Book of the Month: Them

Okay, I know it sounds like that old science fiction horror flick from the fifties, but it isn't. But in many ways, it's much scarier.

The book of the month for May is Them: Adventures with Extremists, written by a British journalist/documentary filmmaker named Jon Ronson who, despite being Jewish himself, who set out to discover the Secret Rulers of the World, and consequently spent part of several years with extremists of various stripes -- Radical Islamists, the KKK, the Hayden Lake Nazis, Randy Weaver and his family, and David Ickes (who believes the world is actually ruled by 12-foot lizard people), among many others.

During the course of all this, he manages to infiltrate himself (very cleverly, by just walking in through the main gate) into the annual super-secret Bohemian Grove camporee and attempts to sneak into an-even-more-secret Bilderberg meeting in Portugal, only to be followed by mysterious dark-suited men wearing paranoia-inducing sunglasses.

Throw in Noam Chomsky (part of the Jewish cabal conspiracy, despite the fact that he doesn't really seem like it...), kidnapped sex slaves from another dimension, and Nicolai Caeusecu's shoes, overlay it with a faux-naive dopeyness and a British-subtle sense of humor, and you have a journey into the heart of darkness that you won't soon forget.

Highly recommended, if only for his insights into the minds of the men of "alternate political power", whose natural bent is to oppose everything the government proposes. Along the way, he even manages to make some of them seem human, which is not an easy thing to do.

But it's also very funny.