Crazy story

This is a crazy story from real life that I haven't thought about for a really long time, but I just remembered it today because of all fuss about Arne Treholt. Again. It's probably mean, but I gotta say it ... I am seriously sick of that guy. To the point where I don't really care whether he did it or not, I just want him to go the hell away. Anyway.

This happened on the airport express bus from Torp one time I was coming home from England. About ten years ago. I think it was the summer of 2000. I'd been traveling for hours and was getting pretty tired, and when I got on the bus I remember thinking that I hoped no one would sit next to me, and if someone did, hopefully not a talker. I just really wanted to sit quietly and relax and stare out the window, basically. But no such luck. The bus ended up being chock full and of course the person who ended up in the seat next to mine wasn't only the chattiest guy on board, but the craziest too.

He started out seeming kind of normal, but he quickly veered off into serious bizarroland. I don't remember all of it now - nowhere near all of it, and maybe that's just as well - because there was a lot of it. All kinds of crazy conspiracy shit. Of course the government is out to get us all and Norwegian society is rotten to the core, it's unbelievable. I was really fascinated, because he really was incredibly normal, you never would have guessed what a nutcase he was from looking at him, or, in fact, even from talking with him, if he didn't start saying all these crazy things. He really gave the impression of having a firm grip on reality. It was really interesting.

What I do remember that he told me, though, was about the Orderud case. (Now those people I am even more sick of than I am of Treholt. Lock 'em up and throw away the keys, I don't care, just keep them out of the media at absolutely any cost.) He knew something SO serious about that case, and he knew so much more, all these things that when they came out they would just blow the establishment sky high. It was him and this one other guy, they had been collaborating for year and had collected so much information. Our entire society, according to my temporary friend, is completely corrupt, and it reaches up into the highest level, you'd never believe it, but the info he was sitting on was enough to topple the government. Which it totally would. And soon.

Now I'm starting to think that this happened in 2001 ... ? Because I remember him saying that all of this info would be presented in the media before the next election, and that was specifically in reference to the parliamentary election of 2001. So this may have been early summer 2001. OK, not that important, but he did say that they had had so much trouble trying to get this out into the media, everything that they knew, they had worked with any number of journalists but they had all chickened out in the end. Of course that was the reason, totally. Now though they had found this really brave guy who would put his neck on the line, and it would all come out, and it would totally rock our collective world. It would change everything about our political life and the election, boy, that'd be anybody's guess.

Not sure I remember anything enormously different about that election. Or the time before it, or the time after. But that's probably just because the government's putting something in my water.

Anyway, back to the Orderud case. Of course the police were barking up the totally wrong tree with this inheritance shit and it was all a coverup, and you wouldn't believe how far up it went. (He didn't tell me how far, just that it was really really far.) What really happened was this. The real target of the murders was Per Paust. But he'd already died on his own, right? But he had known something - which was what he was supposed to have been killed for - and before he died he told his wife. So she had to be eliminated. And she might have told her parents, or maybe she definitely had, I don't remember, so they had to go too. That was the reason. But what was it that he knew?

OK, so, this was not that long after the documents had been released in the Treholt case. And of course my bus buddy had copies of every single document. Of course. BUT. He had somehow gotten to see these papers before they were released, and had copied them then too, AND GET THIS - three pages that had been in the original files were now different, with different information. Someone had swapped them with other papers. He had them at home, blown up onto oversized plastic sheets for an overhead projector. It was really really important that they were oversized, for some reason. I'm not entirely clear on that. But the point is that there was info in these three pages that SOMEONE doesn't want people to know, and Paust knew what that info was and that was why he had to die. It's all because of Treholt. Paust apparently worked with him at some point. Or so my informer told me ... I actually haven't looked into it, crazy as that sounds.

This guy is to me the epitome of the crazy conspiracy theorist. It was fun talking to him, but thinking back I see him as a very sad character. It was just so obvious to me that he had an enormous need to feel important and special, his life was pretty empty and he was clinging on to this worldview he had constructed for himself as a way of forcing meaning into life. That really is sad. And it makes me think that there really is absolutely no way you can talk sense to a conspiracy nut. They are just way too emotionally invested in it. They can't let go of what they believe, because that would leave only reality behind, and for some reason they can't face that, they have to self-protect with their conspiracy of choice.

Kind of makes me think of Arne Treholt, actually. o_O