And Speaking of Shills . . .

Recently it came to my attention that another career imposter, whose employment history has included stints as an athletainer and a fake representative of the people, has now begun to impersonate a defender of the American people through his position as a minion of the private security industry and the host of his own “reality” TV series.

Former Minnesota governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura – sans mustache and Navy seal buzz cut, and sporting a rattail as stylish as a mullet – now fronts Conspiracy Theory on the “TruTV” network. Insomnia enabled me to catch a recent rebroadcast of a 2009 episode, “Big Brother,” in which Ventura, with his company of so-called investigators, purports to expose the “heart” of the surveillance industry that currently justifies its existence by creating of us all terror suspects which require omnipresent and increasingly stealthier monitoring. Many of Ventura’s half-dozen or so investigators are duly skeptical of Ventura’s reasons for his seemingly puritanical and dogged determination to uncover what he paranoiacally suspects are industry abuses, one even outrightly declaring that giving up some of our freedoms is necessary to maintaining the freedom of us all. The alleged range of political opinion of middle America has been dutifully mimicked and provides the backdrop against which Ventura will wage his individualistic, American heroic, mostly one-man war for the truth about the threats to our freedom from within.

In the Big Brother episode Ventura clowns for the camera, feigning indignation in all the right places as he would have feigned suffering an opponent’s nelson in 1976, when he interviews industry insiders, including David Williams, a former military police officer turned sheriff turned police reserve and current director of our nation’s first country-wide SS organization, Oklahoma’s Infra-Gard. Ventura is unrelenting in his “hard-hitting” interview of Williams, at whom he growls, “Just so long as you don’t forget who that document protects,” once he’s managed to squeeze out of Williams his concession that Williams may sometimes have to break the law to uphold it but that he nevertheless carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution with him at all times, suggesting he’s never without the talisman in case he’s overcome with a desire to pay obeisance to it. Williams’s organization now has chapters of unnamed business leaders whose job it is to monitor the communities – including the communities of their employees – within their purview in every state. Their job is to put into action a response to threats against the infrastructure, including threats to their supremacy as society’s power brokers. “And you would never, for example, exert any pressure on your employees whose political views don’t exactly align with . . . “ Ventura begins to ask before another Infra-Gard chapter president in Tennessee assures him, “Oh, no, no, no. No. Certainly not. That’s not the purpose of the organization. We’re strictly concerned with protecting the infrastructure . . . of banking . . . telecommunications . . .” Our chapter president now looks more like a member of the current or immediate past White House administrations who stole our tax money to prop up allegedly failing industries, including the automakers that have, together with the oil industry, destroyed beyond repair our environment.

What Ventura doesn’t do, though, at this point, is to talk about the prevalence of gangstalking in the workplace, or even tell his viewing audience how far the law allows employers to conduct character assassination campaigns against their employees for the purposes of removing them not merely from their present positions but from the entire workforce, even though the practice was so prevalent in multi-nationals doing business in Europe in the late 20^th century that several European countries – including Germany – outlawed it. All of Ventura’s half-dozen or so investigators are blithely unaware of these phenomena, inarguably the most germane to their exposé, and provide foils for Ventura’s posturing as the great defender of the freedoms of the hard-working, patriotic and tolerant American people.

In the end, we’re left with Ventura’s paranoia being simply reasonable, but ultimately not justified – at least, not today – which is exactly what the fascist American government for whom Ventura has worked most of his life wants you to believe. But we're nevertheless also left with a wee bit more than that: the very fascism which Ventura’s buffoonery tries to obscure.

I imagine this is how most of Ventura's “theories” turn out.

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