I don't think it's that particular specific excuse in this case either, but in general it feeds into the same idea of "Hey this sounds weird and incapable of happening, so that person just must be crazy and let's just write him/her off. This couldn't have happened, case closed." That is the real point here. Honestly, I don't really care too much about Randy Quaid's financial problems, but the core issue of this story is what struck a cord with me and it was with that question about him being delusional, like it's already over, he's already been judged, no one's going to stop for a second and think. It's just such bullshit way of, first off, treating a person in that situation, and secondly, doing your job.
That notion, that mind set, has absolutely bitten us in the collective ass so many times throughout history and it's like we don't even realize it so we just keep doing it. It's a line of thinking that does us no good, to automatically rule out something as impossible without even seriously considering it first. And that's a problem that's never going to go away because there are whistle blowers, plenty of them on subjects ranging from child prostitution rings to corruption to high level treason, but a lot of it is just what that person knows. Like, no one has a document signed by Bush and Cheney and bin Laden that says "We agree to blow up the WTC, start a fictitious war on terror that is never ending blah, blah,blah.." and with their signatures on the bottom. That "smoking gun" is never going to surface. And without something like that, there will always be a mass contingent of people who will always refuse to believe even in the possibility , just the mere possibility that things may not have been on the up and up.
When you're talking about the mega wealthy, mega powerful establishment figures who have armed guards at their "sit ins" and meetings, the only potential way of learning their secrets is through these 2nd hand accounts. And if you're a person who is going to continually disregard every one of them that talks about it as a wacko conspiracy nutjob, you have to ask yourself a question that I already know these people never will:
"If it was all true, would I ever believe ANYone who did come forward to confirm that it's all true?"
As for how to keep a secret that big under wraps, ask anyone who worked on the Manhattan Project. The way you keep potentially dangerous secrets in a large group is through compartmentalization. In that huge secret, only one man was allowed to know everything about the project as it was going on, Lipman Siew. Everyone who worked on the project had only tiny bits of information that were essential to their individual job in the larger goal. Many people working for the project had no technical understanding of the implications of the work they were doing, just enough to know their job on the production line as it were. Harry Truman didn’t know about the project until he became president. He got briefed by the secretary of war after it had been going for 3 years.
The uranium production was in Tennessee, the plutonium plants were in Washington, and workers weren't allowed to work in more than one facility so they couldn't connect things in their minds. The public had not a clue this was all going on, right under their noses. Over 100,000 people worked on that project, they had to build little temporary towns. It was an amazing, horrible achievement that if you were to beforehand ask any common person walking on the street whether or not the government, of all things, could keep a secret that large and that involved and complex for years and years they'd say you'd be crazy to think that they could. And it's not a whole lot different today, Pretty much just as gullible.
