scam; that it happened out in the desert, secret film crews capturing the entire thing. Unfortunately, most of the people who agreed to be interviewed all happen to live in trailer parks, and that tends to undermine their credibility.
Every now and then you encounter one of those documentaries on TV and it’s impossible not to scoff. Look: these people are not merely skeptical, they are insistent. It’s not a matter of which parts of the official record are dubious, all the parts are dubious. These are the folks positive that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the creation of the universe was, in a matter of speaking, an inside job (God being the ultimate insider). These folks are as invested in government’s omnipotent mendacity as the faithful are in God’s benevolence: all that is required is utter abdication of personal volition and the concept of chaos: it’s all preordained and executed according to plan. A run of the mill cynic, sane by comparison, has no alternative but to shake his head in exasperation—or amusement. And yet, the ones immune to uncertainty are enviable in their own weird way: if ignorance is bliss there is a discernible upside to being half-baked.
But I’ll be damned if, fifteen minutes in, I’m on board, buying just about every argument. After twenty minutes I’m talking in increasingly agitated tones to my TV. A half hour later I’m ready to make a down payment on a used trailer.
Listen to them: these people might not be crazy, but they are playing the part to perfection. Wide eyes working to wash away the one-two punch of alarm and indignation; creased foreheads wet with the weight of their weird worlds; the insistent outlook of the converted Christian or polished politician; the unburdened body language of a puppet who has finally plucked the wires from its back.
And, I think: Please!
Please let this be true. Imagine: all the churchgoing, flag-waving, right wing radio listening, free market following, see-no-evil simpletons if they found out?
And then, this: No!
Nothing, it eventually occurs to me, could conceivably be worse than if those astronauts actually landed on earth. Because it is marginally acceptable, or at least comprehensible, that in a time when millions of people are starving and dying of decades-old diseases, we’d have the effrontery to float billion dollar babies in space—that is enough, that confirms all we need to know about priorities and good and evil and the fact that there is, of course, at the end of the night, no chance whatsoever that God is watching over all this (Would you be able to watch and not do anything, even if you were The One who made it all happen in the first place?). But to think that the suits who call the shots arrived at the decision that it was ultimately to their advantage to take the time and imagination to choreograph a made-for-TV miracle to propagate compliance, or boost morale, or whatever mendacious busywork those men who don’t work for a living get up to when they are hard at work behind those fortified doors.
If that is even a possibility, then all bets are off. Then suddenly even the cynics are shit out of luck, and things like fake wars and flying planes into buildings begin to seem like a rather ingenuous part of the program. See: it is conceivable that money gets spent every day on scientific charades that serve no practical purpose. Or conceding that God obviously does not exist, so it can’t be His fault (because He never existed). But finding out that we are capable—and worse, willing—to pull off that kind of crap? It is almost enough to make you join a militia. It’s almost enough to cause you to cash it all in and start looking for the alien transmissions in your fillings. Or hunker down in a trailer park on the outskirts of Area 51.
