During this epic free time, I went to Texas and visited the site of one of the biggest conspiracies in American history: the assassination of JFK. A pretty inconspicuous building, the 6th floor of the Daley Building in downtown Dallas is now a museum where the corner where Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly fatally shot President Kennedy (we now there was another shooter in the grassy knoll on the street level) inspired plenty of theories, which go unsolved today. I love conspiracy. Conspiracy triggers all the emotions we dread but secretly love the most, the fear of the unknown mixed with the excitement of mystery. Conspiracy allows people to use their imagination to think up the most elaborate of plots when most mysteries probably aren't that complicated: Occam's Razor states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. But the mystery is what keeps us guessing and is the most interesting, whereas if we were just told the truth we would accept it and move on to something more interesting (the conspiracy). Conspiracy in legal terms is also interesting because it requires 2 or more people to do something, which if one thinks about it is probably less likely most of the time than one person acting alone- you can't control perfectly what someone else will do, it's more secure to do something on one's own, etc.
Another conspiracy that blew up over the weekend was that of "Making a Murderer," a 10-episode series on Netflix that exposed possibly conspiracy in the sheriff's department of Manitoc County, Wisconsin. Ordinary citizens like myself all fear the government or authoritative figures with more power than us will do something to deprive our rights, but it actually here to a man named Steven Avery- at least once but probably twice, if what the series portrays is to be believed. What's even more heartbreaking is that the conspiracy by the police department (which at this point, seems likely have happened given all the facts that the series presented) reached innocent people like Steven's nephew Brandon, a slow learner and possibly mentally challenged 16-year-old who was coerced into making a confession against his uncle Steven and implicated himself in the process. Ironically, conspiracy is a crime that authorities use to condemn criminals who act together in malicious ways, and is what the prosecution accused Steven and Brandon of doing in this case, but it's the authorities who conspired together to plant evidence and gather confessions together to further their own cause of nailing the crime on Steven, making their movements akin to legally sanctioned conspiracy. It is really a terrible instance of the criminal justice system allowing those with power (the police, the prosecutors, the special agents, the judges to some extent) to pin a murder on possibly innocent people (it's not clear whether Steven Avery is innocent, but he definitely seems more likely to be innocent than Anand Syed, who people are still 50-50 on a year after Serial) to further their own causes. I wonder what (my favorite storyteller of all time) David Simon, creator of the Wire would say, about sergeants being made majors and majors into colonels, or this case prosecutors being made star prosecutors and special agents boosting their own stats, and I haven't even mentioned the pure malice of planting evidence against a suspect to ensure a conviction. It's really sad that the criminal justice system can allow this sort of conspiracy to happen and justifies American citizens like myself to wonder if there are stronger, darker forces out there that are all out to get us.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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