Crackpottery, early or late

The New Yorker has a long review by Lauren Michele Jackson of a first volume of excerpts from Alice Walker’s journals. The literary agency representing Walker has tweeted its approval of the review: “thoughtful and lovely.” The review turns the titles of Walker’s books into Amazon links, but there’s no link to Walker’s blog, mentioned in the next-to-last paragraph:

The journal entries selected for Gathering Blossoms Under Fire conclude eight days into the year 2000, but Walker has maintained a blog since 2008. Her posts are more hortatory than her journal entries, but not necessarily more disciplined. In 2012, she wrote her first post on David Icke, whose “freedom of mind,” she writes, “reminds me very much of Malcolm X.” She recommended a video for those who “haven’t been exposed to his thinking.” Icke’s thinking includes the theory that mankind has unwittingly been ruled by an intergalactic race of reptilians since antiquity. In an interview four years ago for the Times Book Review, Walker praised Icke’s 1995 book, And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which promotes anti-Semitic crackpottery about who runs the world. Walker, a proper boomer, seems also to have been diving deep into the brackish waters of YouTube.

Is this a late-life aberration, or can the tropism be traced to a deeper angst that was missed in its time?

One might ask: does it matter? Anti-Semitism, early or late, is anti-Semitism. Crackpottery, early or late, is crackpottery.

Jackson almost dodges her own question, noting that the journal excerpts reveal “no sinister taproot” but that Walker, “having grown up in a place where conspiracies, racial and sexual, were daily realities to be reckoned with,” “may have developed a belated hunger for more.” “Belated hunger” sounds to me like a polite rephrasing of “late-life aberration.”

How aberrant? Well, a Walker post from 2015 embeds an episode of InfoWars in which Alex Jones interviewed David Icke. Walker’s caption:

I like these two because they’re real, and sometimes Alex Jones is a bit crazy; many Aquarians are. Icke only appears crazy to people who don’t appreciate the stubbornness required when one is called to a duty it is impossible to evade.

Those crazy Aquarians! Sometimes they even file for bankruptcy.

[In a 2018 New York Times “By the Book” feature, Walker praised David Icke: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.” Much comment followed. I suspect that the notoriety of the “By the Book” feature, which brought Walker’s conspiracy-thought to widespread attention, made Icke an unavoidable topic in the New Yorker review. Here is a 2013 commentary on Walker’s conspiracy-thought from J. J. Phillips, who is far franker than the New Yorker reviewer: “Go Ask Alice Walker” (The Berkeley Daily Planet ). This link will take you to “By the Book” and follow-up reporting from the Times. Here is some background from Vox. And here is a recent brief retrospective from The Atlantic.]