Oops, I Have a Conspiracy Theory (Political Satire)

Oops, I Have a Conspiracy Theory (A Political Satire)
By Patricia Volonakis Davis

The Bush Administration has a Secret Weapon against free thought of the masses and towards eventual world domination. It’s Britney Spears.

Think I’m a madwoman? Let’s just look at the facts, shall we?

In 1998, a group called Project for the New American Century sent a letter to President Clinton which called for the invasion of Iraq. This letter can be viewed at (http://www.newamericancentury.org) but even if you don’t wish to see it, I can tell you that it was signed by the group members, some names of whom are quite recognizable: John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, to name a few.

So, three years before the World Trade Center was attacked and Clinton still president, this group already held the position to wage war on Iraq. But the citizens of the United States didn’t know this, because that same year, 1998, Britney Spears, at barely legal age, became an instant international success with her music video, ”Baby One More Time." It featured a Lolita-like Spears wearing a Catholic school uniform that made grown men drool and grown women speculate whether they could duplicate the look without appearing pathetic. Britney-mania was launched. How could we think about foreign policy when we all so enthralled by Britney? We debated, “Is she really a virgin?” “Has she had her breasts ‘done’?”

We remained focused on Britney for two solid years. Is it any wonder we had no clue that an invasion on Iraq was already being planned?

However, we blipped in our national concentration on Britney Spears in the year 2000, when Al Gore protested the results of his presidential run against George W. Bush. There were some strange goings on, weren’t there? Ballots marked incorrectly and unaccounted for, live Democrats in Florida prevented going to the voting polls by state police and dead Republicans still on the registries ‘materialising’ to vote. It all added up to a suspiciously close margin.

But then, Britney’s new single, Oops, I Did It Again, debuted, breaking the record for highest sales in its first week. So, while some protested the inauguration of George Bush by holding up placards that read, “Hail to the Thief,” this became a tempest in a teapot when Britney, at the MTV Music Awards, ripped off a black suit, revealing a provocative flesh-coloured outfit. Well, who could pay attention to what George and Al were up to after that? Oops, Britney ensnared our attention…again. The new administration was off the hook.

But not even Britney could distract us when the towers fell in September 2001. We were as transfixed by that as we’d been transfixed by our young diva. It looked like the Bush Administration might need more spin control than distraction to mollify us. An ingenious propaganda campaign was launched and we were on our way to invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

Was it a coincidence that Britney announced she was taking a six-month career break that same year? No more than this little gal is an unwitting pawn in the Bush Administration’s agenda. Though we had plenty of evidence to support the fact that the US invasion on Iraq was a personal vendetta and money-making strategy for them, none of us wanted to believe our eyes and ears. We saw that there were no weapons of mass destruction, despite the claims. We read that Halliburton, the Texas company which was awarded the Pentagon's post-war construction contracts at outrageously high bids, was still making annual payments to its former CEO, the vice-president Dick Cheney. Then there were the horrific photographs from Abu Gharib and the soldiers’ testimony that the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, knew and approved of the illegal tortures there. And yet, we couldn’t accept that a presidential administration could lie to us.

Instead, we chose to believe our ‘nymphette,’ when in 2003, she told us, “I think we should…trust our president in every decision he makes… just, you know…be faithful..." The same year, she exchanged a steamy kiss with Madonna, the self-proclaimed “spokesperson for Judaism.” (for which every practicing Jew is thankful, I’m sure) The war in Iraq raged, we now had “color-coded alerts,” but with that kiss Britney mesmerised us …“once more time.”
Still not convinced Britney’s working undercover? There’s more.

By 2004, the death toll in Iraq was equivalent to Vietnam in 1966. But Iraq wasn’t like Vietnam, we rationalised. These soldiers had volunteered, so we shouldn’t wonder whether we’d sent them to die for no good reason. Instead, we wondered why Britney would marry a back-up dancer. “And what was she thinking with no pre-nup?” We fretted over her marriage more than we ever fretted over the marriages of our soldiers coming home in the boxes they weren’t allowed to show on TV. Britney married the dancer and that’s what we remember of 2004.
August 2005 brought Hurricane Katrina. Again, the Bush Administration was under fire. In an attempt to right the half-assed job of disaster rescue by FEMA, the government spent over three million in tax dollars per citizen of New Orleans. Who got that money? No one knows, but for sure it didn’t go to the citizens of New Orleans. Two years later, New Orleans is still a bloody mess. For a bit, Hurricane Katrina supplanted Britney in the news. It was entertaining to see every government official point fingers. But not as entertaining as Britney becoming a mother. By giving birth, she rescued George Bush again. Was there a medical reason that the c-section of a first child was scheduled only one month after the hurricane hit? No, it was just another way to divert the public’s attention. It worked. New Orleans hasn’t been in the news since.
Now, we’re back to “all Britney, all the time” reports. Britney dumping the dancer, Britney running with Paris Hilton (another cunning, bottle-blonde agent for this regime,) Britney without knickers, without hair, without children. On any server’s home page, on any television news station, Britney is inescapable.
She got her divorce less than one month after George Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, an act so reprehensible that it’s being protested by every civil rights group. But he got away with it, because most Americans don’t even know what it is, how it will effect thousands of innocent people, nor that it was developed in order to legalise criminal acts for which the administration had already been challenged. We couldn’t know, because we’d been hypnotised by Spears.
And when the Blackwater atrocities were exposed, people didn’t know about that either, because we weren’t thinking “Blackwater,” we were thinking “black bikini.” Britney’s, worn during her “comeback performance.” (a misnomer, for the reason that, she’s never been gone.) The whole nation, most loudly Simon Cowell, (a mole for British Intelligence) gave their opinion on whether or not she should be wearing it. The slaughter of civilians in Iraq by a firm of private mercenaries paid by the United States government, went virtually unnoticed.
But what finally convinced me of my “conspiracy theory” was a YouTube video. You have to know the one I mean, because I never look for this stuff, but the CIA planted it everywhere and we all had to see it. In it, a young man, Chris Crock-of-Sh**, cries into the camera to all of us, “Leave Britney alone!”
This vid received over 2 million hits. And when did the perpetrator post this video? You guessed it- September 11, 2007. Six years to the day after the towers fell, when the number of American casualties in the Gulf is nearing 4000, with 29,000 wounded, the number of Iraqis killed over one million and US. tax dollars spent nearing 460 billion.
Simultaneously, Britney’s “comeback single” is number one on the charts. She calls it …“Gimme More.”
So, is ‘Spears Craze’ the result of a media that’s now heavily censored and a nation tragically obsessed with fame? Or, is Britney a “Mata Hari archtype” engineered by a nationalistic ‘techie’ with a hidden laboratory hidden in the Pentagon? What do you think?
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Patricia V. Davis is a writer who lives in Northern California. Her narrative, Harlot’s Sauce- A Memoir of Love, Loss, Food, Family and Greece, has just been completed. Visit her website at http://www.harlotssauce.com