Category: "Hmmm…"

William Shatner, in his new book, writing about his trip with Blue Origin:

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film "Contact," when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet." I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

That's more than a bit of a surprise coming from the quintessential Captain Kirk.

So did this guy…

Prompted by a comment left by Frank on my last post…

"I make light because I am thoroughly depressed, angry, exhausted, burned out, and numbed by the entire lot of white/christian/conservative/republican/authoritarian/ nazi/hating/lying/cheating/insane/backwards/unreasonable/fucking assholes. And they are not just in this country…it's a world phenomenon."

I quipped back, "And this is why we can't have nice things ANYWHERE."

And probably, I began to think, why we haven't had definitive proof of being visited by extraterrestrials.

I'm sure this has already been posited by minds far greater than mine as an explanation to The Fermi Paradox, but what if all species reach a certain point of development—on the verge of extra-solar space exploration—and poof! they blow themselves up over petty squabbles, god-myths, racial bias, and whatever else they might cause them to separate into an us-versus-them mentality like Man has suffered during most of his existence on this planet. As much as I'd like to think otherwise, maybe one of the hallmarks—nay requisites—of "intelligence" is aggression and competitiveness. I mean it took something to get to the top of the food chain, and having bigger brains certainly contributed to that.

Maybe we haven't been visited—or, considering the vast distances, even heard from anyone else out there yet—is because intelligence never really makes it. Perhaps the galaxy is littered with the corpses of great civilizations that never broke out of their planetary shells, instead turning inward and destroying themselves only to rise and fall again indefinitely. Though not yet widely accepted yet in academic circles, there is certainly mounting evidence that just such a thing has happened on this planet; our current worldwide civilization was not the first—and will not be the last to inhabit this blue marble.

Or as Battlestar Galactica famously proclaimed , "All this has happened before and will happen again."

Of course the other possibility for not having been contacted is that if you are an incredibly advanced, galactic civilization that has mastered most if not all of the laws nature and can manipulate them at will, would you want to make contact with a bunch of continually warring, willfully ignorant apes on a small rock in the backwaters of the Milky Way?

We realized the other day that since we live in a community property state, if anything happens to either one of us, the surviving spouse would become responsible for the deceased's debts. That's not a big deal for Ben as I don't have that much of a debt burden, but Ben's student loans would bury me – literally…and then they still wouldn't get paid!

We were thinking of moving after I retire, but since I'm not sure either of us would want to deal with winters in the blue northeast, that basically leaves Colorado or Oregon out west.

From The Reprobate:

The fraudulent author of 1970s misery memoirs and the birth of the Satanic Panic.

At the start of the 21st century, 68% of Americans believed in the Devil – a real, physical Satanic antichrist. Another 12% thought that it was 'possible'. Think about that for a moment. That's 80% of the population of the most powerful country in the world who are open to the idea of demonic possession, a concept that you might reasonably think belongs in the dark ages. When you know this, a lot of what might otherwise seem to be absolute madness makes sense, and foremost amongst that madness is the Satanic Panic. If you live in a secular society, then the Satanic Panic – be it the hysteria of the 1980s or the current round of lunacy propelling Pizzagate and so on – seems almost incomprehensible. But when you realise that eight out of every ten people actually believe in a literalSatan, possession and supernatural powers, then, of course, they will have an unquestioning belief and acceptance of the more outré claims of actual demons appearing, ouija boards summoning the dead and vast conspiracies of lizard people draining the life fluid from children. The idea that these ideas are beyond belief is lost on people who believe that Satan is real. For them, such claims are entirely within the boundaries of possibility.

Every movement needs a start. Rick Emerson's fascinating book Unmask Alice digs deep into one of the pioneering texts of the Satanic Panic, Jay's Journal, an entirely fictional work from 1978 that was passed off as an authentic teenage diary by a fifty-something Mormon housewife with a bloated ego and fake credentials. The story begins seven years earlier, though, with another moral panic, another – even more sensational – book and the death of the daughter of Art Linkletter, one of the most beloved figures in 1960s Middle American culture.

Diane Linkletter plunged to her death from her sixth-floor apartment in Hollywood in October 1969, an apparent suicide. her father, however, was quick to label the death 'murder' – Diane had been using LSD and for Art, this had to be the reason for his daughter's death. Parents always scramble for a reason when a child takes their own life, desperate to believe that some outside agent has taken control of their mind. We'll see this again in the Satanic Panic years, when dabbling in the occult was often blamed for teen suicide, with all other factors swept aside.

Art Linkletter became a fervent campaigner against drug use in general and LSD in particular. The tide had rapidly turned against the psychedelic drug, which went from an interesting psychotherapy treatment and aid for the terminally ill to demonised mind-bender after the patent expired and it was made illegal. 1969 was a bad time to be defending acid. Just a few days after Diane's death, the Tate-La Bianca killings rocked Hollywood and when the culprit turned out to be a scruffy prophet and his family of good girls turned killers – apparently due to Charlie Manson warping their minds with the drug – public opinion was hardened. LSD was a bad trip and nothing good could come from it.

Well, not for most people. But cometh the hour, cometh the opportunist. Beatrice Sparks was a Mormon who had a comfortable life and big ambitions to be a writer. Things just hadn't worked out for her though – she'd had a few gigs in comic books, magazines and even TV, writing for one of Linkletter's shows, but not the major break she needed. But Diane's death, a tragedy for most people, was an opportunity for her. She contacted Linkletter's people with a book proposal – a diary of a teenage girl who had gone down the rabbit hole of drug abuse, addiction, sexual abuse and degradation. And here was the punch – it was all true! Sparks said that she had obtained the diary of a genuine teenager who had come to a sticky end after a whirlwind journey from LSD to marijuana and heroin and then – get ready for the spoiler – after trips to the psycho ward manages to finally clean up, only for the epilogue to tell us that she had died a few weeks after her final diary entry, aged 17. A bad trip indeed.

Go Ask Alice is full of dramatic – some might say too dramatic – stuff, never more so than in her final trip, which is quite something:

If huge chunks of the book made so sense, then no one was noticing, because this was not only a furious read, full of incident and outrage but it also hammered home the message that everyone wanted in 1971. Parents were encouraged to buy it for their teens, teens for their parents. This was hot topic stuff and it sold in its millions. For the author, this was bittersweet. Despite her own claims to the contrary, Beatrice Sparks had written every word of this fictional novel but her name didn't appear anywhere on it, not even as editor. Instead, the author was 'anonymous' – not even Alice – all the better to make it seem like a real, raw teenage confession. For an author more interested in attention than money (she and her husband were already wealthy), this was frustrating, but she bit her tongue – at least for a while. Slowly, though, she outed herself as the 'editor' of the book – the woman who this troubled anonymous girl and her equally anonymous parents trusted enough to take the intimate diary and bring it to publication. It was this self-outing that would lead to her other massive seller.

Alden Barrett was a 16-year-old with a 'troubled' history – he'd dabbled in drugs and alcohol, questioned the truth of religion, the value of the Vietnam War (which he expected to be drafted into within a couple of years) and the worth of blind patriotism. He grew out his hair to collar length and listened to rock music. And he did all this in a small Mormon community where such things were a lot more outrageous than they might have been elsewhere. His life, according to Emerson's research, seems to have been a mix of half-hearted rebellion and desperate attempts to straighten up and fly right. His parents can best be described as 'unhelpful' – meaning well within the confines of a restrictive religion, their attempts to bring him into line would look suspiciously like abuse to people now. Alden got himself a girlfriend, went through a symbolic marriage with her and then was banned from seeing her by her equally stiff parents. On the day of her 18th birthday, they quarrelled and the sensitive boy finally broke. He shot himself in the head with his father's gun.

Alden too had kept a diary and in a moment of understanding, his mother realised that it was often a cry for help. If it could be shared, maybe it would help other troubled teens and their parents. But how? Then she read about the woman behind Go Ask Alice. She contacted Beatrice Sparks and told her the story of her son.

Alden's mother took Go Ask Alice on face value – and Sparks did nothing to correct her belief that this was a real diary, edited by a qualified psychologist, one that was helping young people – and that 'Dr' Sparks could do the same with Alden's writing. Sparks, we should point out, had no medical qualifications whatsoever. In fact, she didn't have a PhD in anything, despite her claims to the contrary. There was no clinical practice, no line of troubled teens that she'd helped. But she talked a good talk and no one had ever thought to question her. This was the first moment of exploitation – pretending to a grieving mother that your work of fiction was the real thing. It would get worse.

Sparks took Alden's diaries – which his mother wanted no money for – and promised to let her know when the book was ready for publication, giving her advance notice to correct any mistakes. That was the last that the Barrett family would hear from her for several years. The next his mother knew of the project was in 1979, when someone pointed her towards a new book: Jay's Journal.