In this period of global crisis, as many cherished institutions and traditions falter, we rightly celebrate the ingenious few who respond to hardship with creativity and imagination.
This standard of praise should surely extend across every sphere of human endeavor, so we are appalled to bear witness to the gross injustice being done to a certain class of creative individual.
With self-righteous zeal, journalistic outlets discriminate against those who tell “the wrong kind of stories.” A few of these stories should sound familiar: The moon landing was faked. There is a monster living in Loch Ness. China created the coronavirus on purpose. Dora the Explorer is not a real person.
Some journalists are so trapped inside their own paradigm that they criticize these stories just because “there is no evidence at all to support them” or because “they might bring about the sort of international crisis that threatens the future of human civilization.”
Decades of discrimination against the sort of art that “was 100% made up by small-minded cultural assassins” has, unfortunately, poisoned the general public against the whole genre. Many may be familiar with the derogatory slur, “conspiracy theories.”
The worst crime of all is that, by focusing on irrelevant twaddle – like whether these stories are true – journalists miss the chance to report on what is really wrong with so-called conspiracy theories: they are just way too dark. Unnecessarily gloomy. All Adele, no Jonas Brothers.
Until our team began this research project, few of us were even aware of this country’s rich and varied history of making up happy shit that no one can prove. Sadly, our former ignorance is still widespread among the populace. Since our founding, it has been the mission of this organization to remedy this national disgrace, first by cataloguing and then by publicizing these lighter stories for the benefit of a general audience.
This auspicious event marks the completion of years of difficult research. What follows is a list of our findings to date. We expect that you, our honored guests, will honor our efforts by reading our work with enthusiasm – and, in many cases, confusion.
Adapted from the minutes from the recent meeting of the National Interest Council Exploring the Regrettable Bias in Storytelling (N.I.C.E.R. B.S.)
Digital Treehouse 