 |
Them: adventures with extremists
Jon Ronson
New York: Simon and Schuster,2001 $24.00
London: Picador, 2001, £16 (hb)
Picador, 2002, £7.99 (pb)
|
|
This is the book of the TV series on Channel 4 in 2001.
Through a series of encounters Ronson presents various aspects of the current,
predominantly American, conspiracy theory culture. A bit like Louis Theroux,
Ronson tries to come across to his subjects as a completely harmless nebbisch
in the hope that they won't notice him playing out the rope with which they
hang themselves.
On TV it was sporadically
entertaining, depending on the quality of the subject: Jim Tucker of Spotlight
and his decades of pursuing Bilderberg, Randy Weaver of the Ruby Ridge shooting
incident, and David Icke peddling his lizard theory in Canada - these
programmes were quite amusing. One of the best sections on TV was Ronson trying
to persuade a bunch of Canadian anti-racist campaigners who were preparing to
disrupt Icke's Canadian tour, that Icke isn't using 'lizards' as a metaphor for
the Jews, he really means. .....lizards. But converted from TV image to the
page the encounters lose a lot and gain nothing. If you want to read
about Icke, Weaver, or Bilderberg, there is much better material. For anyone
with a serious interest in, say, the Bilderberg group, Ronson's approach simply
trivialises a complex subject.
What the book does best is
provide a series of snapshots of some of the people at the crazier end of all
this. Ronson tries to tie these various
encounters together with the Bilderberg group, presenting all his subjects as
variously obsessed by the Bilderberg group as the New World Order's Executive
Committee; but it isn't really true.
I don't want to be unduly
harsh on the book. Bits of it, particularly
the portrait of Spotlight's
Jim Tucker and his obsession with Bilderberg, and Ronson's account of wandering
into the annual gathering of the white American male elite at Bohemian Grove,
are entertaining and mildly interesting. Bohemian Grove is the one section
which contains new information. To my knowledge his is the first account
of what actually goes on there. And it turns out to be a kind of giant,
undergraduate piss-up at which the over-worked, highly-stressed chief
executives of American multinational capital and politics let their back hair
down and do a little corporate wilding - taking their ties off, pissing
in the woods and that sort of thing. It sounds fairly hideous but then a
weekend with those people under any conditions would be hideous. I know someone
who attended a big meeting in New York of the financial 'masters of the universe'
which was addressed by the then chair of the Federal Reserve. 'What are these
people like?' I asked. 'Worse than you can possibly imagine,' he replied.
Last | Contents | Next
