West of the West

I learn later that MoveOn.org, the Berkeley-based liberal blowtorch, tries to rally youth against this spying by holding the online equivalent of a protest march. Privacy, for the most part, is too quaint a notion to draw much of a crowd anymore. Yet enough Facebookers are perturbed by the idea of a birthday gift no longer being a surprise that 80,000 of them join in on the march. Facebook has stopped the practice, at least until it can fine-tune its snooping.

So now we’re tramping up Market Street in downtown San Francisco, besieged by tens of thousands of straight folks staring meth-eyed at the queer folks—a parade of dykes on bikes, he/shes with beards and boobs, hairy gay men with saggy bottoms, hairless gay men with steroid pecks, dancers sprouting wild-colored balloons from their heads like Rastafarian locks, IMPEACH signs in pink, JESUS SAVE THEM signs in red, queers on stilts, queers on skates, queers on floats, so many corporate floats that I wonder for a moment if it’s January 1 in Pasadena. There’s Tylenol PM, Comcast, Wells Fargo, Hare Altoids, and, of course, the Google float, Starship Google, to be exact, with George Takei, Star Trek’s gay Captain Sulu, riding shotgun.

“This isn’t exactly what I expected,” my daughter sighs. “I thought it would be a lot more . . . untamed.”

“I’m sure it was—back in the good old days.”

“You ready to leave, Dad?”

I thought I might check out the Summer of Love fortieth anniversary gathering at the Mission Delores school auditorium on Sixteenth and Church, so I place a call. The woman who answers says it would be worth my while. The theme is a night at the Avalon Ballroom, the city’s legendary rock venue, now long gone. There will be a lecture on the art of the rock poster.

“You a survivor of ’67?” she asks.

“No,” I say, “my surviving came a few years later.”

“Well, I am, and I encourage you to come. It’s only five dollars at the door, and there’s going to be a simulated joint rolling contest . . . oregano and basil.”

Across the street from the Cheeseboard, on the sidewalk in front of Chez Panisse, I watch a young Greenpeace recruiter, patient and earnest, attempt to sign up a Berkeley student. She doesn’t wave him off. Quite the opposite. She makes him work. Is it true, she asks, that Greenpeace has set fire to subdivisions built on wetlands? Is it true that Greenpeace has lied about the toxic dangers of Apple laptops? He does not dodge her questions. It takes twenty minutes, but he signs her up as a card-carrying member. She is Asian.

I walk in on the lunch crowd at Chez Panisse and try to see Alice Waters, but she’s still smarting over a tepid rating in Michelin and busy with her book tour anyway. Back on the street, I pick up the Daily Planet and read the whopper of a headline: Mystery Surrounds Tilden Murder/Suicide.

A popular local physician, Mamiko Kawai, forty, and her two daughters, eight and six, had been shot to death in a secluded area of Tilden Park. The suspect was her husband and their father, Kevin Morrissey, fifty-one, who then used the .357 magnum to kill himself. Police surmised that Morrissey was distraught over financial problems that stemmed from his wife’s struggling dermatology center. Botox and laser treatments, it seems, are a tougher go in Berkeley, though if your problems are psychological, it’s the place to come—the shrink capital of the world, one psychologist for every hundred residents.

Then the newspaper story adds this: Morrissey had told friends he had been a CIA agent stationed in the Middle East. Before managing his wife’s practice, he had served as the administrator of Medicine International, a physician group that provided medical training and care to mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan.

And then this: Morrissey’s close friend, Dr. Mark Edward Stinson, executive director of Medicine International, had been found dead in his Oakland home just three months earlier. His body was so badly decomposed that the coroner could not determine the cause of death.

By the time I return to the apartment, the woman next door, Sally, the old hippie who is a friend of my aunt and uncle, has digested the story and methodically searched the web for clues. She hands me a stack of printouts.

“You google Medicine International,” she says, “and it has no address, no phone number. Strange. It does list Dr. Mark Stinson and Kevin Morrissey as advisory board members. They both went to the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1980s. Strange.”

On his résumé, Morrissey plainly states, “As a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Diplomatic Corps, I provided operational and technical expertise to senior U.S. officials worldwide. I supervised staffs of hundreds and managed budgets of more than fifteen million dollars during the collection and analysis of information that was disseminated throughout the U.S. Government.”

“Strange,” Sally says.

We hop into the car and drive over to the Morrissey-Kawai house, a simple California bungalow, wood siding, with an obvious add-on. Sally says the couple probably bought it for around $800,000, a decent starter house for north Berkeley. Out front, the communal mourners have erected one of those shrines that have become part of the ritual of tragedy in America. We all feel the grief. This one, though, is different. No fuzzy bears or Virgin Mary votives. There’s a Buddhist shrine with a candle inside and a collection of children’s books: The Secrets of Droon, The Moon Dragon. One mourner has written a note: “These were really special people, warm, loving and friendly. What’s wrong with a society that leaves so little choice?”

We’re about to leave when a car pulls up. It’s Morrissey’s brother, Jack, short cropped hair, pot belly, who has just arrived from Texas. Sally conveys her condolences. “He and Dr. Stinson were very good friends,” she says. “Strange.”

The brother’s face could not be more grim. “Yes. It’s been a very strange time.”

We climb the hills above Berkeley on our way to Tilden Park, to the Mineral Springs parking lot near Inspiration Point where the bodies were found, the two girls slumped in the rear of the car, the husband and his physician wife sprawled on the asphalt. We get lost near Lake Anza, and I ask the park ranger for directions. He’s a tall, big shouldered man who’s followed the story in the paper.

“Everything points to a man in the depths of desperation. Right?” he says.

“Right.”

“Then you go a few paragraphs deeper and find out he was a CIA agent and his friend and fellow agent was killed just a few months earlier, not far away. And your mind goes to where it doesn’t want to go.”

“The church of conspiracy,” I smile. “One of the places I’ve done time.”

“Hey, we live in an era where the emperor has no clothes. And this is Berkeley. Go get ’em.”

A mile up the road, a picnic table sits on a flat spot in the hillside, beneath a gathering of eucalyptus and oak. At the far end of the parking lot, I come across an even stranger memorial. A pound of sugar has been poured onto the asphalt in the shape of a big heart. In the center there’s an arrangement of flowers and a note: “Dearest Mamiko. I will never forget you. I love you. Dah.”

Sally is too tired to accompany me to the memorial service that evening. The room at the hospital is packed tight and hot. Friends, family, the Kawai sisters on one side, the Morrissey brother and his wife lonely figures on the other side. After a nod to Buddha and Jesus, the speakers begin their litany of remembrance:

“Mamiko took care of my skin. I just wanted my skin to be beautiful for the holidays. You never know when someone is about to break or do something really sick.”

“This is a shock. The entire situation only God knows. I’m feeling such anger. If you have to take another life, take someone terrible. There’s plenty of them.”

“Mamiko was a year behind me in residency. The first thing I noticed was how beautiful she was. It’s so hard for me to move the negative energy in a positive way.”

“Kevin was stressed. Two days before, he was trying to re-finance and things weren’t going right.”

“Kevin was extra good with the kids. The kids are in a better place.”

The brother keeps his hand to his lips the whole time. On the way out, I overhear a woman talking about the death of Dr. Stinson. “No one knows if Mark was killed or not. His body was so badly decomposed.”

The next morning I call the lead detective on the case, Sergeant Tyrone Davis. He has never heard of Stinson, knows nothing about his death, even though it’s been all over the papers for days. In any event, that death has nothing to do with this murder-suicide. “When something this unbelievable happens, people have a hard time believing that someone they know is responsible,” Davis explains. “They want to believe that someone—something—they don’t know is responsible. But we have to stick with the facts we found at the scene. And nothing indicates that anyone other than Kevin Morrissey did this.”

I spend the rest of the afternoon fishing for old and new hippies in Haight-Ashbury and People’s Park. I meet many vagrants and homeless men. They all have a story to tell about San Francisco and the summer of ’67. “The Three M’s,” one old black man mutters. “The Three M’s.”

That night, on the other side of Altamont pass, racing down the grade into the valley back home, it hits me. The Three M’s . . . The Giants . . . Mays, Marichal, McCovey.

Where Other Conferences End, Conspiracy Con Begins Ten of the world’s most controversial speakers to convene in the San Francisco Bay Area June 7-8, 2008. The Nuclear Threat Scam The 4th Reich in America Cover-Ups: UFOs to 9-11 Chemtrails & Morgellons 9-11: An Inside Job Vatican Assassins

I had missed the seventh annual Con Con the year before. For this one, I call Arlene, an old family friend in Berkeley, and we make a date. Arlene is the seventy-year-old daughter of Arisineh Nishigian, one of the Armenian lefties who was a comrade and lifelong friend to my grandparents. Remarkably, Arisineh is still alive and sharp at ninety-eight. Mother and daughter live together in a house in the Berkeley Hills. The plan is to spend the night there and drive in the morning to Santa Clara, the site of this year’s Con Con.

Arlene needs to be explained. She is a conference regular, a believer in UFOs and past lives that she traces with the help of an applied kinesiologist who uses the means of regression. These sessions have enabled Arlene to discover that she is, or was, Mary Magdalene. In the past year, she has been to Belgium and a village in southern France chasing Mary’s bones. When she finds them, she plans to submit them for DNA testing to prove her past. She is convinced that the FBI and CIA have been tracking her (this life) since she was ten, when her parents first came under Hoover’s surveillance as subversives. As of late, the government has bombarded her house with microwaves, implanted an electronic chip in her ear, and seeded the sky above her with chemical trails, all in an effort to keep her from writing a book about what really happened on 9/11. The electronic barrage has caused her once knockout body to become plump. She has paid thousands of dollars for experts such as Roger Leir—author/lecturer, alien implant researcher, podiatrist—to find the government’s fingerprints. She is committed to searching still.

And yet I refuse to believe that Arlene is crazy. She has managed to live in Spain, Costa Rica, and Mexico, picking through remote villages for antiques to bring back to the United States to sell. She is a dedicated mother, patient grandmother, a woman who has never smoked a joint or consumed an alcoholic beverage and started buying organic vegetables in 1972 when Berkeley had only one small market that sold them. She serves her family bowls of organic blueberries and organic cherries and prepares only free-range, antibiotic-clear chicken and buys the best European cheeses for her mother, whom she carries up and down the steep stairs, bedroom to living room, house to car, every day.

Thus I try to be patient when suspicion becomes a pathological state inside the house on La Bereda Lane.

“How I married my husband, I’ll never know,” Arlene says, her voice a kind of vibration. “I had no connection with him, nothing in common. He was Armenian, and I had never dated an Armenian. As it turned out, he beheaded me.”

This sends her eleven-year-old granddaughter, one of three granddaughters who have come to the house to eat pizza—topped with nettles and clams and crooked-neck yellow squash—to the floor in robust laughter.

Not the head she’s wearing, the granddaughter understands, but her head from two thousand years ago.

“They all see me as crazy,” Arlene says.

“You’re not crazy, Grandma,” the youngest granddaughter pipes in.

Arlene’s son, Jan, has heard enough. Tall and bony, a cyclist and martial artist, he stands over the kitchen table and taunts her.

“What about the electronic attack you’re under, Mom?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Tell him, Mom. Tell him.”

“I paid a man $1,500 to measure the waves. He used to work for Howard Hughes, looking for bugs. He came over with all kinds of machines. He was here for hours.”

“Tell him how the man found nothing, Mom.”

“Well that’s not exactly true, Jan. He did find . . .”

“The waves,” sings the granddaughter on the floor. “The waves are making Great-Grandma shrink.”

“Tell him, Mom, how your doctor couldn’t find the implant, the one you swore was planted in your rib cage.”

She shakes her head, but no words come out. Her son then turns to me, explaining his interrogation.

“This stuff has hijacked my mother. Something happened to her in the ’60s or maybe the ’50s. Something deep. She’s right about one thing. It all stems from her previous life. But instead of going back to her childhood to find out what it is, she’s going back to France to find her bones. Mary’s bones.”

“I should have known not to talk about this in front of you,” she says.

“Mom, how is it that every one of your next door neighbors over the past twenty years has been a CIA or FBI agent? They keep sending them to spy on little ol’ Arlene. You’re the center of the world, Mom.”

We talk until two in the morning about the antiwar protests she marched in and the five-year battle she waged in the 1970s to win custody of her son and daughter. She suspected her former husband, a physician, of making plans to kidnap the children and move to another country. So she beat him to it, whisking them away to a three-year exile on the island of Majorca. She returned to Berkeley in 1980 only to lose the kids when she joined a UFO cult called Solar Cross.

“It was at that point that I became catatonic, clinically psychotic,” she says. “It’s taken me years of dance and meditation and regression therapy to become healthy again. That healing, the CIA is doing its best to undo.”

She gives up her front bedroom for me. I try to fall asleep but the whole room is humming, buzzing, the strangest vibration. For a second, I think it’s an earthquake, but the shaking, like one of those massage loungers, never builds or dies. Its dullness plays on me like a soporific. The next thing I know, it’s morning.

On our way to Con Con, we pick up Arlene’s friend Barry, who takes a seat in the back. He’s tall and sturdy with a thin nose and intense blue eyes, narrow set, that he keeps opening and closing, one eye at a time. I ask a few questions, but Barry isn’t big on responses. He doesn’t like sharing details of his life, at least not to anyone ever associated with the Los Angeles Times, which is affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations. I do manage to glean this:

Barry left L.A. in 1964 or 1965. Drove up to Berkeley to hear Mario Savio speak in front of Sproul Hall and never returned. He eked out a living painting houses in town and would be homeless today if not for a kind liberal who lets him stay in her garage. He spends day and night poring over the two-thousand-page tome of a British conspiracy theorist named David Vaughan Icke. Barry is convinced that the world is ruled by a secret group known as the “Illuminati,” a race of reptilian humanoids that includes Jacob Rothschild and George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II and Henry Kissinger.

Barry should come with a warning: Even if you regard the word “and” as one of the most important inventions in human communication, listening to Barry, absorbing his elaborate constructions, requires a particular forbearance for the word. “And” is mortar, and Barry uses lots of mortar.

“I have the membership list of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg group, and it’s a real eye-opener, a must-see if you’ve never beheld it before, and I have a list of the Committee of 300, and that’s another eye-opener, and they seem to outrank the other lists that we’ve heard about so far, and do you know how much money there is in the world? There’s supposed to be $300 trillion and a third of it is owned by the Rothschilds, and I’ve charted all this, and my chart incorporates all the charts I’ve ever seen, and I have the hierarchy of the Committee of 300, and above that I draw another square, and do you know what I label that square, the highest square on the chart? I label it the ‘You Don’t Want to Know’ square. It’s Satan.”

Arlene jabs at the heavens with great excitement. “Look. Look. It’s a chem trail.”

I crane my neck. “Isn’t that just the vapor from a jet?”

“No, vapor dissipates. A chem trail is thicker and last hours and hours.”

“What’s the purpose?”

“They’re spraying the sky with these electromagnetic chemicals to change the density. By changing the density, it makes it easier to carry the beams of electricity they use for spying and mind control. Spray and zap. Spray and zap.”

“I’ve seen some pretty dramatic ones,” Barry adds. “One poured over Shattuck Avenue like Niagara Falls.”

“People don’t pay attention,” Arlene says. “They need to look up and ask questions.”

“Heck, Arlene,” Barry snaps. “All these concentration camps are being built all over the country and people aren’t speaking a word about them. When they start filling them up with millions of citizens, maybe people will wake up.”

“Who’s going into these camps?” I ask Barry.

“Dissidents, the homeless, so-called terrorists. Step by step, you can match it up with Hitler and Nazi Germany, right down to the phrase ‘homeland security.’ It’s not about America anymore. It’s about the world. They want to govern the world.”

We pass under the giant beak of the Yahoo hatchery in Santa Clara, enter the Marriott Hotel, and walk the perimeter of the Con Con showroom. Barry turns to me. “You’re should be feeling like a babe in the woods right now. If you don’t have that sensation of ‘Where have I been all my life?’ then you’re truly not discovering stuff.”

It is a lot to take in.

A pyramid with the all-seeing eye—the same symbol of the Freemasons and the dollar bill and the Israeli Supreme Court building erected by Baron Rothschild—hangs from each attendee’s neck.

There are booths for UFO/TV, magnetic jewelry, and psychic readings by Joseph Ernest Martin, winner of the Visionary Award of Excellence.

A large woman from the San Fernando Valley is shouting “It’s all pieces on a chessboard” as she hawks hundreds of DVDs with titles such as “Mohammed Atta and the Venice Florida Flying Circus.”

A stern-looking man with a Texas accent and a necktie in the design of the Don’t Tread on Me flag sells memberships to the Free Enterprise Society, a Fresno-based group that advocates income tax evasion and a new theory on the Oklahoma City bombing, one that exonerates Timothy McVeigh.

A tall, striking woman from rural Pennsylvania with blonde hair past her waist explains the narrative threads that hold together her husband’s thirteen-and-a-half-pound book, Vatican Assassins. He is elsewhere.

A makeshift bookstore along the back wall features titles such as Phantom Flight 93, Sexual Encounters with Extra Terrestrials, The Secret History of Free Masonry, and, for reasons I cannot determine because one of the booksellers, spooked by my note-taking, keeps snapping my picture, the Rwandan genocide classic, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch.

In the middle of the room, Jim Fetzer, distinguished professor of philosophy and computer science, founder of the 9/11 Scholars for Truth, is standing behind a table pushing his latest DVD, “9/11 and the Neo-Con Agenda.” With heavy jowls and long gray sideburns, he looks like an elder of the Amish tribe. When he talks, his words topple from the side of his mouth. “It’s all here. The fact that the FBI says there is no hard evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11. The thousand lies, according to the Center for Public Integrity, that induced us to support the war.”

I had spent a week researching Fetzer and the various offshoots of the belief that everything we’ve been told about 9/11 is a hoax. It wasn’t the work of Al Qaeda and nineteen of its foot soldiers but an elaborate machine of far more sinister proportions laboring here and overseas in perfect synchronicity. An inner sanctum of our government—the exact combination of players could only be guessed at—had conspired to set up 9/11 as a pretext to grab oil, protect Israel, and remake the Middle East in our image.

Theirs wasn’t a movement of the fringe. Polls showed that more than a third of Americans believed that federal officials had assisted in the attacks or knowingly let them happen. Hundreds of thousands of disciples were tuning in to YouTube to watch videos that poked holes in the official version. One clip showed Bush, three months after 9/11, making a fantastic blunder. He told a town hall crowd that he learned of the attacks the same way they did. On the morning of 9/11, moments before he entered the Florida classroom to meet with kids, Bush recalled seeing the TV image of the plane striking the first tower. “I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on. And I said, ‘Well, there’s one terrible pilot. It must have been a horrible accident.’” Bush then recalled his chief of staff entering the classroom and whispering into his ear about the other tower being struck. “America is under attack.”

Problem was, this sequence of events could not have happened. There were no live images televised on the morning of 9/11 that showed the first plane hitting the tower. The attack, after all, was a surprise. Only on 9/12 did such videos emerge. So this was either a confused retelling by the president or the slip of something darker. Guess which one the YouTube bloggers believed?

Fetzer can recite many such peculiarities. A professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, author of more than twenty books, among them The Evolution of Intelligence and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK, he is a man of considerable erudition. Yet he is not a scholar comfortable with the idea that stupid people, idle people, sad, hapless people who occupy society’s margins can, in one simple act aided by a bit of planning and propelled by the tailwind of luck, alter the course of history. Thus no one such as Lee Harvey Oswald, using a mail order rifle, could have ever killed JFK.

In his 9/11 postulations, Fetzer begins with an indisputable premise: the attacks were a conspiracy. Whether you buy his version or the official government version, dozens of men were involved. Then he trots out a series of more or less confirmed facts:

• Bush-Cheney have used the Big Lie time and again to propagandize on behalf of the military and corporate complex. From altered scientific reports to mobilizing a small army of retired generals who sold the war on every TV news show, this presidency has institutionalized the Big Lie as the highest form of spin.

• A conspiracy of such magnitude is in keeping with the administration’s hubris. Bush-Cheney had brought aboard a group of neocons who called themselves the Project for the New American Century—the same group that had been wishing aloud for a Pearl Harbor-like match to ignite America to the dangers of Islamic radicalism. Many of these neocons were Jewish and strongly pro-Israel.

• Israeli spies, tracking Al Qaeda on American soil, likely had prior knowledge of 9/11. Several Mossad agents, posing as employees of a phony company called Urban Moving Systems, were caught in Liberty State Park filming and jumping for joy as the Twin Towers came crashing down, according to the New York Times and several New Jersey newspapers, though the stories were all buried. After two months in custody—and numerous evasions and failed lie detector tests—the spies were flown back to Israel on the orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

• The corporations benefiting most from the war had close ties to Bush-Cheney. Halliburton, for one, had handed the vice president $35 million in stock.

For the Arlenes and Barrys of the world, this wasn’t simply a set of disconnected facts but proof of a larger truth that led back to the crime scene, Ground Zero itself.

“Buildings struck by airplanes sway and buckle and then topple over,” Barry says as we stand in line to meet Professor Fetzer. “They don’t come down in a perfect free fall. Only a moron would believe it happened that way. It just so happens that we have a nation of imbeciles.”

I ask what, if not those planes, brought the towers down.

“Controlled demolition,” Barry says smugly. “Only controlled demolition makes a building come down in perfect pancake fashion.”

He suggests that I read the work of Steven Jones, a professor of physics at BYU. “Jones has discovered traces of thermite in the debris at Ground Zero.”

“Thermite?” I ask.

The man in front of us jerks his head around. Bushy gray beard, wild hair in a ponytail, splashy blue T-shirt decorated with salamanders, he knows thermite.

“It’s an explosive agent,” he says. “Laced with sulfur, it can do very powerful things. But I happen to believe that it wasn’t thermite but a new material, one even more powerful, that brought down the Twin Towers.”

He is a scientist, he says, an expert in “nano technology” who once worked on lasers for the Star Wars program. This gave him access to the innermost corridors at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore labs. “I’m the guy who used to have Q clearance,” he says. “That’s before I started wearing salamanders.”

“So you believe in this too?”

“It’s not a matter of believing. It’s a matter of science. Those towers were built to withstand plane crashes. There was a core and ring built around the core and crisscrossing lattice. There’s no way a plane spilling fuel and fire could bring it down. It’s not going to work. Sorry. This was something else. This was prepositioned demolition charges.”

“You mean in the days before, a team was sent in to salt both buildings, all 160 stories, with high-tech gunpowder?”

“Yes, yes. Thank you, thank you.” He bows at the waist with Chinese deference. “He gets it. The man gets it.”

“Three thousand of our own people expendable?”

“Trust me, my friend. Trust me. Death is nothing to these men.”

Fetzer is about to leave and I want to talk to him, but the bushy-bearded scientist is now speaking in acronyms about another building in the World Trade Center complex, a forty-seven-story steel-framed skyscraper known as Building Seven. It sat a block away and was never hit by a plane but fell instantly at 5:20 that evening, imploding in the exact manner of a professionally engineered demolition.

“This is the building that housed all the secret documents about spying and such,” he says. “CIA, DIA, the whole shebang.”

It occurs to me at this moment that he and the others aren’t “gullible illiterates,” as one blogger committed to the official line put it. They are, to the contrary, very smart people with minds as intricate as their theories. They gobble up impossible amounts of data, and the magnitude of the material, its accumulations and meanderings, becomes its own truth. That their theories are elaborate should come as no surprise. This is purely a function of their minds, the capacity to construct and hold such elaborations. Minds such as these cannot be contained to one sealed off theory. Minds such as these need to breathe and produce other offshoots. Theories grow into physical contraptions. UFOs suddenly have an integral role in the plan. Russia and China become bedfellows with Israel. The Rothschilds join up with the Bilderberg Group, and the faces of Satan are glimpsed in the smoke that billows down from the burning towers.

I want to ask Fetzer about his scholarship, how it is that he builds one piece of his case by citing the work of a strange website called Judicial Inc. It is full of anti-Semitic rants and Protocols of the Elders of Zion-type malarkey. But the professor has sold his last DVD and left the room.

People are heading to the speakers hall to hear Sean-David Morton talk about the Great Antichrist, the Indigo Children, and the 2012 apocalypse. I walk in the opposite direction and step outside. Under the canopy of the side entrance, I find Charles, an old moonshiner from the hills of Virginia who hasn’t filed an income tax return since 1960.

This is his first Con Con. He’s here to launch a new 911 phone system. Only this one is activated by hitting the numbers 119. “If a cop stops you, you dial 119, leave the cell phone open, and we tape everything that goes on. Get it all on record. This is the only way we’re going to stop the criminals in uniforms from accosting the people.”

I ask him if it feels funny setting up his table next to so many old hippies and dippies.

“You know what they say. The left goes west and the right goes east and at some point ’round the bend their roads meet. We’re standing in the same place. Plum pissed off at the government.”

On the bridge back to the East Bay, Arlene can see a sky full of chem trails. “They’re going to be hitting Berkeley hard tonight,” she frets. Already, she is feeling ill from the electrical assault on the exhibit hall. “Think about it,” she says. “What more could the CIA ask for. All those activists under one roof.”

She and Barry discuss the importance of taking lots of minerals and chelation flushes to ward off the vibrations. If all else fails, drink your own urine.

“People all over the world do it,” Barry says. “It’s the first medicine of man.”

“Cured me of cancer,” Arlene says.

I climb the hill to La Bereda Way. Arlene invites me inside for homemade organic lasagna, but my appetite isn’t what it should be. I take the Earl Warren Parkway to the 580 east and steer straight into the searing heat. From Livingston to Los Banos, it’s all a blur of Shane P. Donlon “Land for Sale” signs planted in the hog wallow. On Highway 152 past Red Top, where I once pulled weeds from sugar beet fields, I think back to those years I had spent covering local, state, and federal governments, all the stories and investigative pieces that made hay of bureaucracy’s schemes and plots. I had found plenty of evil, yes, but it was stupid evil, blinkered evil that lacked the imagination to link up to the evil below or above it. No matter how involved I had imagined it to be—and it always seemed impossibly ornate from the outside looking in—once I broke through the design, it was a small man’s chicanery at heart.

I think back to Watergate, the plots hatched in the White House basement, the deeds of Nixon’s “plumbers” who possessed, in the words of Time’s Lance Morrow, “the low cunning of Daffy Duck thinking hard. An entire Administration brought down by an immense yet pissant doofusness, culminating in Nixon’s inexplicable failure to burn the tapes.” Now that was a government conspiracy.

I try to imagine the disappointments of Arlene and Barry and the others who traced their awakening to the summer of ’67. All those years fighting Vietnam and Nixon, all their endeavors to change the system, and then to see it culminate two generations later, grandparents now, in the lies and war of George W. Bush. My psychologist cousin said it was textbook. Those who had tried so hard to change the social order and failed had retreated into their own psychic order. Protest turned into mysticism, and mysticism led to phantasmagoria and paranoia.

The social transformation of San Francisco and Berkeley, its ionic foot bath and organic tampon self-absorption, the inexhaustible consumption made possible by the ascent of the silicon chip, mirrored Arlene and Barry’s own pilgrimage inward. And what about those who would stand in their place? Blame it on a lack of courage or the absence of a military draft or the submission to the dot-com or too much Ritalin or something missing in the nation’s soul from way back. I only knew that when I strolled across People’s Park and onto the Berkeley campus and finally found the steps of Sproul Hall, there wasn’t one man raging to thousands about throwing his body onto the gears of the machine but thousands, en masse, heedless, staring into the iridescence of their cell phones.