Welcome, nuclear terrorist supernuns!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, May 21, 2010

I am hereby delighted to report that, not a mere bucketful of weeks after one of the most devastating unnatural disasters in modern history, the mystery has been solved as to the real cause of the BP oil catastrophe.

Here is the good news: It has nothing whatsoever to do with annoying trifles like human error, mechanical failure, oil company oversight, greed, ignorance or plain ol' corporate malfeasance; it is nothing so mundane as, you know, normal life. I mean, duh.

Have you not heard the latest conspiracy theory? Have you not been sucking your laudanum, trepanning your skull with a Makita and smacking yourself in the head with a brick until you see the harrowing vision? Have you been doing the unthinkable and actually believing most of the lies of the media and the U.S. government? What the hell is wrong with you?

The spill, oh naive one, was not caused by anything so pedestrian as a failed shutoff valve. It was, of course, caused by a small missile, shot from a secret North Korean mini sub on a political suicide mission out of Cuba, a weapon that specifically targeted the Deepwater Horizon and blew it up just prior to Earth Day, all of which was spotted and confirmed by Russia's Northern Fleet of invisible black submarines, which you have never heard of because they might or might not actually exist, so far as you know.

And why was it blown up? Oh you silly plebe. In order to force President Obama into an "impossible dilemma," naturally, whereby he would be compelled to deploy a small nuclear warhead to permanently seal the leak, thus embarrassing him on a global stage, destroying the integrity of the U.N. nuclear conference and causing Obama to cry on camera, which would, in turn, re-empower all nasty third-world nations into demanding scary nukes of their very own, at which point Iran could gleefully bomb the crap out of Starbucks, but not before Miss America, a noted Lebanese stripper/terrorist with laser-beam breasts, gives the command from her throne in the MGM Grand. Awesome!

Did you follow all that? The details, of course, are still emerging (Miss America's shocking terrorist connections have just been added to the mix, an unexpected dollop of sexy frosting on an already creamy cake. Hey, you gotta be nimble with this stuff).

But wait, you still don't know a tenth of it. There is also apparently some sort of Irish/Israeli nun who goes by the name of Sorcha Faal, the Mother Superior of a secret order of ancient supernuns who pre-date Christianity, speak perfect dolphin, totally PWN the Illuminati, and also shoot fire from their cute little hats. Sorcha Faal is all over the oil spill because, well, that's just what supernuns do. Awesomer!

(There's also a rumor that China and Venezuela might be involved, perhaps in cahoots with powerful eco-terrorists from Berkeley who biked all the way to the Gulf on their solar-powered fixed-gear Bianchis, intending to destroy the Gulf in order to, um, save it. Or something).

Can you see why it took a few weeks for all that to come out? You gotta sniff a lot of glue, read a lot of David Icke and sift through a lot of splendid rense.com goodness in order to cobble together a truly insane-but-plausible theory, one that's just cohesive enough to induce delicious brain wobble. After all, a really good, lasting conspiracy theory must contain spectacular amounts of bizarre, arcane technical detail and remotely credible factual data so as to make it appear tenuously believable. It's not as easy at it looks.

But when you get it right, it really sends the senses atingle. It's a wonderful thing about conspiracy theories: They operate fully and respectfully within scale. The larger and more destructive the event, the more elaborate the theory as to the various forces at play in the fields of the oh good lord would you please shut up, and the more you will swoon at the endless possibilities of humanity's dazzling vileness.

Recall, if you will, all the gorgeous conspiracies surrounding 9/11, easily the most complex and gloomily entrancing in a generation, a rabbit hole so deep and wide, with so many tributaries and sub-plots, it's already effortlessly swallowed up the relatively puny Kennedy assassination as a generational touchstone of collective insanity. Indeed, every culture, every political party, every generation gets the conspiracy theory it deserves.

Do not misunderstand. Of course, evil conspiracies exist. There are myriad dark forces at play in the world, spy satellites and government plots, coverups and sinister schemes and Dick Cheney planning to destroy the galaxy, poison the water supply and sell your Facebook status updates to the Chinese mafia. Shift your lens just right and suddenly everything is a conspiracy, an eternal intergalactic übermatrix of pain and panic that never, ever exhales. Awesomest!

And why the hell not? Real life, after all, is so goddamn boring. Dishes and phone bills, beer guts and Zoloft. The news is thick like curdled cheese with tepid murders and moron politicos, pedophilic priests and GOP senators snorting meth off the cheeks of their gay lovers. It's a huge problem: The watery cocktail of everyday melodrama doesn't get us nearly drunk enough. Reality is a depressing pop gun; we crave a magic bazooka.

But this is also why we're so often loathe to acknowledge the sad truth: The vast majority of terrorists, evil plots and so-called master plans are usually just crude and stupid things, no more elaborate or masterful than two toddlers wailing in a sandbox. Evil is banal, terrorists tend to be anti-social loner douchebags, bank execs and CEOs that are often just rich old imbeciles who need to buy a private jet for their mistress' coke dealer's accountant.

Remember the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad? A guy who claimed to have trained for months, if not years, in Pakistani terrorist camps? He couldn't even blow up a van, much less be a key to a nefarious Taliban plot to undermine American democracy by giving away spoilers to the 'Lost' finale. Pop pop sigh, goes dreary reality.

So which is it? A mysterious, clandestine Sorcha Faal worldview straight from Dan Brown's last wet dream, packed with ancient gibberish and murky quasi-intellectual subterfuge that therefore has endless power to keep us dumbly entranced, so long as we don't think too much? Or a bunch of loner geek jackass anarchists who play too much Grand Theft Auto and can't get laid? Whiny sandbox thugs, or evil nuclear supernuns? The choice, as always, is yours.