Conspiracy Cultures

Weekly World Inquisitor
$0.99
UFOs, alien abductions, government conspiracies, New World Order, weird science, the paranormal and supernatural - we waste no time in seeking the truthKindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you're not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the day.

Echelon Conspiracy - Movie Poster - 11 x 17
$14.99
MovieGoods has Amazon's largest selection of movie and TV show memorabilia, including posters, film cells and more: tens of thousands of items to choose from. We also offer a full selection of framed posters. Customer satisfaction is always guaranteed when you buy from MovieGoods on Amazon at www.amazon.com/moviegoods

Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture
$24.95
"Conspiracy Theories" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Fenster's book interview ran here as a cover feature on January 20, 2009.

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Caravan Book)
$29.95
I found very little to like about this book.

First, the focus is not on "gay artists" but on a few gay composers and musicians, including
Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Giancarlo Menotti. The discussion of these individuals is incredibly repetitious.

Second, the book is based on elevating ridiculous and outmoded ideas, such as that there was some kind of conspiracy of gays to promote themselves at the expense of straight artists, and that gays were tolerated because of the need of Cold War Washington to demonstrate its superiority in all areas, including the arts. The idea is bogus. Sherry is something of an expert on the Cold War (he won a Bancroft Prize) and is far afield here.

Third, Sherry's modus operandi is to quote extensively from dated books by gays and homophobes and then to shoot down his straw men with his own brilliant critiques. There is no reason why anyone should care about these ridiculous writers 20-40 years later, much less about Sherry's ripostes. The book is therefore heavy on impenetrable jargon.

The only tolerable part of the book is a chapter on composer, Samuel Barber, but why Sherry thinks it matters that Barber composed a very bad opera, "Anthony and Cleopatra," for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera building in 1996 escapes me. At least the chapter on Barber is a straight forward story free of the empty rhetoric that Sherry finds so compelling.

If you have not lived through the decades when being gay was considered a mental illness, or
had to deal with petulant attacks on gays by ignorant people such as Midge Dictor and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., I suppose you might learn something from the book, but there are better books on the same topics.