Paranoid Reading: Steamshovel Press and the American Conspiracy Canon
Kenn Thomas, ed. | Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader | IllumiNet Press | 1995 | 343 Pages
Popular Alienation is a goldmine survey of ’90s parapolitics; a collection of a decade’s worth of conspiracy writing first published in the Steamshovel Press out of St. Louis, Missouri by Kenn Thomas. “Politics,” Thomas explained in a 2008 interview, “is going out and voting for people. The ‘para-’ is everything that goes on behind the scenes in that process.”
Roughly defined, parapolitics is the broad rethinking of the foundations and frontiers of political principles, systems, and issues. For Thomas, what goes on behind the scenes ranges from unidentified flying objects to the dreams of Allen Ginsberg. The earliest origins of Steamshovel come from Thomas’ time studying literature at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, where he befriended Ginsberg and Burroughs. Thomas introduces the anthology with a literary provocation—that Ginsberg predicted the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas 1963 when the beat poet wrote a journal entry about JFK four years prior: “He has a hole in his back. Thru which Death will enter.”
As Thomas explains in the introduction, at first “[he] did free-lance writing for local and regional papers and also worked as the rock critic for St. Louis’ old Globe-Democrat newspaper.” Then Bob Banner of the journal Critique, the “only regular newsstand outlet for conspiracy research and scrubbed up rants,” ceased publication because Banner joined an “interpersonal self-development group.” Thomas became worried about the publishing void in the researcher scene—especially after another big loss, the death of “The Queen of Conspiracy” Mae Brussell, a radio personality who asserted Lee Harvey Oswald was not the only one involved in JFK’s assassination, in 1988. “When a friend with access to printing equipment offered free printing allowing Steamshovel a larger format and print-run,” Thomas writes, “it seemed like a good opportunity to shift its focus from literary angst to alienation central.”
Steamshovel adopted an “only-publish-what-you-can-document” approach, earning Thomas early respect within the conspiracy researcher community—a group that considers “conspiracy theorist” a pejorative. From the headquarters in St. Louis, Thomas put out a call for articles. As he told Stephanie Russel:
The thing about living in St. Louis is for $200 you can go to any city in this country, and L.A.-centered stuff, New York-centered stuff—that’s part of the conspiracy. It’s part of the homogenizing of the world. I don't want to be part of that. I want a bigger picture. And you have to work harder to live in L.A. I think I’ve stumbled upon the perfect place.
For Thomas, the Midwest periphery was a perfect vantage point for keeping track of D.C., Roswell, Langley, and the rest.
Thomas went on to become an admired ’90s celebrity, appearing on Kevin Nealon’s The Conspiracy Zone. Steamshovel surfaced in the mainstream, with mentions in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and The Smithsonian. His conspiracy journal was a source of inspiration for the writers of The X-Files, and Baseball Prospectus claimed that the MLB had “enough fishy behavior to keep Kenn Thomas swarming for years.”
In the introduction to Popular Alienation: A Steamshovel Press Reader, Thomas believes (without a ton of evidence) that the series Dark Skies on the SciFi channel cribbed a few episodes off of the Steamshovel website—at the time, Hollywood demand for conspiracy theory-based plots was skyrocketing. This is the period that ultimately produced The Matrix—the most influential conspiracy movie of our time, positing that the world is actually a computer simulation. Neo’s decision to take the red pill and learn “how deep the rabbit hole goes” created the term “pilled,” now used to describe people hooked on conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists became truth-telling patriots in Oliver Stone’s JFK, or handsomely-troubled detectives in Agent Muller. In a 2008 interview, Thomas said that before the success of The X-Files, the media depicted conspiracy research as tin-foil-hat gibberish from the mouth of “a cartoon picture created by the media to keep people from taking these kinds of issues seriously.” It was a phenomenon Thomas called “the laughter curtain.”
The laughter curtain disseminates dopey misinformation surrounding something serious. For example, Alex Jones’ now-famous 2015 claim on InfoWars advances the idea that “They” (anyone from Big Pharma to The Globalists, often an antisemetic placeholder for the Jews) are “turning the frogs gay,” and that tap water is being used to disseminate a “gay bomb.” A sex-panic frog meme came out of Jones’ claim, but it cloaked something real: an endocrine disruptor at the center of the InfoWars story. Atrazine, a real-life profitable weed-killer that contaminates massive swaths of US groundwater, and has been classified as a human carcinogen, is still commonly used on corn and other crops. In frogs, it’s been associated with increased estrogen production, decreased fertility, and hermaphroditism, and what it does to humans is buried in the joke.
Popular Alienation features interviews with Ginsberg and Timothy Leary alongside Bilderberg schemes, lots of flying saucers, questions surrounding Waco, and the Pynchonesque theory that Princess Diana’s death was linked to Saudi aerospace contracts. Perhaps the most valuable aspect is that all this work predates September 11, the modern internet, and our contemporary Q-pilled hellscape. Popular Alienation is a look at the paranoid past before right wing adrenochrome thinking became widely accepted in American politics; back when hippie paranoia was still the dominant critique of shadowy power.
With so much information rolling out online every day, how are we supposed to stay sane while asking critical questions? “You have to create a triangulation of research,” Thomas told St. Louis Magazine in 2008. “The bulletin-board model of research where you take the bits of data that come in and every one of them has a bias. You have to find out where the bias is, pin it up on a bulletin board.” Thomas worked as an archivist for the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
When you find a certain kind of information clustered somewhere, you realize you’re onto something. That’s the whole metaphor of Steamshovel Press—your desk gets piled up with bits of information, and you need to create a metaphor for pushing it out of the way. It actually comes from a [Bob] Dylan song: “takes a steam shovel to clear out my head.”
•
For Thomas, JFK’s assassination in 1963 remained the number one conspiracy of the ’90s. The allure of that day in Dallas continues with contemporary researchers pouring over the Biden Administration’s declassified trove of assassination documents released in December 2022. For Thomas, the evidence doesn’t stop at George H. W. Bush’s mysterious whereabouts on that day in Dallas; it doesn’t stop at the strange CIA-linked life of Lee Harvey Oswald in the USSR; it extends to the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, JFK’s mistress, friend of Jackie Kennedy, and ex-wife of a top CIA man, Cord Meyer. Mary Pinchot Meyer was mysteriously stabbed to death one October day in 1964, one year after Kennedy’s death. Some believe Mary was smoking pot with JFK during their excursions, or dropping LSD and opening his mind to universal peace, freeing the most powerful man on the planet from the tentacles of the Cold War deathcult.
Steamshovel did the journalistic work on JFK’s assassination (Issue #6) when Thomas published an interview with the writer Deborah Davis. Her book on JFK’s murdered mistress had recently been recalled and pulped. “You might ask why they’re so afraid of having these things found out about them,” Davis told Thomas. “After all, nothing that anyone knows about them is going to take away their money, their power, their friends, their influence or anything else.” Davis, and those published in Popular Alienation, believe in the demystifying power of articulating the truth, and that conspiracy research can help them read between the lines. “You know,” Davis continued, “the newspaper that they put out, the whole aura that they create, that they are the ones who are in charge—not only in charge of things, but should be in charge, and it’s because they’re morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us.” Those in charge might have a sunny public face, Davis says, but behind the scenes, they’re power obsessed and savvy about holding on to what they’ve got.
Davis sued her publisher for breach of contract for On the Trail of the Assassins and won. While some of the research published in Steamshovel is exacting, cited, and fairly academic, other articles are purely fictional, or comic, and some are un-digestible with a scat poetry rhythm that can still be fun. For example, “Whose Saucers Are They?”(Issue #5), by Jim Keith:
I had always assumed that it was big money rubbing shoulders and making secret deals in cabals like the Bilderbergs, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. But lately… I’ve begun to take seriously the thought that there really might be a secret centuries-old agenda among the Illuminati, not to mention the Templars, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Knights of Malta or the Priory of Sion. No, I haven’t completely bought into the Lear-Cooper-Hamilton-English-Lazar-et. al. scenario that the “boys” behind this age-old conspiracy really run things from outer space, or even the inner earth, but I’m no longer dismissing it out of hand, either.
Reading Popular Alienation, you might conclude that there has always been a mix of fact and fantasy upstream from the mainstream. In “Wilhelm Reich Died for Einstein’s Sins” by Jim Martin, we wonder if the psychologist Wilhelm Reich invented a cloud-bursting weather control technology using a previously undiscovered substance called “orgone.” Does orgone, a material that violates the second law of Thermodynamics, exist? And did Reich prove it to Albert Einstein, threatening to set off a new scientific revolution that was stopped when Reich was hit with the CIA’s heart attack gun? Wouldn’t this lead us to believe that climate change is a hoax? If that’s the case, we’ve gone from Big Science keeping universal truths from the ignorant masses, to what Exxon Mobile would like us to believe—no change is necessary, do not disrupt the quarterly profits.
After reading some of Thomas’ work on Reich and orgone, it’s hard to believe there isn’t a little fire with all this smoke—after all, Popular Alienation includes early investigations into programs like COINTEL and MK Ultra that have only recently had parts of their story declassified, gaining some measure of collective consensus, acceptance, then indifference.
I can relate to orgone as a metaphor for the missing element at the core of modernity; a spiritual deadness in contemporary American life that’s linked to the atom bomb. I can relate to the idea that there’s some essential element of our collective existence that seems absent; something they’re not telling us about the laws of our universe, covered up by people who are small and power hungry the way that Einstein is depicted in this Reich conspiracy.
•
Unfortunately, not all conspiracies are an attempt to cut to the truth. I am not an unbiased consumer of conspiracy, and you should not be either. Popular Alienation contains some dubious Lyndon LaRoche apologia, and some depressing environmental questions in “A Green Conspiracy,” but what’s very disappointing, and even unacceptable, is a piece of Bradley’s Smith’s Holocaust denialism published in Steamshovel #7, 1993.
The piece is titled “Holocaust Revisionism: ‘Myth’ or Free Inquiry?”, which sounds like a humble plea for American apple pie free speech, systematic logic, and clear-eyed investigation—the performance all “intellectual” bigots torture themselves into. From The Bell Curve to Julius Evola, it’s a clean show before we get to race science and antisemitism.
Smith’s piece ran uncited because there are no citations for his claim that one of the most well-documented genocides in human history has no documentation of gas chambers or ill will toward the Jewish people in 1930s Germany. It’s an absurd claim. But of course it’s absurd. As Sartre put it in the essay “Anti-Semite and Jew,” antisemites act in bad faith, moving easily between contradictory ideas. The rational man “groans as he gropes for the truth” while “the anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith.”
The problem is, we are moving back and forth between contradictory ideas all throughout Popular Alienation.
As a rule of thumb, I think conspiracies should abide by the same rule as comedy—you should never punch down. But as is well-documented by the skeptic podcast, Q-Anon Anonymous, the topic “could white supremacy be true??” proves slippery for the conspiratorially minded. Newcomers open to fresh ideas get snatched up by the promises of the far right, and prophecies like The Storm can fail over and over without losing believers; some are lost down that road, but as is argued as a kind of thesis on QAA, the only way a few come back is if it’s their idea, they want to return, and a community welcomes them home.
“The need at the root of conspiracy questing is to find the source for human pain and suffering,” Tim O’Neill writes in “Mysterium Coniunctiouis” (Issue #4). For the many who lose faith in the established order, and go off questing, there are now technologically sophisticated far-right media funnels that will take your Aunt Denise from questions about JFK to adrenochrome in one afternoon. What she’s really searching for, O’Neill argues, is the Truth of Oneness built into our existence; we go looking because we live in disharmony and disunity, “which is held to flow out of some central fountain, running in rivulets throughout the world.”
We are in the post-Trump, post-pandemic era, where both are still wildly active, and there’s a sense that the center doesn’t hold. The mainstream can’t be trusted, most agree that Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself, and the domain of conspiratorial thinking has expanded apace with the NSA. UFOs aren’t the subject of un-indexed, widely read, much loathed, supermarket tabloids; the US government itself publishes UFO footage. What is a rational mind to believe?
One answer I see is in this link between conspiracy and literature that’s evident all over the Steamshovel catalog, where the perspective from St. Louis itself is a little skewed, off the beaten path, skulking around, a paranoid underdog. Thomas’ operating from the perspective of the Midwest itself is part of the exercise. The “Show Me” state is wary of easy fixes, admitting to no final truth, always looking out, punching up.
My own interest in paranoid reading comes from Thomas Pynchon’s ’60s-flavored historical conspiracy world, where Trystero horns are chalk-marked clues on trash cans and street curbs pointing to… signifying… something. As Michael S. Judge put it on the Death is Just Around the Corner podcast, there is a synchronicity of our moment with sixties, “when another world seemed not just possible, but about to emerge from this one.” The way Pynchon puts it, this is a vantage point standing “against the day,” or just a few inches to the side of the day, where everything we think we know, “all the protocol of daylight, and public behavior with which you had been inculcated,” shifts off its axis, and through the crack between that and the edge of the frame, you were able to perceive a world charged with the possibility for transformation.
Today, the mainstream abundance of conspiracies—crackpot and plausible—makes the whole façade seem flimsy. “The media often pairs the word ‘conspiracy’ with the word ‘theory,’” Kenn Thomas writes in the introduction. “In much the same way as the word ‘Beat’ was wedded to the suffix ‘nik,’ as a means to diminish the assertions of certain writers and researchers.” Maybe we need a new term for this point of view. Maybe, as Judge says, if we step back, or to the side, and take off at a strange diagonal, we’ll find ourselves in a world for which we had never been prepared.
Popular Alienation is one of those strange diagonals—an ice core drilled out of the American conspiracy landscape that we can use to measure how far we’ve gone, and where we’re going.