But even the minimal commitment to the idea of a Deity that Catholicism requires of its' adherents has become unthinkable for most people in the modern world, and the search for a new organizing principle is on! Very few people seem to want to face the fact of their dependence upon each other so nakedly--it's so much easier to proselytize than to relate! So now, instead of God, we've got conspiracy theories. The "Marxist-Feminists", the phone company, the Masons, the "liberal-rationalists", the "Media", and, of course, that old reliable, the "military-industrial complex". You just choose one that suits your animus, start ranting, make yourself a like-minded friend, and voila, you've established a little church for yourself--and the world has structure again. Sure, it's an "evil" structure, but I'll tell ya, I've read most of Jonathan Edwards' theology, and his God was far nastier than any Masonic cabal ever dreamed of being...

This all goes back to Moby Dick, I think... That whale? A honcho in the Bavarian Illuminati--for sure! Ahab's syndrome is a pandemic by now. We're born flailing at the "pasteboard mask" of "false consciousness"...Morrison has some fun with all of this in Animal Man, throwing a series of totalizing schemes at the protagonist. We get the yellow aliens--with their absolute dominion over the fabric of reality; we get the monstrous government plot against Buddy; all of which collapses into the idea that the world is merely a spectacle orchestrated by that arch-conspirator and puppet-master, Grant Morrison... Why does he throw the rock? I'd say he does it to produce those circles on the surface of the lake on the following page. You can send out your metaphysical sonar all you want, and "consciousness" might even "expand", but those waves are never coming back, and those circles are never gonna harden into anything "real"--eventually, they just dissipate... If you're looking for "feedback", you'd better make do with what you get from other peoples' sonar, and that's where the lettercols come in! It's an epistemological crossfire: in becoming an Object, the Subject is "grounded"--at least provisionally, which is all we have any right to expect, really...

The use of "vast conspiracies" as narrative scaffolding for entire comic book series was rampant in the eighties--in Watchmen, in Power of the Atom (a particularly unsuccessful example, I think) and Gruenwald's Captain America (where the Red Skull's activities, behind the scenes, in issues #307-350, rival Morrison's in terms of sheer omnipotence, although the face-to-face showdown between Cap & R.S.--and they've got the same face!--doesn't turn out so pleasantly as Buddy's meeting with "Grant", mainly because the Skull can't let go of his desire to screen his pain on another, while "Grant" elects, finally, to ground the electrical charge of loss within himself, thus abandoning his role as a conductor, passing on the shock to his creations, and making possible one of the only truly satisfying endings that I know of in any work of art); later on, of course, The X-Files and The Matrix would make use of the same device, and, from what I've read of The Invisibles, it seems that Morrison himself lost the ability to live without faith in a grand scheme! Luckily, we've still got Animal Man--in which a man sustains a terrible loss, and that loss becomes real, because we care... nothing more, nothing less...

Hey if you're still out there--thanks for reading!