A friend of mine from grad school came to town for an academic conference in San Francisco this week. It was the annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association, and while I generally find these conferences extremely boring, I decided to tag along with my friend and attend a panel discussion.

He asked me to pick a panel I thought would be interesting, and I found one that fit right in with my love for shows like the X-Files, movies like The Matrix, and the weirdness of David Lynch movies. The topic of the panel was “Conspiracy Theories and Beliefs in the Paranormal II: 9/11 and post-9/11,” and while it was quite interesting in terms of the topic, the delivery by the presenters made me realize why I can’t stand academic conferences: these people have poor public speaking skills.

Not to dwell too long on the mechanics of oration, but some academic folks really need to take a speech class. Talking too fast, pelting the audience with information in a shotgun style, or stammering, um-ing and ah-ing throughout a 20-minute speech engenders the exact opposite of what is intended in sharing knowledge. However, once I got past the barriers to effective public speaking, I was taken with a paper given by a professor at UC Davis (Magid Shihade). His paper was entitled “Orientalism as a Conspiracy Theory and the case of 9/11.” Seems a bit daunting at first, but what he did was connect what Richard Hofstadter called, in 1964, the paranoid style of American politics, to the post-9/11 view of “The Other.” (more…)