Alfred's Odd Observation #19

Bless you, Errol Bruce-Knapp...
laid low by cruel malady
and STILL facilitating friends and comrades!
You are in my thoughts.

Alfred's Odd Observation #19 

Sunshine's Surreal Shine-on

by Alfred Lehmberg

Only the most prosaic of the nonprosaic had been sighted—which was not to say that *they* had returned in any force or even at all.  To wit: All the observations since a preceding report (two actually) had been dim, of short duration, and unremarkable.  The only thing I can presently observe is that *something* is up there.  They are quiet, oddly moving, and strange—but they were few, even if the drought had ended...

Here on Earth, Spielberg's Taken had been running for five days and taped on old VHS. I'd watch it the next morning sans the evil Celebrex and cheese advertisements... or other cognitive insults and creepy assaults of commercial TV. I report as an observation that it was certainly watchable, classic Spielberg, and actually pretty astonishing.  It was also pretty unsettling.

From the opening scene, I'd been gratified by how closely it stayed within a factual "ufological" lexicon, despite the plot distortions it employed to be an exciting television program.  Something unusual seems to be trying to be communicated (NOT par for a conflicted mainstream) certainly considering the number of times it had been replayed in just the first five days. This is forgetting the virtual carpet bombing of it that Saturday and Sunday, though remember that it is exposure from the mainstream, so suspect even if it IS intriguing!  

*Everyone* is being given an opportunity to see this "thing" in a manner that just hasn't been done before.  

What's up with that?

Spielberg was also using a lot of (seriously employed) children to tell this story, too.  And he's doing that, I think, to reassure the audience regarding some kind of *truth* to this tale—a *truth* (or set of *truths*) that he is so ardently trying to communicate? Hard to spend that much money on a gamble and not say... something meaningful, eh? 

I mean, that's why an artist filmmaker uses kids, isn't it? They are notoriously difficult to work with precisely because kids don't have any guile.  Kids aren't easily duplicitous.  Kids aren't usually *talented* liars... an actor's stock in trade.  

Kids can still be innocent simply because they haven't had the time and experience to become jaded yet...  ...What that old saw about the "child being father to the man" might mean... eh? Kids are innocence and truth... or can be. If they can sell their performance they are truth where truth is told... or seen to be.

What exactly IS being communicated, presuming (as many of us would) that this was not just an amusing yarn to distract the masses?  Too much (even if arguable) "fact" is being employed, from foo fighters through alien abduction to implants, to just do that.  If they only wanted a soap-selling yarn they could have any number of "Buffy the Vampire Slayers", and remember... *they* set this whole thing up with slick film documentaries painting the Roswell and Abduction ufological reportages as potentially factual in serendipitous presage!    Of... what?

Firstly, Something, eh? Many of the people watching are plainly encouraged to take the whole saga as a dramatization of some kind of existentiality...  What are the *facts* communicated?

To start, and clearly, local and federal Governments are tending to evil, out of control, and corrupted entities so impossibly beyond rational oversight that they have become enemies of the people they would be sworn to protect, Spielberg says.  Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Black-box "agencies," "ranches" and "shops" run disconcertingly amuck, keeping useful secrets from the lay rank and file for inexplicable and arbitrary but certainly pecuniary reasons, and who make no pretense about having any respect for the individual human being, for which they'd pretend right stewardship, we see. Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Ironically, these egregious human agencies perform abductions of their own and are nowhere near as concerned about bringing the abductees back as the aliens apparently are.  WE are what we fear!  Aliens are ancillary, is the takeaway!  We have nothing to fear but the fearful themselves?  Such seems so. Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Secondly, Human beings are more stridently psychopathic than the aliens or their clones and hybrids, by far.  It's the obsessively passive-aggressive faithlessness and disloyalty of -human- beings that is at the root of the problem between humans and aliens... or humans and other humans.  "You don't see THEM f-king each other over for a goddamn percentage," Ellen Ripley once grimly observed to a corporate captain in ALIENS.

Truly, consider our behavior as they see it, and wonder that it MUST be that we scare the hell out of 'em with our shortsighted and irrational, not to mention immature and psychotic, behaviors.  Indeed, it could be argued that they'd traditionally shown remarkable restraint and patience with us.  Certainly in the play, perhaps in reality?

Aliens are old.  They are Older and more hoary than are the pyramids, by a long shot. We, on the other hand, are new. Remember that we are likely the newcomers in a fractal universe!

Third, "Doctors" readily abandon ethics and oaths "to do no harm" to do REAL harm facilitating the agendas of projects so horrific they'd make the evil Nazi Doctor Mengele gag... (well, maybe not...).  

I'm sure some of the antagonists are lawyers, fulsome Politicos are in evidence, and some priests can be introduced to the core of the psychopathic elite of fervid harm-doers.  Human institutions are more corrupt than the individuals they prey upon, and closed institutions are the worst offenders.  Trust is not possible or advised.  

What kind of world is that?  It does not appear to be a recommended one.  And why tolerate that when it's a simple choice to embrace the efficacious kingdom always at hand!  A kingdom, a Camelot, is at hand!

Four, pervasive "secrecy" and convenient "classification," in addition to facilitating a necessary discretion, also facilitates a culture of rampant sociopathy allowing the most craven of grasping psychopaths a full range of authoritarian autocracies to pursue arbitrary, illegal, and conspiratorial ends, ends that too plainly benefit the few at the expense of the many.  Such seems so even as it has always been so.

Secrecy becomes its own justification. A culture evolves  around it and into the hands of those who transfer power along hereditary lines, just as it had been tyrannically done before the renaissance.  There is no review, revision, evolution, or reform possible within it.  Autocracy reigns supreme as a complacent despot, at best!  Cue ominous music.

What was being communicated to the reader by "Taken," not enumerated here?  Does a reader have anything to add?

I further point out, endless characters in Spielberg's saga are great examples of a "Mothman futility mechanism,"  or the deliberate steps taken by a cowardly society to implode or destroy the individual human being who would have the effrontery to report their paranormal experiences to the rest of us, expose our cowardice in that experiences regard, and shame us.  

Endless examples of persons who would prey upon us exist in the play also.  Those would be the society's officiators alluded to above.

Remains, the person watching is left with the impression that there is going to be some kind of payoff as a result of disclosure of this event.  Like the event, itself, is a preface for disclosure, a little heat applied to the water so as to warm us up for some subsequent disclosure... we live in interesting times.  

Taken is aired as science fiction to provide an escape hatch for the usual plausible deniability in the event of the suggested panic or provoked unease (Bollix that!  Let implode that which implodes! We'll all be better for it in the long run!), but the intimations of *fact* are strongly, even if teasingly, suggested.

Bad news won't get better with age, friends and fellow motes, and even if good news can wait, should it?

That's enough.  I remain watching the skies.  Read on!

Bless you Errol Bruce-Knapp... laid low by cruel malady and STILL facilitating friends and comrades! You are in my thoughts.