June 21: Conspiracy theories

In 1997, I was sitting behind the wheel of my Pontiac T-1000 when a guy in a semi hit me head on. I didn't blame the guy. The sun was shining in his eyes and the roads were very icy. I was not injured but my car required thousands of dollars in repair work, which the semi driver paid for out of pocket.

One of my biggest faults is I tend to get chummy with people I probably shouldn't be chummy with - including people who just hit me with their vehicles. But that's exactly what I did with the semi driver, who was a guy in his late 50s named Lorne.

Talk about conspiracy theories? This guy subscribed to 'em all. During our telephone conversations – which were supposed to be about how quickly he would give me money so I could repair my car – he shared the following gems with me:

- AIDS was created in an American laboratory to "cure the faggot problem."
- Almost every election in the United States and "her puppet nation to the north, Canada" was rigged by the global illuminati, also known as the Freemasons.
- Then sitting Alberta Premier Ralph Klein was actually a communist.
- JFK was killed by the CIA.

Hooray! A hammer and a sickle.

He didn't say anything about the moon landing being faked and I vaguely recall him saying something about Charles Manson, but I'm not too sure. This was four years before 9/11. I imagine he had a heyday with that one.

Lorne said he didn't vote. "It's pointless," he said. "It's an illusion the illuminati gives us to make us think we have a choice. We don't have a choice. They handpick our leaders and those leaders do everything they tell them to."

I was 24, I had a car I was trying to fix and a play I was trying to direct. I suspected Lorne was spouting nonsense but I was too polite to say so and I didn't have the time to conduct research so I could mount a rebuttal – all of which, I'm sure, would fail to accomplish anything.

So instead, I just punctuated Lorne's monologue with exclamations like "mm" and "wow" and "really?" I never challenged him on anything because then I'd be on the phone for another half hour and that would mean I'd have to miss an episode of Law & Order, which, at the time, starred Jill Hennessy.

Shteevie! I was wondering how long it would be before I made another appearance.

But I'm older now. I'm a journalist too. I have covered plenty of elections, I have seen how the ballot boxes are scrutinized, and I can testify that, in Ontario at least, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the votes have been tampered with. Lorne was spectacularly wrong about that and, I imagine, that there was plenty else spectacularly wrong with his whacked out worldview.

I'm not naive enough to dismiss every conspiracy theory as a nutty bedtime story for grownups. I know that evil lives everywhere. It lives in my heart and your heart and it lives in all of our institutions - everything from a rural school's parent teachers association to the United Nations.

But I can't believe – won't believe – that Big Brother is watching me even as I type this.

And I believe that my vote counts.