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Brooks and Horwitz

the breakfast table
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from: Geraldine Brooks

Entertaining Conspiracy Theories

Posted Thursday, March 25, 1999, at 1:40 PM ET

Dear Tony,

You can't be too cynical. I realized that back in Australia (which, I regret to report, is no longer semi-socialist: demi-semi-socialist, maybe, at least compared with here)--when the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior blew up in Auckland harbor. The editor of the weekly I was working for came striding through the newsroom muttering. "It's the bloody French." I thought to myself, Give it a rest. As if the French government would blow up a boat just because it was protesting their nuclear tests. I think it took about 24 hours for the scuba tank with "Property of French Spy" written on it to wash up on the beach ...

Since then I've rarely met a conspiracy theory I wouldn't entertain. Here's the latest one I've invited over for cocktails: The so-called Chinese spy at Los Alamos is a sham constructed to justify the revival of Star Wars. Gee, if the Chinese have got our missile secrets we'd jolly well better spend another gazillion to prop up the military-industrial complex. The thing is, if the Chinese scientist was a spy, why couldn't they develop enough evidence for an indictment? Or even a warrant, for goodness sake? I mean, they only spent three years investigating him.

I must say, as our stint as "Breakfast Table" conversationalists draws to a close, I've enjoyed these morning mind-melds. Shall I reveal the Truth? That in real life we never speak to each other in the mornings, despite working in offices a mere 10 feet apart. Part of it comes from my upbringing in a household of very grumpy morning people, where conversation at breakfast was considered uncivilized if not downright dangerous. And part of it is just the impulse to get to work while the caffeine is kicking in.

Most of our communication happens in the evenings, which makes me wonder how a forum named the Dinner Table would work? Just think of all those wine-soaked rants we could inflict on cyberspace ...

And so we say goodbye to rosy-fingered dawn ...

What's for lunch?

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: Geraldine Brooks

Entertaining Conspiracy Theories

Posted Thursday, March 25, 1999, at 1:40 PM ET
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Geraldine Brooks is a free-lance writer and author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women (click here to buy the book) and Foreign Correspondence (click here to buy the book). Tony Horwitz is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War (click here to buy the book). They live in Waterford, Va.
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