In any Time, the Good Times. Enjoy Responsibly.

I've taken up smoking a pipe. A new pipe. More to the point, I've grown a beard.

It is a pesant beard, gone cosmo intellectual. Think Zizek. I've decided to adopt a "hip professorial anarchist" aesthetic to go along with it. Smoking pipe tobacco is a part of it. I'm still hitting the Kool Milds pretty hard, but I'm trying to replace my ritual smokes (after meals, dope, getting in the car to drive, presumably sex, and getting the movies started) with a spot of the Black Cavendish.

I’m a projectionist. I’m a hip, professorial anarchist projectionist in the North Dallas burbs. Ascetic too. I’m a hip professorial anarchist ascetic/projectionist in the North Dallas burbs. Neo-Feudalist, no?

Back to the subject at hand—I’m watching the Colbert Report and he’s got Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations on as his guest. I wanted to watch it, seeing as I’m interested in watching the face of the cospiracist bugaboo in action. Colbert’s first “question” actually revolved around the “rap” on CFR: Illuminati, masons, the whole bit. He says that they “toy” with the nations of the world like “well, toys,” like pieces on a chess board. What say ye, Haass—the question more or less went.

And then Haass says “Well, it’s not just nations. It’s banks, corporations, terrorist organizations, everything.”

I jump up, pissed off at this guy. I’m appalled by his ineptitude. This vid is going to live in conspiracist infamy (except that the official online version looks to be fucked up, only Haass’s response is shown—this too is sure to get their peckers all veiny) . Colbert asks “Hey, are y’all really a superpowerful cult secretly running the world in the interest of creating a one world Nazi superstate?” and he says “yes, but it’s so much more complicated a job than you might think!” Buying the premise. CFR admits to running world.

It opened my eyes to something. One of the reasons that conspiracy theories form around these groups is because the people running them share in the conspiracist delusion. The conspiracists see these groups as carrying out a nefarious, secret plan with perfect efficacy (save for blowing the Colbert interview), and the CFR does too.

They are both wrong, of course. The world, the “economy,” history, politics—everything—are all far to complicated and we are all too temporary for it to be viewed in those kinds of terms. Lee losing his cigars before Antietam, flocks of geese almost setting off nukes, Vasily Arkhipov risking it all for everyone who ever lives now and after—these things can’t be controlled or predicted. It’s just the Tao, foiling the silly plots of men.

I’m still chewing all this over, letting the brain smack some bubbles and figure out what it all means.

One thing is for sure: the beard and pipe are keepers. Next up: sweaters.