On Triple R last week, I decided to revisit one of my favourite writers, Jon Ronson, one of those brilliant people who is intelligent and funny all at once. While I was preparing for what I would say on the radio, I looked back over an interview I did with Jon for The Big Issue a few years ago, which I quite liked, and thought it might be a nice lazy post:
Staring at Goats
Jon Ronson seems an unlikely investigative journalist. Yet he’s managed to infiltrate some of the most secretive societies in the world, including the Klu Klux Klan and the US military. Partly because he asked. And partly because he presents as so utterly unthreatening. In person, Ronson is crumpled and affable, a Woody Allenish character with a street-smart wardrobe. There’s not a hard edge in sight.
People who believe in very strange things are at the core of his bestselling books, Them and The Men Who Stare at Goats. Ronson’s unique talent is to portray his fringe dwellers as they are – in shades of light and dark – rather than viewing them as caricatures from under ironically arched eyebrows. “I don’t like the people who do the kinds of things that I do, but are just there to mock,” he says.
Them follows a mismatched band of extremists, bound only by their shared belief in Bilderberg, a shadowy group that rules the world from a secret room. Ronson, a self-described ‘nebbish, urbane Jew’ hung out with Klansmen, gun-toting isolationists, white supremacists, and Omar, a London-based Islamic fundamentalist who funds his plans to overthrow the government with his Social Security payments. Most shockingly of all, he stumbled upon a secret Bilderberg meeting and crashed an owl-burning ritual at San Francisco’s Bohemian Grove, both attended by, well . . . the people who rule the world.
It was during the infamous owl-burning ritual, surrounded by world leaders fervently chanting “Burn him!”, that Ronson had the germ of an idea that became The Men Who Stare At Goats. “I thought, these are people of wealth and power, and they’re just as crazy as Omar!”
The Men Who Stare at Goats, Ronson’s alternately hilarious and disturbing account of ‘our’ crazies delves deep into the recesses of the US military, where he uncovers an underground network of highly-placed men who believe they can walk through walls, literally stare goats to death, and psychically spy on their enemies.
At the root of these bizarre theories is The First Earth Battalion, a manual for an alternative military by Hawaiian-based Vietnam veteran Jim Channon. Declaring that the post-Vietnam US army “doesn’t really have any serious alternative than to be wonderful”, the 125-page document suggests, among other things, that soldiers be able to bend metal with their minds, walk through walls, and see into the future.
“I think Jim is really pragmatic,” says Ronson. “He never really thought that people could walk through walls.” The efforts of some literal-minded military members to train themselves to be supernatural makes for hilarious reading (so long as you don’t think about the government money spent in the process). However, the stories about the savvy soldiers who more accurately read Channon’s message to aim for the impossible are not so funny.
When the story broke that the military had been torturing prisoners in a shipping container in Iraq by blasting songs from Sesame Street and Barney and Friends at them, the whole world was laughing. But Ronson, halfway through his research on unorthodox military methods, knew that something wasn’t right. Digging deeper, he had his suspicions confirmed that whatever they were doing, it was neither cute nor funny. Ronson was sent a photograph of a blindfolded Iraqi on his knees in that shipping container. He was screaming so hard it looked like he was laughing.
“We had the wool pulled over our eyes so effortlessly,” sighs Ronson, who is convinced that the activity was linked to Channon’s ideas about using sound frequencies to disorient enemies. “For all our wise urbanity, we get tricked by a gag. That was pretty shocking to me.” Approximately two weeks after Jon received the photograph, the Abu Ghraib photographs – which weren’t received with quite the same hilarity – hit the headlines.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ronson doesn’t consider himself a political person. “I think the last four years has turned everyone political,” he says. “I sort of hate Bush like everyone else does. But I’m a humanist. I’m much more interested in people, and what makes them tick. I think that’s what makes me better than Michael Moore.”
We both laugh quite hysterically for a moment before he quickly adds “I’m half-joking of course”, then goes on to explain. “If you’re too political, you run the risk of being a polemicist. That’s lying, when you take out the half of the facts that don’t fit within your argument. Polemicism is bad for the left. All of the left’s big stars these days are liars, just by the nature of what they do.” He pauses. “I don’t mean that cruelly. Some of my best friends do that.”
Maybe it’s this brand of refreshing candour (the kind that allows him to admit that his team is headed by liars) that convinces people to tell him their secrets – particularly a wartime US military.
Sales of The Men Who Stare at Goats (100,000 copies in the US and Britain) certainly don’t seem to have hurt The First Earth Battalion. Recently discovered offshoots include the development of the ‘gay bomb’. Combined with a stink bomb, the weapon would hopelessly confuse enemy forces, who would find themselves both attracted to and repelled by each other. (It failed, of course.) Only a week ago, the Americans revealed that their trained dolphins, armed with poison darts, had escaped during Hurricane Katrina, posing a potential threat to scuba divers in the region. And the fabled goat starer (a civilian who runs a martial arts academy) still makes regular trips to Fort Bragg to teach his death stare techniques.
“Rumsfeld is asking for creative ways of fighting the war on terror. It’s a time of crisis, and in times of crisis, they turn to crazy ideas.”
