-Caveat Lector- New at my library (and perhaps yours):
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/01/10/ronson/ "Them: Adventures With Extremists" by Jon Ronson A writer takes a full-tilt trip into the world of Muslim fanatics, skinheads, survivalists and paranoid critics of the shadowy Bilderberg Group. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Damien Cave Jan. 10, 2002 | "Them: Adventures With Extremists," Jon Ronson's wry, detached look at the world's radical conspiracy peddlers, suffers from a case of bad timing. Before Sept. 11, it would have been fine to joke about Omar Bakri Mohammed, one of England's most prominent Muslim fundamentalists and possibly "the most dangerous man in Britain," according to one London newspaper. No one would have criticized Ronson for focusing more on the sheik's gaffes than on his ability to foment terrorism. Most of us would have simply laughed when Ronson recounted how the supposedly fierce warrior couldn't be coaxed into dehooking a fish that he pulled from a country stream. But now, when federal prosecutors are about to put the so-called 20th hijacker on trial and when a British man has been accused of trying to blow up a plane with sneakers full of plastic explosives, Ronson's light, uncritical approach feels misguided. The "hip reporter visits wacky subculture" scheme may have worked for decades -- Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and Hunter S. Thompson's drug-addled "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" have become American classics -- but these days, it's hard not to wonder whether Muslim fundamentalism and the Klu Klux Klan deserve to be painted with Ronson's gonzo-like brush. And yet, it would be a mistake to discard Ronson's book because its style seems too casual for our times. Ronson first published "Them" in England before the terrorist attacks so he can hardly be blamed for plying the popular pre-Sept. 11 trade of ironic reportage. And despite the book's apolitical, documentary approach -- or perhaps because of it -- "Them" raises important questions about the nature of public paranoia. Who is more dangerous, the book suggests, the so-called extremists like Mohammed, who is afraid of fish, or the government agents who killed Vikki Weaver and her 14-year-old son in 1992 after a standoff at Ruby Ridge, their Idaho cabin? When anthrax letters are spooking the nation and the government reserves the right to detain thousands without explanation, who should the public fear? Ronson aims to obliterate the "us vs. them" dichotomy that inspired the book's title. His extended first-person account is framed as a quest; he travels the planet seeking information about the Bilderberg Group, a tiny band of powerful men who allegedly run the world, according to Mohammed and just about every other extremist that the author encounters. But Ronson never rushes the process of discovery. He lingers with people along the fringe. He listens, watches, records and ultimately juxtaposes their outlandish rhetoric with their simple humanity. When he visits the Appalachian compound of Jeff Berry, Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, for example, he writes about not just the neon sign that reads "White Pride Worldwide," but also the bodyguard named Dakota who "searched me for weapons and made us all coffee." He notes that despite the hate he would seem to embody, Dakota looked "like a teenaged skateboarder who watches MTV and endorses multi-culturalism." Visits to other extremists yield deeper forms of paradox. Ronson, a documentary filmmaker who wrote the book after producing a companion series on "The Secret Rulers of the World," focuses on his subjects' softer side. He seems to appreciate the sincerity of people like David Icke, a former pro soccer player who gave up a sportscasting career when he began to think that Queen Elizabeth, George Bush and other world leaders are actually blood-sucking 12-foot lizards bent on destroying the earth. He's willing to believe Vikki and Randy Weaver's daughter, Rachel, who survived the Ruby Ridge attack, when she argues that her family was simply a band of loners who wanted to be left to themselves, not a racist militia that aimed to topple the government. At the very least, Ronson suggests, the Ickes and Weavers of the world are no worse than their adversaries. The gung-ho government agents who called the tiny Weaver shack a "fortress" end up looking just as radical under Ronson's gaze as the family they attacked. The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, earns lows marks as well. The book's interviews with Gail Gans, the ADL's chief researcher, make the organization seem overzealous, if not deluded. Ronson, who identifies himself as a Jew, never directly condemns the ADL, but with pointed rhetorical questions he casts doubt on the group's claim that "one out of eight Americans has hard-core Anti-Semitic feelings." He also questions the ADL's focus on "code" words. Having spent time with several people who the organization labels as anti-Semitic -- and having witnessed little if any anti-Semitism -- he finds it hard to believe that every mention of the "New World Order," "international bankers," "the New Yorkers" and "cosmopolitans" is actually an attempt to mask hate for the Jews. But Ronson, however much he leans toward anti-establishment beliefs, never falls completely into the conspiracy-obsessed camp. He toys with the belief in an all-powerful Them; he panics when someone seems to follow him after he visits the hotel where the Bilderbergers are meeting. But when Big Jim Tucker, publisher of The Spotlight, a right-wing newsletter, fabricates a quote and attributes it to Ronson in an effort to demonize the group, Ronson begins to draw the line between fact and delusional fiction. After landing an interview with a member of the group and after sneaking into one of their private ceremonies, he distances himself even further from the extremist view of their activities. He becomes convinced that the Bilderberg Group is nothing more than a loosely organized think tank that annually calls together some of the world's most influential business and political leaders. Critics are correct to point out that these men (and a few women) are powerful, but do they actually start wars and choose presidents, as some believe? No way, Ronson declares when he gets in an argument with a handful of Bilderberg haters: The markets rule the world, not a band of leaders, and those who think otherwise are in danger of becoming as ridiculous and dangerous as the American government they love to hate. "You're doing to them exactly what they did to Randy Weaver and David Koresh," Ronson tells the anti-Bilderbergers. "You're putting two and two together and making five in exactly the same way." With this tongue-lashing, Ronson's development from reporter to almost-believer to universal skeptic becomes complete. There are a few literary snags along the way. Some of Ronson's paranoia feels staged for dramatic effect, and his indirect style -- even when one ignores today's political mood -- often feels inappropriate. The book could have used more probing analysis, more adversarial questions for the right-wing extremists (not just for the ADL). But Ronson's light romp through a world of paranoid but relatively harmless clowns is not without value. By reminding readers that the gap between "us" and "them" is far more slender than some would like to believe, Ronson's effort may end up becoming a useful antidote to today's frightened times. salon.com and this at: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/ronson020202.htm Web exclusive Face to face with Them In writing Them: Adventures with Extremists, British journalist Jon Ronson found that all extremists share a core belief: the world is run by a shadowy elite in a secret room-Them. Ronson then sought Them themselves, infiltrating conclaves of power like California's Bohemian Grove, a resort frequented by CEOs and politicians (and whose rumored occult burning of a wicker owl turns out to be harmless fun). Did you find the extremists convincing? What surprised me is how they go into details-they go into absurdly specific details: Not only do [the shadowy elite] exist, but they always meet in a five-star hotel with golfing facilities, or they dress up in robes and have owl-burning ceremonies. Somehow, this made-up story has got all these details. So maybe it's not all made up. Isn't burning a wicker owl just a little dysfunctional? If it had been any old people it wouldn't have mattered, but I did think it was a little odd that we're talking about the Bush family and Henry Kissinger and all those people trapped in kind of their frat boy years. I did find it disturbing that they are the leaders of the world and they have such dumb tastes in vacations. How did you get a bunch of extremists to let you tag along so you could write a funny book about them? Well, I think some of them probably thought, if he is going to make fun of us, it's better than him portraying us as one-dimensional demons. I never wanted to make fun of them; I wanted to portray them as human beings, and one of the best things about human beings is our capacity to be absurd. Was writing this book scary? When I started getting chased by men in dark glasses through Portugal, my fear was genuine. The henchmen of the shadowy elite were actually surveilling me from behind trees. I'm essentially a humorist here, and I'm out of my depth-I've nothing to compare it to: I couldn't say to myself, well, this is just like the time I was chased by the shadowy cabal back in '86. So it was genuinely terrifying. People seem very willing to entertain David Icke's notion that 12-foot lizards rule the Earth. Are they gullible or open-minded? I think they're open-minded-I do credit David Icke's audience oddly with quite a lot of intelligence: [They might say,] "I respect his beliefs in the giant lizards, but I don't share them." They are quite discerning-though it does amaze me that he has such a huge following. You spent quite a lot of time with Thom Robb, the grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who's trying to give the Klan a kinder, gentler image. He reminded you of Woody Allen. I deliberately chose a particularly nice Klan-I thought that it was a good story, a funny story. I just didn't want to go to any old Klan. I chose that one because Thom was trying to do the image makeover. I did choose an unusually nice grand wizard to hang out with. If they just fit into the stereotype of the tobacco-chewing rednecks, it wouldn't have made for a very interesting chapter. It's such a funny story-it's kind of high comedy, pathos, this guy undertaking this kind of desperate task. I find it very interesting, the sort of Jewish angle, Jewishness in the Klan-Thom's nebbishy demeanor and the Calvin Klein T-shirts. I did think that was really funny, that we've even infiltrated the Klan. You learned that the Bilderberg Group, which extremists think secretly rules the world, really exists-it's a group of CEOs and politicians and up-and-comers that meets annually to discuss issues of global economics and world affairs. Do they rule the world even a little bit? I don't believe that Bilderberg sets out to secretly rule the world, but I would say that any secret organization like that, that's not answerable to government, is bound to have an impact. What they're debating, what they're for, is all what's happening-they're for free trade, giving power to business and taking it away from government, internationalization, all the things which the antiglobalists are against. They are at the heart of something, but I don't think that they're secretly ruling the world. Who do you think rules the Earth, secretly or otherwise? I think nobody does, and I think that's what's really scary. Absolutely no one does; it's this uncontrollable flow of money, beyond anyone's control. Anarchy is ruling and nobody controls anything, and we're all twigs in the tide. The secretary general of Bilderberg said that to me-the most terrifying thing when you get close to real power is just how little anybody has. What's the most compelling evidence that there's not a global conspiracy? Human nature: Could that many people keep a secret? People like to tell. There are conspiracies, we all know that there are conspiracies; they do happen. But the idea of a grand conspiracy, something that big and important-someone would have spilled the beans by now. http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/0743227077.asp THEM: Adventures with Extremists Jon Ronson Simon & Schuster Nonfiction ISBN: 0743227077 It goes without saying that extremism is on everyone's mind nowadays. Whether that's the reason that Jon Ronson's THEM, a British book, has been released in America is an open question. There's little doubt that the new preface addressing September 11th is the kind of socially relevant touchstone that a publisher would never let pass by. But how much does the book itself really have to say about terrorism, extremism, and the malaise of the modern world? Quite a bit, actually. First off, Jon Ronson is something of a smart ass --- albeit a smart ass of a very high order. Unlike comedians and essayists, who are always commenting on things, Ronson is a journalist; he exposes the silly underbelly of pompous people by using their own words against them. He's the master of the quote that says 10 times as much as it appears to, of the uninflected description that is more damning than a thousand adjectives. But perhaps his greatest asset is that he enjoys people; he really likes them. He's always looking for humanity in his subjects, and when he finds it in the form of weakness or vanity, he tries to understand it rather than mock it. All of this niceness and humor is sometimes hard to make jibe with what we know to be the results of extremism. For this reason Ronson's conversation with Rachel Weaver, the daughter of over-persecuted isolationist Randy Weaver, is less funny than the rest of the book. A lot of the humor in THEM comes from the fact that Ronson is talking mostly to demagogues. One gets the sense, and Ronson does too, that many of these people are as interested in being famous as they are in advancing their causes. They are cults of personality, and Ronson sees them to be kindred spirits on some level. When he visits people like the skinheads living in the Aryan Nations in Idaho, who seek no publicity, who exude only hatred, he gets scared. As a Jew, Ronson tends to focus on people who are suspicious of Jews, which as it turns out, is most everybody. In general, THEM doesn't trouble itself with the roots of hatred --- such things are intractable --- but Ronson does stumble onto an interesting theory about prejudice towards Jews, one that I had never thought of before. The willingness of Jews to assimilate has been at the bottom of their success through the ages. Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Ralph Lauren, Louis B. Mayer --- assimilated Jews. But what if this assimilationist tendency, this hostility towards the old ways, is part of the reason that people think Jews are hiding something? That is, what if Jews really are hiding something --- their heritage. It's an interesting theory. THEM begins by trying to figure out why some people believe in massive conspiracy theories about other people, and it ends in the exact same place. After witnessing an owl burning ritual at an Ivy League internationalist retreat (What's up with those, anyway?), Ronson and his conspiracy theorist travel companions are left on opposite sides of the same divide on which they began. He sees a bunch of businessmen and dignitaries acting like jackasses, his companions see Satanism and a shadowy cabal. All Ronson can conclude is that, for whatever reason, some people see one and one and make five, while the rest of us are stuck with regular math. It bears remembering, of course, that conspiracies do exist. One need only listen to the tapes made by the FBI of Archer Daniels Midland executives participating in a worldwide price fixing conspiracy to realize that men in hotel rooms sometimes do control the world in secret. The trouble comes when people use conspiracy theories to substantiate their prejudices. Here's a test: If the truth is so obvious that you don't even need to investigate; if their denials only make you believe it more; if you think everyone has been duped except you and your friends --- and you only made those friends after you realized all your old friends were duped...well, I might be talking about you. This break with rationality is what Ronson, a wonderful skeptic, is able to highlight in his stories. THEM will hardly make you feel better about the state of the world. It will, however, do something more valuable. It will remind you that extremists are human beings, that their leaders are hardly evil geniuses, that they are sometimes just buffoons. It will also remind you that there is evil in the world; that some nuts are too hard to crack, and that sometimes, if you're evil enough, you don't even need to be a genius. It's a lesson worth remembering, particularly right now. --- Reviewed by Fred Kovey � Copyright 2002, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved. http://www.forteantimes.com/review/them.shtml THEM: Adventures with Extremists Jon Ronson Picador. 2001. HB. �16, 352pp. ISBN: 0-330-37545-8 Is there really a secret elite, the true rulers of our world, meeting once a year to empower presidents and dictators, moving wars and economies around like pieces on a chessboard? This is the premise of journalist Jon Ronson's Them, the book version of his Channel 4 series The Secret Rulers of the World. Spending time with various extremists (the main criterion for their inclusion being that they have been labelled as such by others) Ronson stumbles upon the fact that nearly all of them believe in a small world-ruling elite. Many of the usual suspects are here: Muslim clerics and gun-toting white supremacists as well as characters closer to home, among them David Icke and Ian Paisley, who refers to Ronson in jocular tones as "The Jew". As he ambles through this world where nothing is quite what it seems, Ronson's foppish demeanour and laid-back style belie a strong, enquiring mind. While on a trek to Lisbon with 'Big Jim Tucker', a passionate campaigner against what he sees as the people-manipulating New World Order, Ronson does indeed unearth strange goings on at the meeting place of the latest Bilderberg get together. He is subsequently followed by a green Lancia - not quite a black helicopter but sufficiently slick enough - driven by a man in dark glasses. Ronson only learns later, to his horror, that Tucker's magazine Spotlight is a magnet for Anti-Semitic campaigners. In fact, Ronson discovers himself to have been duped and used on a number of occasions. There is indeed something inherently sinister about these people's potential for manipulation and deception, though the book's frequent hilarity - for above all this is a very funny book - comes from the limitless capacity of these same individuals to deceive themselves. Them isn't just a riotous farce, however. The story of Rachel Weaver (whose mother and brother were killed by FBI agents during the "Siege of Ruby Ridge") is treated in a clear-eyed but sensitive way. Ronson judges the tone perfectly here, while at other moments he lets the buffoons speak for themselves. In this respect his investigations achieve true fortean dimensions, maintaining the delicate balance between scepticism and open-mindedness essential to a fortean approach Described as a 'romp into the heart of darkness', Them is funny and thought-provoking, and should sit comfortably on the shelves of any fortean. Nick Cirkovic � Copyright Fortean Times. 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