Conspiracy. Not Just for Breakfast.

I do love a conspiracy. Such clean innocent fun!

A conspiracy, in common usage, is at least two people working in secret to obtain a goal, most usually with negative connotations.

But if you think a little harder about it - you may conspire with your siblings to plan a surprise anniversary party for your parents; you may conspire with a girlfriend to aid her in getting a date with a man she's been eyeing; you may, as a young lover, conspire to keep your budding relationship a secret from your respective families.

Yet most of us, when we think of conspiracy, automatically cast aside the benign qualities of the word's meaning and adamantly begin marching in ever dwindling circles, tinfoil hats firmly in place.

The overwhelming success of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, which has always been treated as a novel (although there are countless people, the author included, who remain convinced there are nuggets of truth within the story) certainly leads me to believe I'm not the only one who thinks conspiracies are rather grand. [Movie version coming to a theatre in May! Trailers running nonstop on television mid-February! Will you forget the movie is being released in May? Will you be able to forget this?],

Mr. Brown's conspiracy story, while torturing its readers with its egregiously bad, awkward prose and overuse of The Anvil of Obviousness (also known as We Saw This Coming A Mile Away) was not even novel - the story was handled much better by a trio of British authors in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which I read when it was published in 1982.

Yet the story, essentially a conspiracy, depends as they all do on the rush at the realization of being "in" on a secret - frankly, the bigger the secret the more immediate and commensurately sized the rush.

Obviously as a species we've barely evolved beyond junior high, a time when secrets were incredibly powerful currency in our tiny galaxies and those graced with the knowledge of all the secrets hugged themselves the tightest of all. (Sleep well, Bush & Co.!)

Yet logic insists that as much as we agree that a tiny benign everyday conspiracy between at least two people to keep secret a fact or event exists, then we also must agree that conspiracies on grand scales involving poltiical power, the balance of nations, and the fortunes of millions exist.

I'll meet you under the bleachers at 4:00 - I'll be the one wearing the tinfoil hat.