When You're Feeling Nostalgic for Conspiracy-Cringe
One thing about getting older is that you start to realize you have a lot more life behind you than ahead of you. I'm OK with that - I'm extremely grateful for the time that I've had.
I've raised a family and pursued the career I dreamed about when I was a kid. I was there for the glory days of pop culture - comic books, movies, rock n' roll - and got myself into the mix now and then. I've appeared on TV and radio and ten-trillion podcasts and won awards for my work.
What's more, I spent so many days writhing in pain, begging for God to put me out of my misery, that I left a morbid fear of mortality behind a long time ago.
But I do get nostalgic. Quite often, in fact. I hear tell it's a Cancerian personality trait, of which I seem to fit a lot.
I'm nostalgic for quite a number of things, but especially so for those short windows of time when the New Age movement seemed fresh and exciting, and conspiracy culture was untethered by trifles like cellphones and simple fact-checks.
Granted, I was looking at these things at a distance - I wasn't involved in any New Age cults and wasn't going to UFO conventions or what-have-you. I was just soaking it all in at bookstores, and later, the Internet.
I figured out the New Age movement wasn't as advertised pretty early on (probably by 1988 or so) and realized most of the 80s-90s conspiracy/ paranormal/ alt. history gurus were blowing a lot of smoke sometime later. But that doesn't mean I can't miss the rush of excitement and mystery I felt back in the honeymoon periods.
Then again, I always sussed there was an avalanche of cringe all over that old school stuff. I never put much stock in channelers, for instance (with one extremely notable exception, of course). I've been in rooms where channelers have done their thing and I can tell you that it brings on such a profound level of cringe you start to believe you will never stop cringing.
Part of me is still cringing.
Which is why that UFO channelers video up top is so exquisitely unbearable. Aside from the tragedy of poor Telly Savalas getting roped into hosting that mess, it's filled some of the most purified cringe you'll ever bear witness to. The alchemical quintessence of cringe, if you like.
If you're younger, you probably have no concept how popular a lot of these channelers were, or how friggin' rich a lot of them got. Hard to believe when you hear those grade school-tier accents and bland bromides, but I'm sure there's a ton of lucrative cringe out there today that people will puzzle over in the future.
Like "y'all", blue-haired weirdos have destroyed the term "grift" forever, but there's no better word to describe the Montauk Mythos.
I apologize to all the people I've offended by calling this con out - and I won't say it's not a very entertaining lot of humbug - but c'mon. This is like something out of an old comic book or drive-in movie. Fun, sure, but terminally fucktarded.
The Why Files do a great job tearing the whole fraud apart, which you can watch here. But I do have to say that the Montauk thing does seem to have powerful mythological resonance, which explains its enduring popularity. Something I may need to unpack at some point.
And it did inspire the first series of Stranger Things, which remains the only series of it worth watching (the other series are the televisual equivalent of a hobo throwing up in your mouth).
This all came up to the surface while I was working on my TracyTwymanTribute. It brought me back to the halcyon days of Dagobert's Revenge, the Enterprise Mission, Raiders News Updates and all the rest.
It's weird - I don't miss any of that content anymore, but I miss missing it, if that makes any sense.
Even the cringe.
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