Comet Ping Pong Craziness

I play music and sometimes I like to go out and see what's new and happening. I don't get out very often, but a few weeks ago my wife went out of town to help her sister move, I had a Friday night to myself, and I went out to hear some music in Chevy Chase.

I went to a place called Comet Ping Ping, on Connecticut Avenue, in Northwest. I overestimated the drive and got there early, went in, hung around for a few minutes. It's a family place, pizza and beer and ping pong tables. Some college age ladies were playing ping pong, switching ends running around the table each time somebody hit the ball, laughing. The band was setting up in the back, behind a curtain. I hung out on the street for a while, wandered into Politics and Prose, stuck my head in at Jake's Americana where my band had played once, eyeballed the Sri Lankan restaurant for future reference. I sat on a bench and watched people walk by.

The bands ... varied in quality. The first was a polyrhythmic duo, drums and synthesizer, and I might like to hear them again. I wasn't sure if they were doing what they did on purpose or just didn't know how to count the meter, but I read some interviews with them and yeah, they know what they're doing. It sounds fresh and spontaneous but it is also disciplined.The second band had a bunch of electric guitars playing mostly in unison and the effect is pretty cool, a wall of sound. Cool for the first twenty minutes or so. The last guy played electric guitar through some digital processing equipment and, well, I'm open to anything but I would call that "noise." It was just a roar and I left after it didn't get any better. The night was just what I had hoped, I had a beer and heard some music. The crowd was enthusiastic, attentive, I think it is good to hang out with young people sometimes.

Wikileaks put email online, where a person found a handkerchief in the kitchen and asked if the person who probably lost it wanted to come by and pick it up, or should they mail it to them. This led some conspiracy theorists to connect random dots, to put together a theory, if I get this right, that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta have some kind of human trafficking ring of child molesters that uses Comet Ping Pong as their headquarters.

A few years ago I talked to Comet Ping Pong about our band playing there. It was kind of charming, the manager explained that they would book us, but they could only pay us in pizzas. We declined, but at least they were honest about it. Bands play there basically for free, hoping to build up an audience.

But now Comet Ping Pong is getting calls, death threats. Sunday a guy drove up from North Carolina with an automatic rifle and fired it inside the place. He was "self-investigating" the child molesters. He thought there were kidnapped children being held in a basement or back room somewhere, and he was going to rescue them. The Post quoted a friend of his this morning saying, literally, "He is not a nut." Wait, what? What does it take any more?

Last week I scrolled through one of the web sites about this, before it was big news. These people are serious. They really do believe that Hillary Clinton is running a human trafficking operation out of Comet Ping Pong, and they have left a lot of clues, sort of like "Paul is dead." The people who believe this theory call newspapers like the Washington Post "fake news" and believe every rumor online about the Clintons being Satanists or criminals or pedophiles. I have some complaints about The Post but I know the difference between reality and fantasy.

And by the way, this is not "fake news." This was not published on a site that looked like a legitimate news site. This rumor oozed out of a festering boil of public discussion on Reddit. The discussion there got so nasty that Reddit finally kicked them out, and that's saying a lot. This story was not planted in the media, it emerged and spread through forums and discussion groups and social media, one person to another.

Yesterday on Twitter the looney-toons decided that this guy with the gun had been sent there as a "false flag" operation, to make it look like the nutty ones had done something nutty, when of course they are the ones who see behind the façade and know what's really going on. They are sure this is all part of the cover-up of Hillary's child sex ring.

This story has been linked to Trump's pick for national security advisor. But Mike Flynn did not tweet about Comet Ping Pong, he accused Hillary of being a pedophile in another context. His son, though, who is always by his side, does claim that this story is "true until proven false." So the story that Comet Ping Pong is headquarters for a Hillary/Podesta pedophile ring has tentacles right into the Trump White House.

I have talked before about mental illness and guns. There can be mental illness where you feel bad, or you say impulsive things, you might talk to yourself, your thoughts are fuzzy or disordered, that's all understandably mentally ill. But what do you call it when an entire community decides to divorce itself from facts? Is that illness or ideology? Or maybe it is just irresponsibility and abdication of decency.

It reminds me of a time when people believed the world was dominated by mythical beings. Aphrodite would put love in your heart, Hermes put thoughts in your head. In the absence of scientific knowledge, that is a good enough way to see it, you can understand what's going on in terms of invisible cosmic forces. I think it is halfway between a dream-world and modern consciousness, logic and causality don't really hold but things sort of fit together in a fable or myth. Things happen that you can't see, and that's why the visible world is as it is. And still in the twenty first century people feel they can mythologize someone, for instance Hillary Clinton, they can attribute any kind of evil to her, and it "makes sense" to them. In fact it makes more sense to those people than real things that you can see. Because someone could be manipulating reality like a stage-prop, but nobody can manipulate "the truth."

I really don't know how you confront this. Once a person has let go of the string, once their balloon has soared away from ground, you can't reason with them. You can't even empathize with them, once they have determined that you are earthbound. It's scary.