Book Review

The Prankster and the Conspiracy
Adam Gorightly
Paraview Books

Book Review by Jaye C. Beldo

If there ever was a perennial scapegoat of the 60's counterculture it would have to be Kerry Thornley, one of the founding members of the patently anarchist Discordian Society. With a kind of insurrectionary bravado, he took it upon himself to sponge up the sordid projections of the Military Industrial Mafia Complex, as well those from intelligence revenants who trailed and taunted him for years under various disturbing guises.

Thornley managed to keep ahead of the archetypal game by purging himself, from time to time, through various prankster-like stunts, publishing underground 'zines and writing fiction. However, The Fool ended up occupying The Hanged Man's place in a Tarot deck that had been stacked against him from day one. As a result of such discouraging and divinatory odds, his self-imposed role as Sin Eater, freely dining at the table of the conspiracy funeral banquet, is probably what turned him upside down and killed him in the end.

In Adam Gorightly's The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, a most intriguing and vivid portrait of this essential and vital anarchist spirit is effectively painted. Kerry freeranged about in the JFK/MLK/RFK assassination matrixes like a conspiratorial version of Diogenes, the ancient Greek who loved to mock the philosophers and statesmen of his day. In this case, Thornley was mocking the real assassins at large without anyone really knowing it, since he was drawing so much attention to himself.

If you're looking to get a bead on the Thornley universe, The Prankster and the Conspiracy is the key enabling you to enter into it. Gorightly maintains a wonderful balance between compelling facts surrounding the JFK hit and Thornley's proximity to it, on one hand, and the elusive and intriguing metaphysics of the Discordian Society that Thornley helped to create and promote, on the other.

Gorightly suggests that Thornley may very well have been an MKULTRA prodigy, along with Lee Harvey Oswald, since they were marine buddies stationed in Japan prior to 1963. Maybe Thornley's Discordian strategy was an attempt to break free of his handlers. It seems that both he and Oswald ended up being double crossed, Oswald by some very real forces at work, namely a mind-controlled entity named Jack Ruby. Thornley was taken down by his ever snowballing delusions, which genuinely got out of hand as the author so convincingly points out, thanks to his unbiased, thorough research and interviews with key players such as Robert Anton Wilson.

In spite of Thornley's Discordian extremism, mass consumption of LSD and his targeted status, I tend to think it was his early dabblings into Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" that ultimately cracked him in the end. Aynny's Hots-for-Capitalism philosophy served to malignantly magnetize the ever mutating vortex of Thornley's psyche and attracted some kind of negative free market investment forces into its realm. No amount of Discordian meme subterfuge could have derailed the Rand dogma from rapidly self-replicating within the brain of this errant pixie, who seemed to defy everything else and get away with it.

Not even the electronic dissolution of memory could neutralize these Objectivist toxins within him, no matter how many times his handlers kept pushing the button to keep him raving. I realize that I'm merely speculating in a possibly communist/socialist manner, but Gorightly's fertile biography is triggering my synapses so rapidly that I cannot help but entertain such cabals. Your own synapses will be triggered (and entertained too) when you order your own copy of this excellent proto-biography of an anarchist archetype gone delightfully awry.

While reading the final chapters of this sad, wonderful, tragic, inspiring and electrifying book, I flashed that the 'evil' Goddess Eris, who brought a well known apple to a banquet on Mount Olympus celebrating the wedding of King Peleus and the Sea Nymph Thetis, decided to jump ahead a few thousand years into the 1960's and toss another solid, golden fruit into the chaos heart of a Discordian party, a fruit upon which was engraved, 'Who is the most paranoid of all?' There is no telling what kind of Trojan war her question would have caused if she had chosen to roll it into the mix at the time. Who amongst the group would have fought for the title?

Fortunately, Gorightly's keen portrayal of Kerry Thornley gives us a sufficient starting place where we can all freely witness the scapegoat himself stepping forth from the shadows and taking the full honors of the title, holding his apple in the limelight.

Please check out: http://www.paraview.com/gorightly and: http://www.mansonmythos.com and my review of Mr. Gorightly's fine book on that wiseacre Charley Manson: The Shadow over Santa Susana at: http://www.konformist.com/manson-review.htm.