The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture

Product Information

Adam Gorightly has delivered a book that is both funny (some of Kerry's antics were inspired hilarity) and sad (his decline in his later years) and gives you lots of twists and turns in between. He achieved this, notably, not by preaching to the converted or by humorlessly attacking those with whom he disagreed, but by constructing elegant intellectual games that he presented with such a straight face that you weren’t sure whether or not he was kidding.

When you begin to get a whiff of a few of the pranks played by the Discordian society, you start to wonder if they may have been behind other pranks. I had never heard of him before so it was interesting to see his ties to Oswald, and the dwarf planet Eris. In January 1968, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, certain there had been a New Orleans-based conspiracy to assassinate John F. He managed to keep ahead of the archetypal game by purging himself, from time to time, through various prankster like stunts, self published underground 'zines and the writing of fiction. For a time, Thornley wrote a regular column in the zine Factsheet Five until editor Mike Gunderloy stopped publishing the magazine.In all this book is a strange journey into a past that is sometimes disconcerting, sometimes amusing, and at other times infuriating. There was a time when I seriously considered writing a book about his life, and I’m not sure that I won’t try it eventually. No matter what your opinion is of the JFK assassination, or even Thornley’s role in it, it is safe to assert that the madness and paranoia that plagued him in his later life was sparked in no small part by those who were either involved in the assassination or used the assassination to push their personal agenda.

Guy Banister, another Minutemen member in New Orleans, had been accused by Garrison of involvement in the assassination and was allegedly connected to Lee Harvey Oswald through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflet.He opens the revised edition of Cosmic Trigger, which is probably his single best book, what seems like a definitive statement: “Many people still think I ‘believe’ some of the metaphors and models employed here. If you have more than a passing interest in the works of Robert Anton Wilson, Discordianism, 60s counterculture or, of course the Kennedy assassination then this book is a must-read. Kerry Thornley in his book, THE PRANKSTER AND THE CONSPIRACY (The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture). But what I like the most about Wilson, who was supremely confident and stylish on the page, is that he knew that he didn’t have all the answers.

Stephens remembers Kerry as an intense character who put a shade to everything that was really extreme…. No amount of Discordian meme subterfuge could have de-railed the Rand dogma (or catma) from rapidly self replicating within the brain of this errant pixie who seemed to be able to defy everything else and get away with it. Prior to reading this, everything I knew about Thornley was filtered through Robert Anton Wilson, and it was all positive (or at least all humorous). Thornley] moved to Atlanta in 1969 and became a fixture in Little Five Points, a merry prankster known for his chaos-inspired philosophy and psychedelic conspiracy theories. Camp Street and Related Events, House Select Committee on Assassinations – Appendix to Hearings, Volume 10, 13, p.Among the subjects he closely scrutinized throughout his life were atheism, anarchism, Objectivism, autarchism (he attended Robert LeFevre's Freedom School), neo-paganism, Kerista, [4] Buddhism, and the memetic inheritor of Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius. I was mildly aware of Kery's connection to Lee Harvey Oswald and the book he wrote about the guy before Oswald killing JFK.