The politics of weirdness does lead into a hall of mirrors.
Concern with what is happening in the skies may well take
people's minds off material concerns.
On the other hand, Forteana also seems to be a form of
dissent in which ordinary people assert
the truth of their own perceptions and beliefs in the face
of the prevailing orthodoxies.
Sponsored weirdness is a subject that hasn't been explored
fully so far as I know. The tendency has been to regard strange
stories as the product of lazy reporting and the operation of a
market where corrections are less interesting than the errors.
However, I have been struck by the extent to which stories on
this site and elsewhere can be traced back to one major player:
the Reader's Digest. The interest of this organization in manipulation,
whether by its notorious Special Offers or by psychologically-programmed
Mood Music albums is well documented, as is its essentially
right-wing political agenda.
It could be simple market-forces, of course: they always paid well
for submissions, though the homogenized editorial policy never
appealed to serious writers. I suppose it rumbles on, but with
so many of its clothes stolen by the web, I doubt if it has the
influence it had in the mid to late twentieth century.
As regards political conspiracy theories, the politics are deliberately
confusing. Take Larouche, originally a Democrat, whose material
is a brantub of Leftist and Rightist sentiments. Disorientation is the
name of the game and it is a politics of suspicion and hate which
needs enemies. The original targets were old-money US families but
the mythos shifted to the Rothschilds and the UK Royal Family later.
It is from this mare's nest that Icke developed his lizard hypothesis.
Is there a grand plan to keep our eyes off the real ball? Well that
is a conspiracy theory in itself. Difficult to say whether people
believe their own material but madmen have always gained a
certain following, because they seem so certain.
