wirldfire deceptions

Meet Andy Martin, the sixty-something sometimes-writer widely attributed with having baked from scratch the long-standing, pernicious rumor that Barack Obama is, in spite of it all, actually Muslim.  If that won’t suffice, for haunting effect too, Martin tossed in a few more colorful details, like the supposed secret that Obama has hidden his religious orientation to win the presidency and launch some sort of bizarre, Manchurian Candidate crypto-scheme to destabilize the US government and gradually transform it into a fundamentalist Islamic terror-state.  Here at last, thanks to our good friends at the NY Times, we may view Andy Martin, verbose pseudo-pundit, in all his psychotic colors.

Martin was born the son of a wealthy banking and farming family.  He completed a law degree in Illinois, but was blocked from practicing there due to psychiatric problems and “paranoid” tendencies.  A deeply avowed anti-Semite, he’s run for Congress several times, most notably in Connecticut, on a zealous mission to disrupt the center of “Jew power.”  On top of all that, Martin has a hobby: over the years, he’s made such a practice of filing bogus lawsuits that he was blocked by a federal judge from doing so. 

For years now, he’s whiled away the days as a ragtag wordsmith, cooking up and perpetuating falsehoods about a myriad of politicians until 2004, shortly after Obama’s emergence onto the national stage, when he created the king-daddy of all yarns – that Obama was a closet Muslim with a hidden agenda.

What was the mechanism for this operation, you ask?  Who financed this infiltration of our politics?  Who orchestrated and supported this purported sabotage of our system?  Good luck with that one.  The details are hazy, meaning Martin hasn’t had time to make them up.  And even he, according to the article, is surprised by the celerity with which his make-believe invective has caught fire across the web.

And why, you similarly might ask, in America in the year 2008 is it necessarily taken as a slight to allege that one might in fact be Muslim?  No doubt the so-called “War on Terror” has left a residual stain of ugly racism on our culture, but alas, that’s a topic that must wait for another day.

Because Andy Martin, architect of lies, has been telling tales out of school.  And a lot of other folks have been repeating it. 

This happy horseshit about Obama has been refuted time and time and time again, so often now it’ll turn ya blue in the face.  But still it continues, whispered by far-right conservative bloggers, howled vengefully at McCain campaign rallies, perpetuated last week by the spinsters of Fox News in a heavily touted documentary on the network, and – I’m sorry to say – strongly insinuated by McCain and Palin themselves.

But when Obama has won come November, when the truth is dragged so entirely into the light, there will remain one haunting lesson left by these underhanded fibbers and their snow-balling lunacy: in the age of the web, in the heyday of the scintillating viral net-secret, sometimes a lie can become bigger than the one who tells it.  Sometimes these venomous, pernicious falsehoods take on a frightening life of their own, easily duping a naive polity. 

Perhaps when the dust from this election finally settles, we need to re-examine our relationship to proven fact and easy fiction.