Robert Anton Wilson is a name that many are familiar with. He is co-author of the infamous Illuminatus! Trilogy, with Robert Shea, he is a hero to many of us here at DangerMedia, and many more outside of DangerMedia. As such, I was nervous about approaching him. After all, here was a man who had utterly changed my life in college with a simple book called Cosmic Trigger. He was a guest at DragonCon this past year in Atlanta, and I was lucky to land an interview with him. I will admit, I approached this interview nervously, but soon found myself relaxing and enjoying the task at hand. Here I was, able to finally talk to a man I'd wanted to meet for the last 11 years. As "Bob" reassured me, once we were getting started…

"talking and writing are two of my favorite occupations."

What followed was a wide-ranging conversation dealing with books, conspiracies, poetry, and everything in between. A logical starting point was with the Illuminatus! Trilogy… definitely the most intertwined series of in-jokes, speculation, fnord, and conspiracy theory ever published.

"Illuminatus! to me is like Citizen Kane to Orson Welles. Everybody says its his greatest work, everybody thinks Illuminatus! is my greatest work. But nobody wants to hear about something they did early in their careers. It implies I've been going downhill ever since."

Yikes! Afraid I'd hit a raw nerve (no pun intended), Bob did reassure me that

" I do like Illuminatus! In spite of the fact that more people have read it than any of my other books. You know, I've written so many things since Illuminatus! But its not that bad. Somebody told me today that Coincidance was his favorite book, somebody else said The Widow's Son, and somebody else said Prometheus Rising. So that cheered me up. Some people have read some of my other books."

Bob also assembled a rather impressive volume of conspiracy theories, Everything Is Under Control. I'd found this to be a useful reference guide (okay, I'm a bit of a conspiracy buff), but learned that it had not been as comprehensive as originally envisioned…

"Its not as good as it should have been, though. The reason that it wasn't, is my wife was dying when I was writing it. I was not in my best state of concentration. That's why it is shorter than its supposed to be. That's why there's so much white space around the different items. They tried to make the book longer than it was. What they should've done is give me more time after my wife's death to recover, and really write the book the way they wanted. But they wanted to get it into print in a hurry. So, I feel it's a very incomplete book. If I had included all the conspiracy theories I wanted to, it would be much funnier, and much more confusing. There are so many conspiracy theories around."

I wanted to know more…. After all, with so many conspiracy theories available, how does one pick and choose which one is right for them? One of my personal favorites has been the Priory Of Sion, as exposed in the book Holy Blood Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh, and Nichols. I found a sympathetic ear!

" The Priory Of Sion fascinates me, because it has all the appearances of being a real conspiracy, and yet if you look at the elements another way, it looks like a very complicated practical joke by a bunch of intellectual French aristocrats. And half of the time I believe it really is a practical joke by a bunch of intellectual French aristocrats. And then part of the time I think it is a real conspiracy."

Delving deeper, we found that trading conspiracy theories was even more fun than trading Pokemon cards! Bob shared a few more with me.

"Another one I like a lot is one from Birmingham, Alabama, that claims that the United States has been run by Freemasons ever since the beginning, but they added that the Freemasons are really a gay secret society. Even George Washington was gay. Everybody knows he was a Freemason, right? George Washington was gay, and all the Freemasons are gay, we've been run by gays for two hundred years, and that's why Jesus created AIDS, to punish this country. I think that's the craziest conspiracy theory I ever heard! Its one of my favorites, because it is so incredibly absurd, and yet there are people quite capable of believing it."

His favorite though?

" The conspiracy theory that's my favorite, is the one I invented myself. That's the TSOG. Not to be confused with the ZOG. The ZOG is a right-wing conspiracy: The Zionist Occupation Government. I haven't ever found any evidence of any Zionists in our government. But we do have a Tsar, no doubt about it. I traced it back to 1945, when Hitler's Chief of Soviet Intelligence Rheinhard Gehlen surrendered to the American Army after first burying several truckloads of data about the Soviet Union that he had obtained while working for Hitler, which he had gathered from all of his connections in the Soviet Union, which were all led by General Vlassov, who was a Tsarist who had infiltrated the Red Army, just to betray the Communists. And so the CIA, when they were formed -Gehlen was working for the OSS for three years- then the OSS turned into the CIA, and Gehlen became the head of the Soviet Penetration section, and his chief agent in the Soviet Union was this Tsarist, General Vlassov. The Tsarists had infiltrated the KGB, and the Red Army. So all of the United States' Cold War policies were based on reports about what the Soviet Union was doing or planning to do came through Tsarists and Nazis. So no wonder the United States policies got more and more crazy and Right Wing as the years went by! But then as I traced the influence of Tsarism on the American Government, the next thing I knew, we had an official Tsar! And he's in charge of what medicine we take! Which inspired me to write not my best poem, but what I think will be my most widely quoted poem:

Oh the sick can't get their meds in the States
The sick can't get their meds in the States
The sick can't get their meds
They are hounded by the Feds
They are dying in their beds
In the States.

Oh the sick can't get their meds in Iraq
The sick can't get their meds in Iraq
The sick can't get their meds
Bombs are falling on their beds
Are we off our fucking heads?
That's a fact!

I call it The Ballad Of Killer Bill"

"I've invented this symbol I'm using in my e-mail. Its five dollar signs. This is to avoid all the other conspiracy theories. The five dollar signs represent the one half of one percent of the world's population that controls almost all the wealth. They may hate one another, they may fight with one another, they may conspire against one another, but they have interests in common which are not the interests of the rest of the world like you and me, and everybody we know. And they do act as a unified force whenever its in their interest. In fact, I think there's a Japanese word for it. Its when all the competing forces in Japan in industry and banking, when they all decide to work together to get rid of some common problem annoying all of them. That doesn't mean they're not going to go back to competing with one another, and back-stabbing each other next week. But when they have one common problem, they all work together. A reporter named Danny Cassalero discovered this. He didn't even know the Japanese word for it. He just called it "The Octopus". He discovered that all the power forces in the world, no matter how opposed they seem to be all work together when there seems to be a challenge that challenges all of them. He called it "The Octopus." I represent it by five dollar signs, representing the people who own almost all the money on the planet."

Realizing that we had now identified "the enemy", the next question becomes "how do you fight back?"

"Nobody could fight them successfully by any ordinary means. The militias go out, and they practice shooting, so they can go out and fight the American Government. How can you fight the American Government with those kinds of weapons? The American Government has atom bombs! The only way you'll ever overturn the Five Dollar Signs, is through ones and zeros. Information! Fucking with the computer systems! The Iraq War was stalled for five days because of a fifteen year old who shut down all the computers in the Pentagon. I DO NOT URGE PEOPLE TO DO THIS, IT IS A FEDERAL CRIME TO URGE PEOPLE TO DO IT, AND I'M DEFINITELY OPPOSED TO IT. I want to be perfectly clear: I DON'T BELIEVE IN THIS, but its going to happen. People who don't like the way the world is run are going to be fucking more and more with the computer systems of the governments, and the power centers, and they're going to screw with all of them so much that they're going to collapse eventually. And as I said, I don't urge this, I just predict that its going to happen. [laughs] How's that for skating around a Treason charge? I don't want to spend thirteen years in a nuthouse…."

Up Next: Part II, in which we discuss Magick, Drugs, and Evolution...

-Naile