Conspiracy theory and melancholy life

I won't get this right the first time around, but something David Savran writes about Burroughs stirs me to think about conspiracy theory as offering respite for not just the white male subject, but for the melancholic late capitalist subject in general. Savran observes:

For Burroughs, as for so many other rebel males of the 1950s, political activism is suppressed in favor of retreat to an imaginary world in which control, the flesh and the word are simply dreamed away. Which means that the in the darkness and horror of Cold War culture, the end of writing—both its goal and its ruination—is utopia (103).

Savran is arguing, essentially, that Beat culture fails because, while they see clearly the terrifying control systems set in place in the immediate postwar years, writers like Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac fail to grasp their own implication in these systems. In order to "disavow" this failure, Savran argues, artists like Burroughs retreat into the utopia of writing, finding there a "dream," an "imaginary world" that avoids the contradictions of, to put it plainly, being white and male and rebelling against a system that authorizes white men, and as a result, he, and his fellow Beats, developed large blind spots. Savran is critical of the Beats in a familiar way--they didn't go far enough, they ignored racism, misogyny, homophobia, they refused politics in favor of aesthetics. But as I write this, I think of what the postwar moment felt like: first, one felt the full horror of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; second, one witnessed the different horrors of unloosed supercapitalism--the rapid suburbanization of America, the quickly-widening consumerism, the expansion of disposable culture (everything we uneasily laugh at on Mad Men); third, one felt the stinging failure of the Communist Left, a great force of organized opposition to the excesses of the State and Capital. In short, the temptation to escape--to seek an "imaginary world" of dream--must have been immense for anyone on the Left. (Indeed, other writers have argued that Ginsberg was no less Leftist than his predecessors in the Popular Front, but the threat of (homophobic) McCarthyism forced him to adopt survival strategies that appeared apolitical--dreamy.)

And here is where I sense a wide, largely undiagnosed set of appeals for conspiracy theory: however dark its mutterings, it offers still a kind of utopia, a kind of no-world where someone is in control, and the conspiracy theorist has the tools to resist such control. In the midst of the melancholic summer of 2010, with a failing Obama presidency, a dying Gulf of Mexico and two endless, nonsensical wars, and a general increase in real human suffering--homelessness, unemployment, untreated illnesses--the temptation of conspiracy seems clear. Blame it on Acorn--blame it on the still-influential neocons. Because at least then it feels better--there's a limit to the melancholy. The oft-repeated joke is that we need conspiracies in the absence of God. But perhaps one can't be patronizing about the appeal of the dream, even if the dream is politically inutile.