Thought you could grow up and get away from dreary lectures about your wrong values, did you?
Wrong-O.
This week, we learned “Former Canadian defense minister says: Stop wars and space aliens will share technology”
Yes, it’s true. Most of those Canadians you avoid ever thinking about grew up on this stuff. One of Canada’s top bloggers, Five Feet of Fury (Kathy Shaidle, who also blogs at PJ Media), offers some thoughts on the space alien as originally a robotic downspout for PC messages, and how he later fell from grace:
Pretty typical of someone his age who grew up watching movies like this:
The liberal “answer” film to that one is The Thing … in which the egghead who tries to reason with the “wise, advanced” alien gets punched out by the creature, and the “dumb” soldiers have to save the day.
Aliens are our wise superiors who want to bring us peace but we don’t appreciate them” meme has been stubborn. For a long time, there was a pretty even balance of good invaders and bad invaders.
For whatever reason, a major sea change happened in the 1980s with movies like They Live, Starship Troopers and Independence Day, and especially the miniseries V. Aliens have been bad guys 90% of the time ever since.
So in a sense the good guys won. That is, if you were seeking relief from extraterrestrial moralizing.
I haven’t looked into the timeline that closely, but it seems that after the success of good alien movies like ET and Close Encounters, the tide turned with V. That miniseries was pitched as an allegory of the coming Reagan fascist state, but the network made them make the villains aliens instead.
Subsequent vehicles like the Alien series, X-Files, Men in Black kept the villainy without the allegory.
Note: Re the flak for my comments re space aliens: No, I am NOT saying They aren’t out there. No one has any idea one way or the other.
Where They for sure are is in the smallest universes ever to exist: Our own heads.
In our imaginations, whence they regularly issue, replaying all kinds of human melodramas with technologies we still but dream of. Hey, it all works. UNTIL the alien opens his mouth and … yikes, he’s Paul Hellyer AND David Suzuki, cloned and randomized. Fortunately, none of the villainous aliens, invented later, were as bad as that.
Thought: Could we get the aliens, good and bad, to come here to help out in a war over who owns the moon?
Under current UN law, member states are “prohibited from appropriating the moon.”
But Ian Crawford, professor of planetary science at Birkbeck College, said there was now a case for developing the treaty to include private companies that may want to exploit it for its minerals.
Remember, what to you and me is a private company is – to a government – a taxable entity and therefore an owned asset.
Anyway, sleep flite. – O’Leary for News