United We Stand
America today is a place of great polarization and division, where those on opposing sides of the political spectrum find that they cannot agree on the facts, let alone the policies. The right has a seemingly intractable fondness for believing fantastical things ranging from unsupported to empirically untrue, but the left has a far worse problem—an utter lack of imagination. But while the left has totally failed to comprehend that conspiracy theories are the spice of life, the right has invested in the wrong types of conspiracy theories, the sort that pose a grave threat to our national well-being.
What this country needs more than anything else is a new slate of conspiracy theories that are nonpartisan, innocuous, and, above all, juicy. Fortunately, I have already done the legwork. In my great optimism that national unity is within reach, I humbly offer the following list of novel conspiracy theories, and it is my sincerest hope that Americans of all political persuasions might put aside their differences and join me in this flight of fancy.
Boater fraud: Boats are terrible, and the notion that anybody in the world actually likes boats is entirely fabricated, a shameful racket promulgated by the boating industry. Should you ever encounter an individual who purports to like boats, I hope that you will see him for what he really is: a shill for Big Boat.
As a young girl, I myself once fell victim to boater fraud and consented to attend a sailing camp. That week of camp was marked by abject misery, due in large part to abusive behavior on the part of the older, more boat-savvy boys who had attended the camp in years past. Declaring themselves to be “pirates,” these rapscallions made it their goal to sail up to my boat, hop aboard, grab my mast, and yank on it with all their strength until I capsized into the freezing waters of the San Francisco Bay. On one such occasion, upon spotting the offending marauders rapidly approaching, terrified, I began to yell things such as, “Get the fuck away from my boat, dickheads!” (I was an early adopter of foul language, of which I remain overly fond.) At this, my tormentors, now only a few feet away, hurled large masses of seaweed in the general direction of my face, with the consequence that in the brief seconds before my boat was commandeered and capsized, quite a lot of seaweed found its way into my protesting mouth.
Humpty Dumpty didn’t just “fall”: The circumstances surrounding Humpty Dumpty’s demise are exceptionally suspicious. First of all, as an egg, Humpty was surely well aware of the perils of wall-sitting, and it is simply unimaginable to me that he would have perched himself atop a wall of his own volition. There is no doubt in my mind that this was a politically motivated execution carried out by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, and I do not for a second believe that their attempts to reassemble Humpty were anything but a half-assed cover-up.
Anti-faxxers unite: As someone with a profound respect for printing autonomy, I am proud to call myself an anti-faxxer. The dark history of faxing belies its insidious nature: After the production in 1957 of the first image scanner, one Xavier Xerox, a coarse and unseemly young bachelor, found himself in a predicament: having successfully scanned what he deemed to be quite a flattering image of his penis, Xavier had nobody to share it with. Over the next seven years, he spent many a sleepless night tinkering away by candlelight, and in 1964, his dream came to fruition with his invention of the modern fax machine. Since that fateful day, many a chaste, proper lady has jolted awake in the dead of the night, clutching her covers in fear as the dreadful beeping turns to a seemingly endless mechanical churning, and then, the stillness that ushers in the horrific knowledge that in her paper tray lies a single, grainy image of a strange man’s disgusting penis.
This terrible history is, by and large, beside the point. The practice of faxing unsolicited messages of any kind is a grievous infringement on my right to choose what is printed with my toner, on my machine, which my mother bought me. My papers, my choice.
The earth is upside down: This one is mostly self-explanatory, but in short—the earth is not, as many assume, right-side up; in fact it is upside down.
Critical left theory: This one looks political, but I assure you it is not. Our children are being indoctrinated in school to believe that lefties suffer from handedness injustice, which must be corrected by disadvantaging innocent righties. I submit first that this tale of disadvantage is empirically untrue: Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed, but somehow he managed to paint the Mona Lisa without smearing his arm all over her face. Yet schools across our nation are implementing accommodations that, first, amount to a solution in search of a problem and second, are objectively terrible. Have you ever tried to cut anything with symmetrical scissors? And don’t even get me started on moving the bathroom doorknobs to the left-hand side. I swear to God if these ass-monkeys do one more thing to my bathroom doors whoops that was political
