To wander through a chain bookstore anywhere in the country these days is to bear witness to the resurgence of America's favorite mystery religion. Ever since a very slight novel about Jesus' bloodline became a publishing phenomenon half a decade ago, booksellers have operated as de facto reading rooms for Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and other fraternal orders where the wearing of fezzes and the reciting of mumbo-jumbo is mandatory.

But even before "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Lost Symbol" turned author Dan Brown into our highest-paid high priest of paranoid pulp, we were already a nation of Gnostics. Generations of Americans have always believed that the only way to make sense of the grand sweep of our history is to tap into a reservoir of "secret knowledge" available only to the initiated.

We've all learned to tolerate people who are convinced that the moon landings never took place, that the U.S. is sitting on an arsenal full of alien technology at Area 51, that Sept. 11 was an inside job by defense contractors and that Barack Obama's parents schemed to make their Kenyan-born son president of the United States by apprenticing him to George Soros and the Bilderberg Group.

A few weeks ago, Fox News host Glenn Beck explained the "true meaning" of the architecture of New York's Rockefeller Center in a way that was far more Gnostic than anything Dan Brown ever came up with.

Rambling at length about how even the murals and statuary were a secret code proclaiming Rockefeller's crypto-fascist plans for one-world government, Beck's lecture, I was sure, would result in an order of immediate bed rest from the network. Alas, his ratings have only gotten higher as his theories have become more detached from reality. He now threatens to eclipse ratings king Bill O'Reilly in key demographics at Fox.

Underlying the search for the Antichrist-of-the-week is a palpable fear that deep down, ordinary Americans have little say in how our democracy is governed. I could understand a little of that feeling after emerging from a Saturday afternoon screening of Michael Moore's incendiary new documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story."

Moore's film contains two pieces of information that stunned me and made me wonder whether I, too, had stumbled upon some long suppressed "secret." One was footage of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in January 1944 proposing "a second Bill of Rights" guaranteeing access to quality health care for all, an affordable education and a job that paid a living wage to every American. It was a seismic declaration that would have rocked the nation's politics had it been broadcast prominently to a national audience. He died a year later. (The archival film of FDR has only recently been unearthed.)

The second tidbit that floored me was a March 5, 2006, Citigroup memo titled "Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer." The internal memo confirms every suspicion that critics of globalization have that the game is rigged to favor the few over the many. It is a smoking gun that depicts global capitalism as anything but a benign, neutral power accessible to everyone who works hard. It is shocking in its unabashed justification for elites controlling and profiting from everyone else's labor. The memo also warns of the probability of worldwide revolution once workers catch on to what's happening.

Standing in the Squirrel Hill Barnes & Noble after the film, I was seething. The film had stirred something fierce in me. Looking around, I saw several folks browsing at a table. Every book was either about Freemasons, the Illumanati or America's "occult" origins. Two tables over on the mezzanine was another group of young people flipping through books on vampires and zombies. Nobody was checking out the FDR biographies.

We are immersed in a popular culture that has managed to convince millions of people who should be storming the barricades that teenagers with fangs are a bigger threat to their souls than the rapacious schemes of runaway corporations. It finally makes sense why we find zombies -- those intellectually inert, plodding dullards who refuse to stay dead -- so comforting. They are a metaphor of our lost ambitions.

Coincidentally, the top film last weekend was "Zombieland," a comedy about four survivors in a post-Apocalyptic America taken over by the walking dead. Michael Moore's film barely registered in the Top 10. It hadn't even done as well as his previous documentaries.

We may be afraid of revolution, but at least we have vampires, Freemasons and mindless conspiracy theories to keep us distracted from the goings-on in the Plutonomy.

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