It’s a Hoax! — 2
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Featuring: Novelist Michael Crichton
“NBC News just called it the great freeze — coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”
- Businessman Donald Trump, January 25, 2014 (via Twitter)
More potent in terms of injecting Denialism into American brains, was the work of science fiction author and George W. Bush “science” advisor, Michael Crichton. I remember reading his The Andromeda Strain in junior high school, admiring it for its scientific speculation. What I did not admire (though I skimmed it in a bookstore) was his 2004 annotated novel State of Fear in which he promoted the idea that global climate destabilization was a hoax perpetrated upon the American people (and the world) by eco-terrorists whose goal is to… well, ultimately to create mechanisms of social and economic control in lieu of Soviet Communism doing the trick. Crichton’s plotline proposes an artificial tsunami as something which would be believed to be related to global warming. Despite the absurdity of the plot, the American public found it worthy of buying in sufficient quantities that it became a New York Times “bestseller”, joining Scientology’s Dianetics and everything Ayn Rand ever put her name to as well.
On his own posthumously-maintained book-selling webpage (Crichton died the day Obama was elected president, November 4, 2008) he published a statement about his writing of State of Fear which itself reads like something from a paranoid thriller:
“I didn’t want to write it. I decided I wouldn’t write it. I had breakfast with a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in 30 years and I told them my dilemma and he said no, you have to write it. I said I might get killed for this. He said, no, you have to write it. I would like to be able to say that as a result of that conversation I decided to write it. I didn’t. I went home and I thought, you know, I’m not writing this. It doesn’t matter. Keep my opinion to myself. I started to work on something else and I felt like a coward and I thought what are you going to do?” (Emphasis mine) [1]
Crichton intimates that his idea (exposing the hoax of global climate destabilization) is a dangerous one, opposed by dark, powerful forces that seek to suppress the Truth. “I might get killed for this” Crichton claims but, like Nolte, Crichton never names. We never learn who the real-life villains are who might kill him for writing the novel. So, while he plays into and teases his credulous audience with ‘real-life’ threats to his own brave and daring truth-telling, he never spells out who the real potential assassins actually are, or why they would kill him.
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[1] From “The Official Site of Michael Crichton: State of Fear” http://www.michaelcrichton.com/state-of-fear/ (Accessed December 1, 2020)
