Steve Braunias tries to come to terms with his cousin the conspiracy theorist
We all have someone like my Cousin Terry in our lives. A conspiracy theorist, someone who "searches for the truth" (on Facebook), someone who has views about 5G and One World Government and all the other various assorted terrible ideas piled up on the ever-expanding trash heap of monstrously false notions, someone who thinks journalists are complicit in a vast cover-up. Someone, also, who is otherwise a grand fellow.
I heard from my Cousin Terry this week. I didn't actually know I had a Cousin Terry but he was quick to appraise me of that fact, which was the only fact in the rest of his email.
He wrote, "Hi Steve. I am your cousin, Terry Grimes. With all that is going on at this time I want to ask you as a journalist to investigate what's going on behind the gates of power in our nation. I believe that this Corona Virus is a man made thing by the authorities in China to cover up the introduction of the 5G Network … I am a great believer in knowing that the One World Government is a well-established organisation … Where were you as a journalist when the Government pushed through legislation to be able to abort all unborn babies to be slaughtered wholesale so that their human parts cane be mixed into vaccines … Have you been gaged [sic] by the reporting heads. I would like to know."
I replied, "We're cousins?"
He thought that was provocative, and wrote, "Is that all you can say Steve. Have you been gaged [sic]?"
I replied to say that I didn't mean to be rude but that his name didn't ring a bell. He replied, "I am Aunty Rose's son."
Dear old Aunty Rose! She was my mum's beloved sister, and lived to 101. They were the Wright family, raised on a dairy farm near Morrinsville; I vaguely and probably unfairly remember my grandfather Jack as a bad-tempered old coot in rolled up shirt sleeves and his pants held up by braces, and have a nicer although quite stereotyped memory of my grandmother Margaret as a nice little old lady who brought out plates of warm scones with butter and jam. They had nine children: my mother Doris (known as Dossie), and her sisters Rosie, Joycie, Margie, Lola, Connie, and (truly!) Winkie, and her brothers Keith and Trevor. They were all good fun, salts of the Earth, with beaky noses and curly hair, and some had light olive skins – my grandmother came from Roma gypsies, and my grandfather, whose real name was Jacques, was of French blood.
So he really was my Cousin Terry. "We have met at a family reunion," he wrote. He meant the Wright reunion a year or so ago at the Cosy Corner Campgrounds run by our cousin Vicky in Mt Maunganui. But I didn't go and in fact have never attended a family reunion. I'm one of those roosters who has little to do with their family. I love my brothers and sister, and all their children too, but am pretty hopeless at keeping in touch. As for the wider family, I wouldn't have the foggiest of their whereabouts or who is alive and who isn't. It's a failing, and I feel bad about it.
But I could do one thing about that. I could reach out to my Cousin Terry. Yes, a conspiracy theorist; but our mothers were sisters, we had the same grandparents, the same blood. Who was he, what sort of life had he lived? Where did we connect, where did we depart?
He lives in Tauranga. I phoned him on Wednesday and we had a long talk. Not all of it went very well and there were long silences. He was suspicious, as everyone probably ought to be in their dealings with news media, and emailed later to reveal he had taped our conversation. Good grief: cousins, practising a kind of surveillance of each other.
No one is any one thing. Evil-doers potter in the garden; saints feel malice, and plot revenge; a genius in love can be a complete moron. Cousin Terry had a head full of ideas that I viewed with zero respect, indeed minus-zero, but I asked around the family about him and the word was that he was top-notch: "Hell of a nice guy … We all liked Terry … He was very nice to Dad when he had cancer … He's very down to earth, believe it or not."
I could believe it. It was really nice talking to him on the phone about his family and catching up with the story of his life. He was born in 1943. He was one of five kids born to my Aunt Rose and Uncle Roy; his brother Lloyd died of complications due to the radiation poisoning he was exposed to as a guinea pig with the Navy during the A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, and his sister Janny died in front of him, literally, in tragic and dramatic circumstances – she was being flown by helicopter from Tauranga hospital to Hamilton after a heart attack, Terry waved out to her as the chopper flew off, but then it immediately came back down to the landing pad: "Nursing staff rushed past me to perform CPR on her, but she had gone."
Our fathers used to drink together: Roy and Johann, on the piss. They were merry times but not entirely so.
I asked Terry about his dad, and he said, "He was a dairy farmer over near Waitoa, in the Waikato, and then he bought a farm going up towards Katikati. He brought his herd over, and then everything turned to custard. The cows were so used to flat ground in the Waikato but when he brought them to a hilly farm, we were always pulling cows out of drains and losing stock. Dad got discouraged and depressed and that's when he hit the booze. Any excuse, he would go to town ... None of us kids stayed on the farm because of his Dad's attitude."
Poor old Roy had a series of heart attacks in later years, was confined to a wheelchair, and lost his sight. I said I didn't remember him very well. Terry said, "If you see me, you see him. I look like him, I talk like him, I run like him, I laugh like him – I'm my father to the very T."
Terry remembered my Dad very well. My father was Austrian, a housepainter, a cad of some repute, witty, charming, and extremely talkative. But Terry said of him, "He was always fairly shut off ... Anything to do with his life personally, he was closed off." He was describing a family trait. He mentioned visiting my brother Paul not long before he died, and said, "He was very quiet, and wouldn't open up and talk. He just kept saying, 'I'm okay, Terry. I'm okay'. But I still went to see him."
It occurred to me though that my Dad and my brother may not have wanted to open up to Terry because they viewed him with abhorrence: Terry was a God botherer, a pastor in an evangelical church. They wouldn't have wanted a bar of that. I could well imagine both of them groaning at the prospect of his religious claptrap. If so, it was a kind of preview of my response to his conspiracy blather.
Terry became a born-again Christian when he was 18. The cause of it reminded me of a phrase that my Dad liked to say when talking about his younger, carefree days: "Cherchez la femme." He translated it as, "Because of the girl". As Terry explained, "I met a young lady when I was 18. We started going out together and then she went and became a Christian. That blew my world away. And so I went along to one of the meetings and responded to the call to come forward to give my life to Christ."
He joined the ministry, and served as a pastor on the Chatham Islands. He told good stories about the Chathams – the abundance of crayfish, the tight-knit community on an island in the middle of an oceanic nowhere ("The world," as he described it, "was in another place") – and said he later pastored in Wellington, Kawerau, and Tauranga, where he lives with his wife Pat.
I enjoyed hearing about his life. Then I asked him, "When did your thinking start evolving into territories involving the Illuminati?" And much of the rest of our interview was his thoughts from the trash heap of Facebook.
Terry said, "The one that really sparked everything off was a guy called Barry Smith. Barry lived in the Marlborough Sounds, and travelled the country, preaching on One World Government, One World Money systems, and the Illuminati.
"Everyone laughed at him. He was scoffed at. Other ministers said, 'You don't know what you're talking about'. And he'd say, 'Just you wait and see'."
I said, "Did you laugh at him?"
Terry said, "I listened to what he had to say. I thought, 'I'm not going to ridicule him in case he's right'."
This was in 1998, at a church in Tauranga. It struck me that Terry was already committed to the practice of ideas based on faith, that he lived in a perpetual state of miracle and wonder, and that his evangelical thinking would form a very tight, very close intersection with his conspiracy thinking. I suppose that really I am expressing the opinion that he had been a nutter since the age of 18, and that notions about One World Government and all that would impress him as pretty reasonable.
And now, in the age of Covid-19, with its death toll and its tragedy and its dread, here was Cousin Terry blithely saying that the virus was manufactured, was all a distraction from the 5G towers, and in any case the news media were making too much of a fuss about it. "A whole hour on the news!" he said.
I said, "You find fault with that?"
"Ooh yeah."
"Why do you find fault with covering the single most important thing in the world today?"
"It's not the single most important thing in the world today."
"It isn't?"
"It's important, but it's not the single most important thing."
"What is more important than this epidemic?"
"Take a look at the 5G network that's been put up through New Zealand while everyone is shut at home."
I said, "Where do you hear things like that?"
"People put it on my Facebook."
"But where does it come from, where does it derive?"
"There are a lot of people at this time who are searching for answers."
I turned the subject to his suspicion that I had been – I promise, this is the last sic – "gaged", and asked, him, "But who would be gagging me?"
"My thinking is we have a socialist government and our leader is a very socialist woman. And therefore anything on the right, she will try to gag."
"How?"
Well, he said, the pro-life lobby had been shut out of recent changes to abortion law. "The government have voted to murder unborn children. Those members of parliament are heartless."
I said, "I think maybe for a man to attack abortion and therefore try and prevent the rights of women, that is an extremely heartless attack."
He said, "You may think so. But I am not attacking women. I have nothing against women. I married one. She's a real beauty and I love her very much."
This was getting absurd, but there was potential for it to get more absurd. He said, "As a church minister, social thinking has gone to the pack, and they've forgotten about moral thinking."
I said, "But Terry, you're sounding like Brian Tamaki."
He said, "Yeah, I agree with Brian Tamaki." He also sided with Donald Trump, was an anti-vaxxer, and I didn't ask him about chemtrails or the Moon landing.
It was time to try to come to a reckoning with each other. I said, "Well, and I say this with huge affection for you, I think your views are repellent and loopy."
He sounded very hurt. He said, "So that's what you think of what I'm saying?"
"Of course. Yeah."
"Then it's about time you opened your eyes, Steve."
"Well, you could read the newspapers and watch the news and take in information from there which is independently gathered by people who draw on their discipline of reporting to go out and find stories about people in their community and in politics, and so forth."
There was a long silence. Cousins, separated; the same blood, running in different directions.
I said, "What do you make of all this, Terry? We're cousins, our mums were sisters, but our thinking is diametrically opposed, isn't it."
"Yes."
"If I saw you at a family reunion I'd be like, 'Good old Terry! He's my cousin.' But if you opened your trap and started coming out with your wretched opinions, I'd say, 'To hell with you mate', and walk away and not want a bar of you."
"Well that's your problem, not mine."
"It wouldn't be my problem because I wouldn't hear your rubbish. But what do you make of that? We're the same family, and yet there's no way we can reach agreement."
He said, "But if the boot was on the other foot, and I asked what you thought, I would hear you out."
I said, "But I've interviewed you. I've heard you out. I've invited you to talk."
"Yes," he said, and left another long silence.
"Haven't I," I said.
"Yes. I've spoken my mind. But if you had different opinions, I'd listen to them, and I wouldn't call you a nutter."
"How would you respond knowing – and I think you know - that I think you're a nutter?"
He said with some dignity, "You can call me a nutter as much as you like."
I didn't want to call him a nutter anymore. The whole thing felt sad. I thought about my mum laughing with Terry's mum Rose ("Dossie and Rosie," as Terry called them) over a cup of tea at our house in Valley Rd, Mt Maunganui, the sun high in the sky, the faint sound of the ocean, all the good life of the Bay of Plenty on our doorstep – and now their two sons taping each other's conversation, getting nowhere.
But as we were saying our goodbyes, Terry said, "Even though we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, you're still my cousin". I liked that very much. Good old Cousin Terry.