Half-Vast Ideas: My Two Cents on Hollywood's Fixation with Conspiracies

Spare Change | March 24, 2006 | Dave Aland

[Natty Bumppo@frontier.net]

Half-Vast Ideas

My Two Cents on Hollywood’s Fixation With Conspiracies

By David J. Aland 24 March 2006

There are two kinds of people in the world: People who divide the people in the world into two kinds of people, and people who don’t. Knowing that there are many of the former does not invalidate the latter, despite the apparent contradiction. After all, being paranoid doesn’t mean you don’t have enemies – but it doesn’t mean that you do, either. And there’s no need to manufacture them.

Case in point: it appears that Charlie Sheen (“I’m no President, but dad plays one on TV.”) has, according to Alex Jones and Paul Watson, “joined a growing army of other highly credible public figures in questioning the story of 9/11…” Charlie Sheen, the blunt foil of the sitcom “Two and a Half Men” appears to be rubbing at least that many brain cells together and has concluded (surprise!) that our government is engaged in a conspiracy.

If there are two kinds of people in the world, one divider may be those who believe in conspiracies and those that don’t. I have a theory on the existence of successful conspiracies: they don’t. Oh, there are many attempts to construct them from time to time, but human interactive entropy spoils them every time.

Conspiracies are pretty tough constructs. By their very nature, they are formed by a number of persons simply because no one person is smart enough to handle all the details. But the fact that it takes two or more to tango is, as we learned in college literature classes, the “inherent flaw” that drives the plot forward into tragedy. It’s just not possible to keep a really good secret. If you don’t believe that, come to DC some time and hang out in any Starbucks within a mile of the Mall, where more secrets get dished than on “Desperate Housewives.”

Nonetheless, Charlie Sheen has joined a number of “credible thinkers” in the body politic convinced that his government has pulled another carpet over our collective eyes. Here he joins the august company of Pierre Salinger, who thinks the U. S. Navy shoots down airliners in Long Island Sound, and Ramsey Clark who thinks the charges against Saddam Hussein have been trumped up.

Certainly, Charlie’s angles deserve examination. He charges that the the Trade Towers were deliberately imploded to create a “Pearl Harbor” event supporting war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq; that the Secret Service did not whisk the President off as the country came under attack because they knew it was coming; that a bunch of “amateurs with box cutters” could not maneuver aircraft at that speed and precision; and that it is not proven that an aircraft hit the Pentagon.

If this is the level of analysis one might achieve after dropping out of school, dropping in and out of rehab, dropping out of wedlock with Denise Richards (what were you thinking?), and dropping a few cinematic bombs (don’t tell me you actually liked “Navy Seals”!), then the rest of us have been wasting our time on education, self-discipline, and hard work. This is where Hollywood has lost its touch with the rest of us. While the mainstream chant of the Left is that the current administration is clumsy, semi-literate, and bumbling, Hollywood still insists that the same administration is capable of vast, Machiavellian and Byzantine plots that are successfully executed despite the fierce watchfulness of the entire world.

It reads like a Hollywood script. In fact, it is a Hollywood script – and Charlie Sheen was in the movie. From the “Shadow Conspiracy” to “No Code of Conduct” to “Terminal Velocity” to … hell, even “The Three Musketeers”, Charlie Sheen has been out there saving the world from conspirators. Now he’s at it again.

As his father has shown, actors sometimes lose track of the line between drama and reality, and become convinced that playing a role qualifies them to function the same way in real life, as though a few years in Hollywood were as good as staying at a Holiday Inn Express.

A Navy Chaplain I know was burying a fallen soldier in Arlington on September 11th and saw the low flying airliner that turned the internment iinto theater of the absurd, creating new casualties in full view of those laying one to rest. I lost friends and shipmates that day, and I don’t need my government to prove it was not involved, prove to me that educated and fanatical men can learn complex tasks, or that the physics of slamming thousands of tons of high-speed explosives into buildings can be detrimental to structural integrity.

There is no vast conspiracy, merely a half-vast attempt to create one – but just because you’re from Hollywood doesn’t mean the government is out to get you. Joe McCarthy is dead. Get over it.

David J. Aland is a retired Naval Officer with a graduate degree in National Security Affairs from the U. S. Naval War College.

[coconutt2000]

I fully and completely support the Left's right to implode.

[sgtbono2002]

Charlie Sheen hasnt gotthe good sense God gave a Rhesis Monkey, In fact if I needed advice I would ask the monkey first before asking Charlie or his Father.

[T Lady]

Just as the writer obviously points out, you cannot take most folks in Hollywood too seriously, especially with the last name of Sheen. You also may want to remember (or forget) that Charlie Sheen was one of the stars of director Oliver "Conspiracy Theory" Stone's 'Platoon'.