Vanity Fair ran this.

It’s true, moments after I heard from my wife as she put on her makeup yesterday morning that Bin Laden had been “killed,” I sauntered over to my trusty Mac Mini view of the outside world and learned that it’s not “true.”

I learned that the president, who, from certain points of view “has done nothing,” from others, “will do anything.” It makes sense that belief in conspiracies is a conservative bugaboo, just as belief in utopias is liberal fantasy. Conservatives try to hang on to a past that never was while liberals lean towards a future that will never be. It’s a complex world. It is nearly unbearable to contemplate the way things are without the shield of any sort of palliative belief.

It’s been a complex week, with many beliefs swirling around in vortexes of fact. The tornadoes came and made a mess from ‘Boulder to Birmingham.’ Well, would you believe…Tuscaloosa? Climate science deniers, as well as climate scientists, were hesitant to blame climate change. Mother nature is restless, inscrutable, destructive, and baffles little minds with zig zags. (If the climate is warming, why is it so cold?) Boom, another storm gathers, intensifies, swamps levees, and causes “unimaginable destruction.” We’ve been warned, believers and deniers alike, “that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Trump went off half cocked. OK, maybe he was fully cocked, but loaded with a crock. He managed to get O-bomb-a to show papers like a good (insert epithet here), but also, in the beautiful equilibrium of the news cycle, to show his own colors. They are not so much red, white and blue as green and yellow. I thought, not remembering what I knew of the Donald, that he might be a fun candidate. He turns out to be a worthless windbag. The pundits lined up for agreement and condemnation. Is he still the front runner in the race to the bottom?

Now this: Osama hunted down and killed in his compound. We are told that it’s a suburban compound; built not in a cave, but on a patch of lawn. Your new neighbor puts up a big complex and surrounds it with barbed wire. I guess only in Pakistan would this sort of thing go unnoticed. Except that it didn’t really.

But I started out with the deniers. I looked at the news feed, and then down at the comments from the general public. There were a few woots of triumph and satisfaction, but then there were the calls for Osama’s corpse, the bloody pictures, his teeth, his left ear, his DNA, his driver’s license, his social security number, his Swiss bank account number, his beemer and his yacht, his dog Tali-Bahn, and oh, yeah, his LONG FORM death certificate. Someone had the wit to riposte: “so now we have to put up with birthers, truthers AND deathers!?”

“And you tell me, ‘you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.'”