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We've all waited in lines at the department of motor vehicles; why are some of us so eager to ignore experience and ascribe to government a kind of Herculean can-do-ness? Here's one theory: if you're squeaking by on the minimum wage, it's probably more satisfying to focus your resentments on a coven of fbi Trilateralists than it is to curse abstractions like economic restructuring or low Filipino wages (no one's much interested in divining corporate conspiracies).
This need to find satisfying villains also explains the endurance of Kennedy-assassination theories. To concede that Lee Oswald could by himself murder a President is to realize that history is significantly random; perversely, it's more reassuring to believe that a confederation of fbi and cia agents, mafiosi, Cubans and Kennedy's autopsy doctors hatched a plot remarkable both for its reach and for the fact that in more than three decades not a single participant has sung. Who were these adroit conspirators? The same men who two years earlier launched the quixotic, inept Bay of Pigs operation, and some of whom, it has been alleged, went on to bollix up the Watergate break-in.
That's the face of a real government conspiracy: the Watergate burglars getting caught because James McCord boneheadedly taped open locks at the Democratic National Committee offices. E. Howard Hunt and Charles Colson, Iran- contra's Oliver North and Fawn Hall-these are not exactly criminal masterminds.
This isn't to say we shouldn't worry about the government. Our leaders conspire to do bad things behind our backs: they bug us, they experiment on us, they subsidize foreigners who sell us drugs-the list goes on. Fortunately, these clumsy transgressions-unlike the Mission: Impossible fantasies of militia members and Oliver Stone-are eminently verifiable, our knowledge of them not dependent on tweezing out coincidences from selective readings of the evidence. We should also remember that government tends to commit its worst crimes in public. The process is called politics, and it's no big secret.