by Joan Marcus, Guest Columnist
Fifty years ago, my father became convinced that a girl named Lucy in the apartment below ours stole my mother’s engagement ring.
He blamed my brother for this. He thought Bobby had let this child into our flat and she’d entered our parents’ bedroom, opened the top dresser drawer, and nicked the ring from its wooden tray alongside a collection of loose buttons and my father’s cufflinks. He raged at my brother, who was only eight. It’s what he did—yell, mostly at my brother, about things that mostly weren’t his fault. This particular tantrum was bizarre even by my father’s standards. Lucy was a tiny thing with white-blonde hair and scraped knees, in the same third-grade class as my brother, but never his friend. She didn’t come over for playdates. No one had seen her in the apartment, nor did she have any history of showing up uninvited. If my father really thought Lucy took the ring, he could have confronted her mother, but he never did, so he must have known it would make him seem crazy. Even so, he was convinced, and no one tried to dissuade him. Not his wife. Certainly not his frightened children, who knew the best thing to do with an irrational parent is to clam up and wait for him to comes to his senses.
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I’ve never known what to do with disagreement. Whether it’s a friend, colleague, or loved-one, I find myself tongue-tied the second anyone challenges me. Blame it on my father if you must. The less trauma-informed explanation is that I feel responsible for marshalling all my proof and articulating it brilliantly, and in the moment, the best proofs elude me—even, or perhaps especially, when the disagreement is about something absurd. Once I stood at the front of a classroom trying to convince a bunch of college first-years that Helen Keller wasn’t a fraud. The “Keller was faking it” conspiracy theory gained traction in the dark days of COVID lockdown, over TikTok at first, spreading however these things spread. The original posts were likely ironic, but I assure you my students in fall of 2022 were believers.
Because this was a classroom discussion, I wasn’t speechless the way I would be if a family member lobbed a conspiracy theory at me, but I wasn’t exactly confident. “How Helen Keller learned to communicate is well-documented at the Perkins School for the Blind,” I tried. “You can go research it any time.”
“Look, if I were deaf and blind from the age of, what, eighteen months or whatever, I wouldn’t be able to write twelve books,” one boy said.
I mean, you probably couldn’t do that anyway is what I was thinking, but that’s not the kind of thing you say to a student.
“Explain to me how she managed to fly a plane,” another one insisted.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” his friend added. “It doesn’t! None of it makes sense!”
It’s my own fault that I was in this mess to begin with. I’d made the decision to teach a course on conspiracy theories—no one forced me to do that. It was the inaugural year of that course, and I’d tried to cram in too much material, everything from 9/11 controlled demolition and chemtrails and vaccine tracking chips to genuine government conspiracies like MK Ultra and the Tuskegee Untreated Syphilis Study to parodies like Peter McIndoe’s “Birds Aren’t Real” movement. I wasn’t prepared for my students’ resistance (9/11 was so an inside job), or for their questions, which kept throwing me off balance. Did Helen Keller really fly a plane? I had to look that one up. Turns out that on a flight over the Mediterranean in 1946, she took the controls from the pilot for about 20 minutes while her translator relayed the pilot’s instructions through tactile signs. You don’t even have to dig very far to find that information, and there’s no reason not to trust the Encyclopedia Britannica. I should have encourage that student to look it up himself, then asked him to explain to me why his source isn’t authoritative. It’s what I do now when I teach that course. But at the time, in the miasma of 2022 anxiety, mid-pandemic and post-insurrection, hearing my students’ misguided notions just made me despair.
So instead of making a clear, measured argument backed by unimpeachable sources, which I didn’t have at my fingertips because I never expected to have to defend Helen Keller in the first place, I fired back with the kind of accusation that stops dissent in its tracks. “This,” I said, shaking my head sadly, “is the most ableist garbage I have ever heard!” A few students nodded and chuckled. It’s worth noting that most of them probably didn’t think Helen Keller was a fraud—it was a vocal minority who pushed that line—and I do think it was important to point out that accusing the most famous deafblind woman in history of faking it is, indeed, ableist. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that would convince anyone who didn’t already agree with me. It was a dig designed to put the whole issue to bed and get us back on track. It’s what I was taught early in life—that the loudest voice wins, and if you get the last word in, well, bully for you.
When I run up against someone who believes absurdities, what trips me up is not really my lack of evidence—I can always remedy that later. My biggest stumbling block is that their belief comes attached to a narrative, a story about the world and their place in it, and I can’t do much to change that story. One of my students complained about how his catechism teacher presented the tale of Helen Keller and her tutor Anne Sullivan as though it were sacrosanct, something to inspire and shame. What do you mean you didn’t finish your assignment? Don’t you know Helen Keller was deaf and blind and still wrote a dozen books and learned five languages? (This kind of idealized tale of heroism does little to further the cause of disability rights. Some of us call it “disability porn.”) “I always thought it was bunk,” he said, shrugging. I suppose disbelief was the only way to resist a story weaponized to make him feel like a lazy little ingrate. All my Keller conspiracy theorists were white males, and all but one was on the football team at this Division 3 college. If they’d ever had high school dreams of NCAA glory, those dreams were gone. Some were struggling academically too. I could have shown them archival evidence of Keller’s language acquisition, provided dozens of articles from reliable sources. It wouldn’t have changed the fact that, in a world where most people seemed to think they had every advantage, those boys were anxious about their prospects and terrified of failure, and calling Keller’s accomplishments fraudulent made them feel just a little bit better.
Defaulting to charges of ableism pitted my narrative against theirs. They believe the world is run by people who don’t understand how hard it is to be a young man and toss around stories like Keller’s to make them feel worthless. I believe their skepticism is part of a long history of doubting people with disabilities—like insisting that Stevie Wonder can see, like claiming a woman’s chronic pain is all in her head. A charge of ableism feels more satisfying than providing sources anyone could shrug off. Since I can’t change their understanding of the world, I may as well lean into my own.
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Conspiracy theories seem to be having a moment yet again this summer. Lindsey Graham was murdered by Russian operatives, or Israeli Mossad agents, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mitch McConnell is brain-dead or already deceased. Speculation about McConnell has been circulating in left-wing spaces, and I’ve followed it closely. On June 14, first responders did find McConnell unconscious at his home in northeast DC. They took him to the hospital, where he remained for weeks without any word on his condition. Eventually, top Republican senators Thune and Barrasso reported speaking to him, insisting he was “fully engaged and eager to get back to the senate”—this according to Barrasso spokesperson Kate Noyse. But left-wing media groups like The Other 98% and MAGA conspiracists like Laura Loomer weren’t buying it. A frail man is found unconscious—emergency dispatch audio mentioned both a possible cardiac arrest and a CPR in progress—after which it’s crickets for three weeks. His wife, former labor secretary Elaine Chao, on a philanthropic visit to China, doesn’t bother coming home, claiming her husband’s condition isn’t serious enough to warrant her return. According to Kentucky law, if it became clear by August 3 that McConnell needed to be replaced, the state would have to hold a special election and anyone could run, including Thomas Massie, the renegade Republican who lost his reelection bid for congress when Trump backed his challenger. If Massie, a vocal critic of Trump’s war in Iran, were to replace McConnell, he could bust apart the Republican block and seriously fuck shit up for them. Chao must be staying in China so she doesn’t have to pull the plug—so the theory went. The whole rotten lot of them are running out the clock until August 4, when they will announce, surprise surprise, that the senator will not be finishing out his term.
It’s the kind of thing I tell my students to resist. Just because you’ve established a motive for conspiracy doesn’t mean one exists. If you were on trial for murder and the prosecution could only prove motive, you’d be acquitted, and damned grateful that courts of law don’t mistake motive for guilt.
And yet.
This particular conspiracy theory jibes with a story I do believe, which is that Republicans will do just about anything to stay in power, including gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, denying elections if it comes to that. Or (under the leadership of McConnell himself), flat out refusing to consider Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court because it was March 2016, an election year, and they thought if they waited another nine months, a Republican would be voted in and they could replace Antonin Scalia with a conservative, which is exactly what happened. The shocking unfairness of that episode still sits with me, heaving up out of darkness every time I see our extremist court make another democracy-eroding decision. So yeah, I’ll admit I was tempted to believe parts of that story. Even when the McConnell camp released his “proof of life” photo, the senator holding a July 12 copy of the Washington Post and smiling stiffly, I heard conspiracists call it AI generated and, though that seemed unlikely, it didn’t seem entirely absurd.
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When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive but not at all well, rumors went around in far-right circles that she was in a medically induced coma or already dead. Her court opinions were being written by clerks; reports of her appearances were faked; leftist operatives were using body doubles for video footage. Watching these people tie themselves in knots was fine entertainment. My brother, who lurks on far-right spaces for his own amusement, showed me grainy footage of RBG trundling through the airport, plus several viewers’ inane comments supporting the body double thesis. Even after Ginsburg’s death, these people wouldn’t let go. She’s been dead for over two years, they insisted. The body-double couldn’t keep it up! Our stories can be so potent, so central to our identities, that we refuse to abandon them even in the face of clear evidence.
I don’t want to be that person. And though I can’t do much to change other people’s narratives, I can at least acknowledge my own and recognize that those stories are not the same thing as proof. McConnell is obviously very ill and has been for some time. He should have stepped down ages ago. But that doesn’t mean he’s been dead for weeks, or that Republicans have been actively trying to keep Massie out of the senate. That’s probably a bit of progressive wishful thinking anyway—Massie gets voted in, flips to Independent, sows chaos. At the very least, I can do my best to separate fact from fantasy.
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The story my father believed about the world wasn’t inaccurate, even if it led to an absurd conclusion. He believed that he’d gotten a raw deal from day one, abandoned by his mother and left in the care of an indifferent father, shuttled off to a “home for destitute children,” then passed from family to family in the first years of the Great Depression. When my mother’s engagement ring disappeared, he’d just learned that the college where he’d taught for fifteen years was closing its doors. At 56 and with the wrong degree in hand, he had no hope of finding more teaching work. If some handsy little girl snuck into our flat and swiped our ring, it seemed like the perfect topper to a life of shit luck. We could have tried reasoning with him. It wouldn’t have changed that story.
Eleven years after my father accused my brother of letting the neighbor girl steal our mother’s ring, Mom passed away and Bob and Dad went through her effects together, including all the scraps of paper and buttons and keys and such in the top dresser drawer. One rarely gets the kind of vindication Bob got when he pushed some bit of rubbish aside and saw the ring—a modest one, quarter carat diamond, band worn to a thread at the undercarriage. “Hey Dad, what’s that?” he asked. My father cleared his throat. “Oh. That’s your mother’s engagement ring.” He didn’t deny having accused my brother, but he also didn’t offer an apology. Perhaps he felt that too much time had passed, like there’s some statute of limitations on verbal abuse. In any case, there was way too much to apologize for, and I can’t imagine him saying the right words. I’m sorry I yelled at you when you were small and defenseless, sorry I concocted a nonsensical story out of thin air, out of my own anxiety, that satisfied my own sense of persecution. I’m sorry I wasn’t evolved enough to understand any of this. I’m sorry. It was never about the ring anyway.
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Articles
and essays by Joan Marcus have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review; Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers; Fourth Genre; The Journal; Laurel Review; The Smart Set; The Sun, and elsewhere. Avoidant Type, her memoir-in-progress, tells the story of her battle with iatrophobia, or fear of medical doctors. She lives in Ithaca, New York.