Popular Alienation is a goldmine survey of ’90s parapolitics; a collection of a decade’s worth of conspiracy writing first published in the Steamshovel Press out of St. Louis, Missouri by Kenn Thomas. “Politics,” Thomas explained in a 2008 interview, “is going out and voting for people. The ‘para-’ is everything that goes on behind the scenes in that process.”
Roughly defined, parapolitics is the broad rethinking of the foundations and frontiers of political principles, systems, and issues. For Thomas, what goes on behind the scenes ranges from unidentified flying objects to the dreams of Allen Ginsberg. The earliest origins of Steamshovel come from Thomas’ time studying literature at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, where he befriended Ginsberg and Burroughs. Thomas introduces the anthology with a literary provocation—that Ginsberg predicted the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas 1963 when the beat poet wrote a journal entry about JFK four years prior: “He has a hole in his back. Thru which Death will enter.”
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