Gorightly Adam - The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

ALSO BY ADAM GORIGHTLY

The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic,
Mind Control, and The Manson Family Mythos

The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture
Copyright 2003 Adam Gorightly
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Paraview, P.O. Box 416, Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 10113-0416, or visit our website at www.paraview.com .

Book design by smythtype
Author photo by Andrew Taylor of Tao-Productions.com

ISBN: 1-931044-66-X
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003112931

The opinions expressed in this book are the authors and do not represent those of the publisher. The author has sought permission for the use of all illustrations and substantial quotations known by him to be in copyright. Any omissions should be brought to the attention of the author.

This book is dedicated to Jim Keith and Ron Bonds

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fearand, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM! Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that yeve been left to fight alone.

E PISTLE TO THE P ARANOIDS , The Gospel According to Fred BY K ERRY T HORNLEY

Kerry Thornley wrote those words in the mid-1960s and within 10 years he had become a clinical paranoid himself, in the judgment of almost all of his friends, including Dr. Robert Newport, a psychiatrist who had known Kerry since high school. The moral of this seems to me: take great care which nut cases you dare to mock, for you may become one of them.

I do not write in any spirit of smugness or superiority. I became somewhat paranoid myself, for a while there, or at least experienced acute anxiety attacks. For several months I literally could not leave my house without looking around to see if Kerry crouched behind a bush waiting to shoot me.

You see, he had become convinced that I worked for the CIA and served as one of his managers or brainwashers, but I thought I worked as a freelance writer and considered myself his friend. As his letters to me grew increasingly hostile and denunciatory, I began to fear that he might have graduated from weirded out to dangerous.

This now seems silly to mean overreactionbut the violence and paranoia of the Nixon years made everybody in this country feel a bit jumpy. A Black Panther leader in my part of Chicago seemed to have gotten shot by the local police while sedated; the extreme Right and extreme Left both had wild conspiracy theories about everybody else; anti-war meetings, anti-segregation meetings, even pot-legalization meetings all had people making nervous jokes about who among us the government had infiltrated to report on our Thoughtcrimes. The government not only appeared irrational and out of control, but so did a large part of the population.

I finally moved to Ireland to start a new life as an expatriate, and my worries about Kerry executing me for brainwashing him made up only a microscopic part of my motive. The whole country seemed a bit funny in the head and I had to hide out and lie low for a while. Silence, exile, and cunning, as Joyce had advised.

Looking back, I feel amused and humbled. Like Kerry, I had satirized the paranoids before the sheer number of them frightened me into acting just like one of them.

I remember my last phone conversation with Kerry, during which he announced that just a week earlier I had come to Atlanta, argued with him about my alleged CIA connections, spiked his drink with LSD, and brainwashed him again. I told him that I had not left San Francisco in months, and that if he had a bad trip the previous week then somebody else gave him the acid, not me. I insisted on this as persuasively as I could.

Finally, Kerry relenteda bit. Well, maybe you believe that, he said. But that means your bosses have been fucking with your head and implanting false memories in you too!

How do you argue that you havent had your head altered? Look, I said, Ill put my wife Arlen on. Shell tell you I havent left here in months.

That wont prove anything, he said with the calm certitude of a Grand Master announcing checkmate. They probably fixed her head too.

I dont remember the rest of the conversation. I felt lost in an Escher painting.

A few weeks, or a few months, before or after that conversation, the police found a young woman raped and murdered two doors from the house where Arlen and I lived. A few days before or after that atrocity I attended a meeting of the physics/consciousness research group in which the assembled Ph.D.s seriously discussed a quantum model in which the universe contains only one electron, and everything else, including this seemingly solid Earth, our own bodies, and our minds (if we still think we have minds) results from the virtual interactions of virtual particles, or of probability waves.

So Arlen and I packed up and moved to a land where the weirdest critter, a six-foot-tall white rabbit, seldom roams far from the fens and farmlands.

Im only kiddingnot.

Madonna, Truth or Dare

But let us, as the Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and examine this soberly.

All the above happened because Kerry and I, with a few others, invented a new religion, and because Kerry and I and a hell of a lot of others dared to doubt the official lone nut theory of the JFK assassination.

Perhaps I should say something about the religion before getting into the even murkier waters of the politics.

We called the religion Discordianism and its central catma (other, and hence lesser, religions have dogmas or absolute beliefs; Discordianism only has catmas or relative meta-beliefs) declares All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense. We owe this Divine Revelation to Gregory Hill (Malaclypse the Younger), the chief architect of Discordian atheology.

In my ministry I have added a rider promising that if you repeat this catma 666 times you will achieve Supreme Enlightenment, in some sense.

Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated joke.

Others consider Discordianism an American form of Zen Buddhism. I think Kerry held that view most of the time.

Whether one considers Discordianism a joke, a new religion, or Yankee Zen, it emphatically does not belong in the same arena as Aristotelian logic or criminal law, yet the life of Kerry Thornley dragged it into those precincts and I can find no way to disentangle them in discussing him. Everybody who ever looked into the Thornley case feels a strong need for basic either/or answers to such questions as: Guilty or innocent? Sane or insane? Victim of the CIA or victim of his own delusions?