I picked up a book tonight at my local Boulder Barnes & Noble emporium called THEM: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson (pictured at right). Two things made me curious about this book. First, it covers (among others) one David Icke, who seems to be one of the planet's foremost nutjobs. Take a look, for instance, at his DVD, The Reptilian Agenda, about which his own site (worth seeing only for how godawful ugly it is), says things like this:

"While people still argue over Roswell and the extraterrestrial beings apparently found there, African tribes people have been interacting with these ET "gods" for thousands of years, sometimes eating them, as Credo Mutwa did on one occasion with unforgettable consequences."

Credo Mutwa, btw, is a "zulu 'sanusi' or shaman." But nevermind that. I want to know about those "unforgettable consequences." My curiosity is killing me!

But back to Jon Ronson. The other thing that intrigued me about his first book, THEM, is his second book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Here's a taste from the author's site:

In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. 'The men who stare at goats' reveals extraordinary - and very nutty - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's War on Terror.

OK, but I didn't see that book on the shelves tonight. I saw the one about THEM. Here Ronson reads a little bit of it...

The road that took me up to the headquarters of Thom Robb's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was strewn with abandoned pickups and "No Trespassing" signs with pictures of snarling dogs, and the signal on my cell phone had failed along the way. I'd come to see Thom Robb because he was undertaking an unusual task. He wants to give the Klan an image makeover and slide into the mainstream. He wants his own TV show, he said, with jokes and music like David Letterman...

Thom Robb told me that his intention to rejuvenate the image of the Klan was influenced by popular self-help books. He told me his favorite ones: "Successful Positive Mental Attitude," "How to Win Friends and Influence People." He gave me a copy of "The Magic of Thinking Big." He said it had a positive influence on him, and it might on me, too.

When I arrived home, I decided to buy another book, a vicious book that had influenced neo-Nazis for 80 years. It was Henry Ford's "International Jew." Ordering it made me feel terrible, but I wanted to try and understand why these people had hated my people for so long. So I gave Amazon my credit card details. A few weeks later, I logged onto Amazon again, and I was surprised to find a helpful message: "Customers who bought the "International Jew" also bought "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler." So I ordered "Mein Kampf." And when it came, I put it on the shelf next to "The Magic of Thinking Big"...

from: Review: Excerpt from Jon Ronson's latest book "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Liane Hansen
source: All Things Considered (NPR), 29 January 2002
via: HighBeam Research