Prince of Cranks

IGNATIUS DONNELLY, PRINCE OF CRANKS
 
HOW A NINETEENTH-CENTURY MINNESOTAN’S CATASTROPHIC IMAGINATION PREDICTED THE INTERNET, CHEMICAL WARFARE, AND DEMON AIRSHIPS
 
Certain figures in American history have become archetypes of national character: Emerson’s American Scholar, Benjamin Franklin’s Self-Made Man, Jonathan Edwards’s Hellfire Preacher, P. T. Barnum’s Huckster. Donnelly represents the paranoiac streak in the country, the Conspiracy Theorist, the Buff of Secret Theories that Explain Everything. Donnelly was probably the greatest crackpot that ever lived, a precursor to Philip K. Dick’s “Crap Artist” and Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid heroes. His enthusiasms, though seemingly endless, all seemed to focus on one theme: the idea that hidden meanings exists beyond the obvious level of everyday phenomena, secret arrangements that lie waiting for the attuned mind to discover.
 
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200508...icle_tyree
 

Cool! A conspiracy theorist from the past. Does this make Jules Verne a critical thinker too? 
 
This only goes to show how creative science fiction from the past involved a sense of imaginative thinking. The good stuff is always a portent for real things to come. How technology is actually used is another thing altogether.

 

 

:1naughty:

This guy is not jester. He's more like an exposer of extreme satire. Jesters are not funny. Cranks on the other hand. Well?

 

Ludicrous as it sounds - truth is stranger than fiction. 

 

:happy: