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The Men Who Stare At Goats Jon Ronson Picador/Pan McMillan Paperback, 278pp, RRP $30.00 
Remember that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes on the space shuttle? There's a scene where Bart writes on the back of Homer's head and Homer starts spinning around on the floor trying to read what Bart's written and the family laugh at first, but their laughter turns to shock as he keeps going and going and going...That's sort of the effect one gets when reading 'The Men Who Stare At Goats.' Like UK journalist Jon Ronson's first book, 'Them: Adventures With Extremists' you begin with these on-the-face-of-it hilariously insane premises (an Earth-ruling secret race of seven-foot lizards, a soldier that can kill a goat just by staring at it) but the joke gets less and less funny as the story goes on. At least with 'Them' the nutjobs were relatively harmless (well, as harmless as armed-to-the-teeth racist militias and conspiracy theorists can get; maybe "far away from me, deep in the US" is a better way to put it): this time around some of these people who are believing in "very strange things" are coordinating military operations in Iraq. No, really. Ronson's great talent as a writer is to express the same stunned disbelief as his readers as we learn that high-ranking officers in the US military are believing in what most people would dismiss as complete lunacy: developing soldiers with the ability to walk through walls, read minds, remote-view targets, explode hearts with the power of thought etc. Through him we learn about the First Earth Battalion, a concept spawned by Vietnam vet Jim Channon and dedicated to non-lethal alternatives to combat, and follow the twisting, unpredictable path that ends with Iraqi POWs being photographed in demeaning positions and the Barney I Love You song being blasted at prisoners in transport crates for hours on end. Sounds implausible? You have no idea. Ronson tracks the development of this peculiar strain of military thinking through points as seemingly disparate as Uri Gellar, the Heaven's Gate cult, the siege at Waco and the war in Iraq, and the reader is confronted by a new and bizarre claim at every turn. There are times that you can't help thinking that Ronson's drawing a long bow with some of his conclusions (and I admit to getting a mite suspicious when people base so much of their evidence on untraceable interview testimony - some more thorough referencing would be appreciated), but if 'Them''s conclusion was unexpectedly reassuring (in a nutshell: the cranks are mostly right, but the conspiracies they seek to fight are far more mundane than they realise), '...Goats' ends with the terrifying suggestion that right this minute POWs in Guantanamo Bay are being experimented on by a new generation of torturers (even if things as seemingly innocuous as Matchbox 20 CDs are among their weaponry). If nothing else, '...Goats' will make you wonder about the muzak you hear during your next shopping trip.  |
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