Historia Discordia
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Reason
August/September 2004
Historia Discordia
Meet Kerry Thornley, the second Oswald.
by Brian Doherty
Kerry Thornley lived and died in obscurity. But while few
people noticed, he invented one of the 20th century’s more
influential religions, helped launch '60s-style
sex-and-nature neopaganism, and was a major force behind the
first modern libertarian 'zine.
He was also, to hear him tell it, part of the conspiracy to
murder JFK, and thus escalate the Vietnam War -- a
conspiracy so secret even Thornley didn't know about it at
the time.
Thornley was one of America's most fascinating unknowns. It
is fitting, given the underground nature of his claims to
fame, that his first biography, The Prankster and the
Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met
Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by Adam Gorightly,
is published in the quasi-clandestine form of a
print-on-demand book from Paraview Press.
Thornley helped his high school buddy Greg Hill invent the
comedic religion of Discordianism in dull suburban Southern
California in the late 1950s. It was dedicated to the
worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of Chaos. Its flavor can
be gleaned from this bit of powerful magick, the Turkey
Curse, from its holy book, the Principia Discordia: "Face .
. . towards the direction of the negative aneristic
vibration that you wish to neutralize. Begin waving your
arms in any elaborate manner and make motions with your
hands as though you were Mandrake feeling up a sexy
giantess. Chant, loudly and clearly: GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE,
GOBBLE, GOBBLE! The results will be instantly apparent."
Thornley joined the Marines in 1959, where one of his
buddies at the El Toro Marine Base was Lee Harvey Oswald, an
openly communist "outfit eight ball" known to his fellow
grunts as "Oswaldskovitch."
Thornley began writing a novel based on his disillusioning
experience in the Marines. After hearing that ol'
Oswaldskovitch really meant it with that commie stuff when
he defected to the Soviet Union, Thornley transformed the
book, called The Idle Warriors, into a roman à clef about
Oswald -- making Thornley the only person to write a book
about Lee Oswald before that fall day in Dallas.
Thornley was living in New Orleans when John F. Kennedy was
killed, hanging out, according to his own recollections
(which some friends suspect Thornley invented) with a
curious cast of characters. Among them were some
unfortunates caught in New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison's feckless investigation into the JFK assassination.
What is definitely not Thornley's imagination, though, is
that he was dragged into the "Who Killed Kennedy?"
melodrama, testifying before the Warren Commission and
targeted by Garrison, who thought Thornley might have been
part of the conspiracy as a "second Oswald." The two men
allegedly looked quite similar, and there was a weird series
of coincidences linking them.
In the mid-'60s Thornley headed back west and became a major
writer for the first modern libertarian 'zine, The
Innovator. In those years he also became an advocate of the
early SoCal free love cult Kerista, which neopagan historian
Margot Adler credits, says Gorightly, as "the true
beginnings of the neopagan movement in contemporary culture."
Through the '70s and the '80s the "order" reflected in his
insanely elaborated conspiracy theories won Thornley's heart
away from the chaos of Eris, and also lost him most of his
old friends. No one wants to hang with someone who is sure
you are part of a baroque conspiracy against him. Thornley
had decided that Garrison was right after all, that he was a
CIA mind-control slave, that a mysterious pal in New Orleans
was E. Howard Hunt, and finally that he had been a
Manchurian candidate from birth, with his parents Nazi spies.
He spent the last years of his life (he died in 1998)
occasionally washing dishes and living in storm drains, and
hanging out as a local eccentric in Atlanta's Little Five
Points neighborhood. A sad fate for someone dedicated to
spreading forces of upheaval and chaos: from his
Discordianism to his advocating a libertarian diaspora
populating stateless floating cities in The Innovator, to
his inspiration of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's
classic trilogy, Illuminatus!, to all the aftershocks
spreading from that earthquake of a novel.
But Thornley still got in his prankish fun, for example
putting up flyers urging people to "Boycott the illegal
weapons amnesty program: Don't bring your illegal weapons to
the Super Bowl in exchange for tickets!" when the game was
held in Atlanta in 1994.
A strange and troublesome man, that Thornley, serving Eris
to the end, and proof that, while you don't have to be crazy
to warp American culture, it helps.
Brian Doherty is a Reason senior editor and author of This
Is Burning Man, out in August from Little, Brown.
--
Dan Clore
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