By James Bowman
Here in Washington, it is hard to go anywhere where tourists also go, such as the Metro, without seeing advertising for one of our capital city's most successful tourist traps, which grandly calls itself the International Spy Museum. All of it is marked with the museum's motto: "Nothing is what it seems." The more you look at it, the more nonsensical that claim would seem--that is, if it were a claim and not a slogan. On the contrary, for most of us, for most of the time, nearly everything is what it seems. At least, so it seems to those of us who are not among the increasing number of people who hope to make a profit out of showing people that it isn't, because they know what no one else does. This claim to secret information is of course what spies share with the media, conspiracy theorists, and intellectuals, and those who patronize the supposed possessors of this information are very often prestige-seekers, eager only to claim a precedence over their neighbors by virtue of knowing something they don't know. The opportunities for chicanery and fraud are obviously enormous, as the curious history of the "birther" and "truther" narratives in recent years has shown.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/02/behind-the-headlines
Here in Washington, it is hard to go anywhere where tourists also go, such as the Metro, without seeing advertising for one of our capital city's most successful tourist traps, which grandly calls itself the International Spy Museum. All of it is marked with the museum's motto: "Nothing is what it seems." The more you look at it, the more nonsensical that claim would seem--that is, if it were a claim and not a slogan. On the contrary, for most of us, for most of the time, nearly everything is what it seems. At least, so it seems to those of us who are not among the increasing number of people who hope to make a profit out of showing people that it isn't, because they know what no one else does. This claim to secret information is of course what spies share with the media, conspiracy theorists, and intellectuals, and those who patronize the supposed possessors of this information are very often prestige-seekers, eager only to claim a precedence over their neighbors by virtue of knowing something they don't know. The opportunities for chicanery and fraud are obviously enormous, as the curious history of the "birther" and "truther" narratives in recent years has shown.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/02/behind-the-headlines
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