The Onion, Predictably, Sees the Truth

From a story in this week's Onion (Interestingly, not on-line yet, another reason to be psyched they're publishing the print edition in DC now):

New Theories Suggest Kennedy Wasn't Shot - A controversial new book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has raised questions not about the role of a lone gunman or a conspiracy of shooters, but about whether the late president was even shot at all.
While the book, Outside the Crosshair, does not dispute the fact that a massive portion of Kennedy's skull was separated from his head during the 1963 Dallas visit, it maintains that the president suffered fatal explosive-cranial trauma through means completely unrelated to gunshots.
"Certain extreme force was involved in this tragic death," said Dr. Horace Musashi, the book's author and professor of computer science at Mount Union College in Alliance, OH. However...Musashi favors an explanation known as the single-massive-spike-in-blood pressure-theory. After 11 years of painstaking research, Musashi uncovered testimony from anonymous eyewitnesses who claimed that unopened packets of duck sauce and soy sauce were hastily removed from Air Force One..."

The crucial detail is that Musashi is a college professor. Despite the democratization of access to information and expertise, it's still the case that society bestows considerable--albeit undifferentiated--intellectual status on university faculty. As long you have a PhD in something and faculty appointment somewhere, you get a significant added presumption of knowing what the heck you're talking about--if even if what you're talking about has nothing whatsoever to do with your training and field of study.

Not that this is altogether a bad thing, it's good to maintain academic standards and credentials in era where simple assertion of expertise is easier than ever before.

But it has the negative byproduct of lending undue credence to Harvard psychologists who believe in alien abduction, BYU physics professors promoting wacky 9/11 conspiracy theories , University of Minnesota philosophers who see sinister government plots behind the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 and the death of Paul Wellstone, etc. etc.