There’s been a lot of conjecture lately among alternative and conspiracy circles about a rather bizarre story involving kidnapping, ritual abuse, and a gay prostitute posing as a reporter at the White House. That’s right, it’s got everything; sort of a conspiracy theory wet dream. If you’re new to the case, I’d recommend checking out this archived copy of a story about it at the Pointblank Des Moines website. Let me just give you a quick run-down of the essentials though, before we go any farther.

Recently, it was discovered that a reporter named Jeff Gannon, who had White House clearance, was not who he said he was. Ostensibly, he was a reporter for a conservative website. But when he began tossing softball questions at Bush, colleagues looked into his background and credentials. It was discovered his “real” name was actually James Guckert. And furthermore, Guckert had something of a sordid past: he’d worked as a high-priced homosexual escort.

If that wasn’t weird enough, soon the possibility came out that there was a connection between Guckert and a paperboy who’d been kidnapped 23 years ago in Des Moines and not seen since. People began investigating the claim of whether or not Guckert was actually the long-missing Johnny Gosch. The transformation of a 12 year old boy into a high-priced homosexual escort posing as a White House reporter is - necessarily - a complex one. In order to follow it, you need to delve deeply into the twisted mirror-world of ritual child abuse by people in high places. This already tricky road is further complicated by claims of Satanism, and vast interlocking networks of pedophilia, sexual blackmail, and conspiracies ten miles high to keep it all quiet.

I’m not going to delve into all the messy details and possibilities of it factually though. Rigorous Intuition continues to do a great job of that, so if you’re interested in getting to the bottom of this, I recommend starting there. What I do want to examine though is the unexamined side of this story: namely, what’s so intriguing about it that it’s gaining so much ground?

Like with most things, I believe there’s much to be understood by looking at this whole thing symbolically. Take a vacation for a moment from worrying about whether or not any of this story is actually “true”. Whether it’s true or not, it’s hitting a nerve with people. And this means that it’s “truth” transcends the corporal world up into the realm of the psyche. So let’s examine what makes it a psychologically valid - or at least potent - story.

First off, it makes sense to look at where the story started. Somebody is not acting responsibly as a journalist and gets called out on it. The first piece of information encoded here is journalists should be trusted as guardians of the truth. So for the guardians to investigate and expose one of their own is a little morality tale about how “trustworthy” journalists really are - a question which has been gaining more and more traction among the culture. It’s noteworthy that one of the only way guardians can show they are trustworthy is by proving that one of them is not trustworthy. Sort of like an Internal Affairs division of a police precint which supposedly roots out corruption. It’s an obfuscation of the fact that each and every one of them really needs to be investigated, constantly monitored and their backgrounds and biases exposed.

The next morsel we have is this whole thing about how Guckert used to be a gay hooker. The implication here - according to some - is that Guckert was actually at the White House to homosexually “service” various politicians. This one’s pretty obvious to decode. The entire Bush administration is built around a traditionalist macho warrior attitude. It’s all about the tough guys protecting us from the bad guys. To find out that the tough guys actually have “queer tendencies” would necessarily upset legions of their conservative supporters across the country - the very people who fear gay marriage and who voted Bush into office.

So what to make of the rest - all the stuff about Satanic ritual paedophilia rings, and a 12 year old boy who was possibly kidnapped and forced into such a hellish world? The key phrase to decoding this thorny tangle, I think, is “loss of innocence.” Let’s look at the story of Johnny Gosch. When he’s referenced, it’s never just as a “boy”, but as a paperboy. This phrase indicates vocation. It indicates that he is a budding capitalist, a small businessman on the rise. And he’s not just a “paperboy” but a “12 year old paperboy”, which means that he’s in the throes of puberty. He’s becoming a man - taking on a job and responsibilities and entering into the world. In some archetypal sense, the figure of an all-American paperboy just entering manhood represents the classic image of innocence and the promise of youth in America.

The kidnapping of such an archetypal figure thus has symbolic significance. Innocence has been lost. But not just lost - it has been twisted and vigorously smashed. Here enters the quasi-mythical machinations of a shadowy group of Satanists. They pluck the boy-ripening-into-man, and pervert his burgeoning sexuality, subverting it to a world of cruel hierarchy and impossible-to-understand sex abuse. Innocence never knew what hit it. Suddenly the cruel politics of the world have ripped it apart, and ground it down into the system.

Perhaps, on some level, this represents what happens to each of us as we make the passage from youth to adulthood. We lose sight of our dreams, and begin to call them childish or unrealistic as we contort ourselves to fit into cruel and impossible social roles which we never wanted in the first place. Maybe the story of Johnny Gosch rings true, then, because it is the story of each of us, encoded into a larger-than-life tale of innocent victims and cruel oppressors.

If this is true, that the story of Gosch applies to each of us mythically somehow, the real question is that now that we’re living in the adult world, what will we do? How will we conduct ourselves? How do we recover the boy inside us who went missing so long ago?

A paragraph from the Pointblank Des Moines article helps highlight possible outcomes:

Yet others suggest that Gosch took on the persona of James Gannon/Jeff Guckert and gained White House access with the eventual goal of exposing the people who kidnapped him and put him, and his family, through hell. Gannon is alleged to have a publishing deal with a Russian imprint, which some believe will result in a tell-all book that exposes those who’ve paid for his “services,” as well as the pedophile ring that he, as Gosch, was victimized by after his kidnapping.

The fantasy that Gosch may have been trying to infiltrate and expose the bad guys is a great one. I think a lot of us try to believe we’re doing something similar when we sell our soul to lifeless corporate jobs or make other crippling compromises we don’t want to own up to. “Oh, I know it’s bad, but I’m going to be the one to make a difference! I’m going to reform from the inside!” I don’t mean to belittle or discredit that attitude though, I’m merely pointing out that the above quote about Gosch/Gannon/Guckert represents an extension of that idea. Maybe it’s valid, maybe it’s not. But is that what Guckert was really doing?

Others, of course, cling to the notion that he was there to suck political dick (figuratively and literally), or sexually blackmail, or commit other acts of espionage. This represents the flipside of the fantasy described above. Rather than infiltrating and exposing, how many of us just finally give up and completely sell ourselves out? We are no longer our own person but merely an agent or an operative of a corporation or an interest which is beyond us.

As the story gains ground - and if it ever enters mainstream media in full force - it’s going to be very interesting to see where the chips fall, since there are so many symbolically and psychologically potent aspects to it. The story itself is likely to be ritually used and abused by various parties who consciously or unconsciously understand there is more being said here than meets the eye of the casual observer. Each of the points I raised above in my symbolic analysis (plus many I surely missed) will be turned and twisted into a million and one different variations in order to support or denigrate particular worldviews. The Des Moines Register’s article on Guckert/Gosch (filed under their “Recreation” section, no less) is a great example.

This very article you’re reading is also a great example. You can’t even trust me. There’s no such thing as objectivity when we move into the world of myth and stories. Everyone can and will interpret and project their own stuff onto whatever you throw at them. I mean, just look at how I took this story and twisted it all around to push my ideas on you. Now you’re thinking about symbolism and the potential for something to be true without necessarily being factual. Hopefully it worked. Hopefully it brought you a step closer to opening up and reconnecting with the 12 year old paperboy with cruelly smashed dreams inside all of us.