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"The Atlantic" Chronicles American Unreason, Including Ancient Astronauts; Plus: "The Week" Condemns Americans for Eschewing "Realist Fiction"

8/9/2017

36 Comments

 
I want to start by pointing to an excellent article by Kurt Andersen in the forthcoming edition of the Atlantic in which he traces the roots of American irrationalism back to the founding era, placing blame for our current explosion of insanity on the 1960s and the rise of the counterculture and postmodernism. It’s not entirely that simple—the weakening of elite institutions as part of a general hollowing out of civic culture in the name of capitalist profit plays a role too—but overall he is quite right. For our purposes, this paragraph is probably the most important, tracing the rise of conspiracy and even Trump to the forces unleashed by the spread of the darkest forms of UFO belief:
I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did. What made the UFO mania historically significant rather than just amusing, however, was the web of elaborate stories that were now being spun: not just of sightings but of landings and abductions—and of government cover-ups and secret alliances with interplanetary beings. Those earnest beliefs planted more seeds for the extravagant American conspiracy thinking that by the turn of the century would be rampant and seriously toxic.
​He misses the fact that this wasn’t an accident but part of a purposeful effort by rightwing groups to attract new followers by infiltrating UFO groups and using aliens as a wedge issue to draw in believers to hard core antigovernment conspiracies, as Michael Barkun outlined in A Culture of Conspiracy, a book that Andersen cites in the article.​
 
Andresen, however, goes too far in imagining that the 1960s broke some rational paradise. He writes of a familiar ancient astronaut figure in imagining how the 1960s gave way to the horror of the 1970s: “Americans were ready to believe von Däniken’s fantasy to a degree they simply wouldn’t have been a decade earlier, before the ’60s sea change.” This is not true. The UFO preachers and ufology of the 1950s, which tied ancient history and the Bible to UFOs, and the Theosophy craze of the early twentieth century, and even the Shaver Mystery, speak to the desire to believe long before history began when the Beatles landed in New York. What changed wasn’t the public’s credulity but the media’s unwillingness to exercise a gatekeeping function. Speaking of Chariots of the Gods, he writes that “Certainly a decade earlier NBC wouldn’t have aired an hour-long version of the documentary in prime time” as they did with the 1973 Chariots documentary, ​In Search of Ancient Astronauts. But that wasn’t a reflection of the public’s willingness to believe but NBC’s desire to cash in with sensation; after all, CBS had aired a documentary on UFOs with CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite (!) in 1966. If it was less credulous than NBC’s, that was only because CBS applied news standards while NBC tried to save money by buying outsourcing the show to a production company that bought a premade documentary and dubbed it with Rod Serling’s voice. The difference was due to capitalism, not intention or public credulity.
 
On a similar thematic note…
 
I don’t usually read The Week, so I did not see a strange and sad article that Matthew Walther, a writer of curmudgeonly commentary for a number of mainly conservative media outlets, published a few weeks ago about Game of Thrones. Walther is the kind of person who feels that young adult fiction is “a disastrous development for literature, to say nothing of morals” and, alluding to Henry Ford, that “history is bunk.” He is the sort of person who praises A. N. Wilson on Twitter for taking Charles Darwin down a peg in his creationist-tinged biography of the great scientist while pretending to stand at a distance from the creationist fringe. In his criticism of Game of Thrones, he promoted it to the level of young adult fiction, arguing that the program is actively dangerous because it employs fantasy, thus making it unworthy of the serious consideration of mature adults. But his reasoning is so awful I had to take note. In fact, his article was so hyperbolic and overwrought that I thought it a parody. But it seems to be deadly earnest.
 
Walther’s actual target is so-called “nerd culture,” and he disapproves in a clucking, matronly way of “well-adjusted tax-paying contributors to our GDP” taking an interest in the finer details of a fictional universe. Better they spend time fantasizing about professional sports, I suppose, since that contributes more directly to the right kind of GDP—the Republican kind. Indeed, he calls our current culture a “nerd-driven death spiral” in which consumers of genre fiction are destroying American culture by preferring fantastic fiction to realist fiction, which, as we know, is the only acceptable form of literature. After all, if Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, along with U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver’s Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, all agreed that the fantastic is subversive, clearly it must be true.
 
Obviously, you can tell I am not buying the argument. But let me quote his astonishing reasoning:
How did this happen? Obviously there is a problem of supply — people can only watch the films and television programs that get made. But supply doesn't exist without demand. There is a deeper sense in which the old problems that were the hallmark of realist fiction and drama — the old stand-bys of morals, manners, marriage, and money — are simply not interesting to people who are not emotionally mature enough to engage with them. And that group, I think, makes up a larger and larger percentage of the dollars-spending, media-consuming American public each year. We really are, emotionally speaking, a nation of teenagers — albeit horny ones with generous allowances.
​That made me mad for a number of reasons. First, there is nothing inherently immature about the literature of the fantastic; it is literally as old as literature itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh is nothing if not an epic fantasy, taking place in a heightened reality populated by giants, monsters, and magic. But Walther also betrays both a small-minded bias and an ahistorical myopia. His bias comes from his narrow interest in the small problems of one particular social class—morals, manners, marriage, and money are more the concerns of the white upper middle class and upper-class elites in a way they are not for other groups whose identities are not tied to the capitalist socioeconomic hierarchy. His myopia is much greater still, ignoring the fact that genre fiction can examine these same issues, albeit in coded and symbolic terms, which by definition require greater mental dexterity to understand than when plainly stated. But more important, he misses the fact that “realist” fiction is the product of one particular time and place, associated with a specific socioeconomic group, and never the dominant mode of literature.
 
For most of Western history, the fantastic mode was the preferred method of presenting fictional tales. The esteem with which fiction was held varied greatly, and in the eighteenth century there was an Enlightenment movement to oppose fantastical fiction for fear it would cause the simpleminded to believe in specters and magic instead of science. The Romantics killed off that argument when they expanded the audience for novels beyond wealthy women, and fantastic, romantic, and uncanny fiction sat alongside the realist mode straight through World War I. Read the literary magazines of the era, and you will see that critics made no distinction between realist literature and any other kind; all were equally able to represent elite literature. The war years created a modernist reaction against the fantastic, and it was in the wake of World War I and the great crisis of culture which followed that elites declared that only fiction that pretended to represent life as it is was worthy of the title. The rest was mere pulp trash for the poor, the marginalized, and women. We still live in the shadow created by that artificial distinction between genre and realist fiction—which is to say, modernism—but the return of Gothic fiction and the emergence of magical realism cracked the midcentury consensus that fiction should never extend beyond the boundaries of the plausible. Fiction, after, by definition is untrue.
 
For Walther to dismiss the whole of the Western tradition in favor of a fossilized version of the 1950s is entirely in keeping with the myopic view of so-called cultural conservatives, those public intellectuals who pretend to value Western culture but instead want to use specific elements of it to impose a particular ideology.
 
Walther’s second argument against Game of Thrones is even more laughable because of his righteous indignation in the face of his own myopic ignorance. After describing the various mutilations, rapes, nudity, and battles of the series, he says:
What does it say about our culture and the state of the souls of millions who participate in it that anyone could find any of this even mildly diverting, much less praise it as a triumph of man's creative energies and subject it to endless hours of analysis and speculation? Half a century ago, when our absurdly generous obscenity laws were still occasionally enforced, a program like this could not have been conceived, much less produced at great expense and broadcast.
 
One of the most persistent liberal myths is that art has no moral content, that reading or watching or listening to something can never be in itself evil. This is something that can only be true if, conversely, art does not have the power to affect or change us for the good. It is only possible to believe this if you think all art is essentially meaningless and people are insensate vehicles for random information consumption. You can only watch so many decapitations and eye-gouges and rapes and brother-on-sister grope fests before you either give up on the wretched proceedings in disgust or decide to pretend that "Lol, nothing matters" and it's not worth having feelings anyway. Not exactly, in the latter, case a resounding victory for the human spirit.
​I will not stand here and defend the specific content of Game of Thrones, which on occasion is more graphic than I would perhaps prefer. But to claim it as evil is to condemn the Western artistic tradition from start to finish, worse still because Game of Thrones bases its horrors on real life events which actually happened, often in even worse ways, to real medieval people. For example, the Red Wedding was modeled on the real-life Black Dinner, a Scottish horror in which James II’s retainers invited two teenaged nobles to dine with the child king. A severed bull’s head was set before them as they ate, and then they were dragged away, given a mock-trial, and beheaded as Clan Douglas laid siege to the castle in which the events transpired. Point is: Bad stuff happens in the real world, and a fan of “realist” literature ought to be aware of the fact that the horrors he despises are every bit as “real” as a stagey midcentury melodrama. If Walther experiences no emotion at Game of Thrones because it lacks poodle skirts and letter jackets, that is the fault of his taste in fantasy, not the content of the program.
 
Has our esteemed gentleman read the monuments of Western literature? The Iliad and the Odyssey are chronicles of one damned thing after another, full of mutilations and death and horrible injustice meted out by cruel gods. The Hebrew Bible chronicles epic cruelty ranging from child sacrifice, genocide, and endless warfare. Ancient and medieval literature revels in the grotesque, often in detail that our bowdlerized translations mask with euphemism. Try reading Martial’s epigrams in the original Latin.
 
The fact is that Game of Thrones, as a historically inspired fantasy interested in questions of elite power through sex and violence is in many ways entirely in keeping with the Western tradition of the past three thousand years or so. It is the midcentury, bowdlerized family-friendly TV born of the technological limitations of early mass media that is the anomaly. To long for that period—which was neither as anodyne nor as puritan as its reputation imagines—is to pine for a fantasy every bit as fake as the imaginary analog of England in Game of Thrones.
36 Comments
Graham
8/9/2017 09:16:25 am

I would disagree in one area, the Ancient Astronaut idea actually predates both "Chariots of the Gods" and "Morning of the Magicians", the earliest 'pop culture' presentation was a 1956 episode of the TV series "Science Fiction Theater".

Entitled "Sun Gold" the episode from the second season of the series begins with two scientists being alerted to the discovery of 2000 year old trinitite (a type of glass only produced in nuclear explosions) in Peru. Journeying there to discover the source they find the mummified body of the alien who 'created' the Incan civilization.

An episode from the first season in 1955 entitled "Hour of Nightmare" has two reporters sent to Mexico to get clear and unambiguous photographs of flying saucers instead stumble across a crashed saucer and the remains of the crew.

What the above indicates is that at least two of the basic narratives of modern UFO lore were already in place less than ten years after the Arnold sighting.

Reply
TheSmartestGuyInTheWorld
8/9/2017 10:24:27 am

You mean Game of Thrones isn't real? Damn! I was hoping to use our strategic dragon reserve to unleash some fire and fury.

#BACKTOTHEDRAWINGBOARD

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
8/9/2017 11:01:10 am

I assume he approves of the western, fitting as it does his particular preferred point in American culture. If so, he'd be hard-pressed to take the best of the genre (say, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance") and fit it neatly in his scheme of morals, manners, marriage, and money.

Further, what does that scheme even mean? Is he suggesting that Tolkien wasn't writing about a moral conflict, both internal and external, or that the characters on "Breaking Bad" are inherently more relatable? If he thinks that realism is a convenient tie to telling a parable... I just don't think he's as literate as he thinks he is.

Reply
Causticacrostic
8/9/2017 02:30:55 pm

Most of those westerns of the 50s are so unrealistic, it's laughable. They depict none of the nuance of the actual era, or the diversity. If, according to historians, one in four American cowboys were black, those television shows and films did a poor job of showing the reality of western life. Not to mention the caricatures of Native Americans and Hispanics (particularly Mexicans). The stereotypical John Wayne wild west was about as real as Errol Flynn's medieval England in Robin Hood.

Reply
Only Me
8/9/2017 11:03:51 am

It seems Walther misses the reasons fiction exists in the first place.

Exercising our imaginations is a coping mechanism to help us deal with the stress of everyday life. If the products of our creativity provide us with entertainment or allow us to reflect on issues we deem relevant, there's no real argument for placing limits on them.

Reply
c
8/9/2017 11:05:26 am

Years ago, I did something that a lot of later generations failed to do. I read the complete "Hobbit" followed by the three novels of the "Lord of Rings". I found them somewhat interesting, but never viewed them as anything other escapist fiction. I was never a fan of the movies, finding them long and somewhat repetitive. Now, comes along "Game of Thrones". I read the first novel on the recommendation of a younger person I knew. After reading it, the person who recommended it asked what I thought of it. I answered that it seemed to be a fictional and fantasy retelling of the English War of the Roses. Their response was a somewhat puzzled look. He had never heard of the war between the Tudors and Lancasters for the English throne.

Reply
BigNick
8/9/2017 01:27:31 pm

Lancasters and Yorks maybe?

Reply
Clete
8/9/2017 04:54:36 pm

You're correct, Lancasters and Yorks is right. Somehow I forgot that they were the families that were fighting for the throne of England.

Americanegro
8/10/2017 07:54:57 pm

"Years ago, I did something that a lot of later generations failed to do."

A lot of later generations? How old are you? And how uninformed?

"I read the complete "Hobbit" "

You struggled through that tome?

"followed by the three novels of the "Lord of Rings". I found them somewhat interesting, but never viewed them as anything other escapist fiction."

De gustibus...

"I was never a fan of the movies, finding them long and somewhat repetitive."

Clever of you to notice the length.

"Now, comes along "Game of Thrones". I read the first novel on the recommendation of a younger person I knew."

Well, I guess poor judgement never killed anyone.

"He had never heard of the war between the Tudors and Lancasters for the English throne."

Take a survey before you get your knickers in a twist over that one. And good job on getting the facts right!

Reply
Shane Sullivan
8/9/2017 11:43:57 am

Wow...

I...

Umm...

...Did Matthew Walther just say that Game of Thrones *wasn't* about morals, manners, marriage, and money? I can only assume he never saw the episode where... Well, any episode.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
8/9/2017 11:45:14 am

I assume that he meant "among people wearing gray flannel suits."

Reply
Ken
8/9/2017 12:48:16 pm

Good luck finding any 'white upper middle class and upper-class elites' who would sit through more than an hour of entertainment based on " morals, manners, marriage, and money" before blowing their own brains out out of boredom..

Reply
Matthew Walther
8/9/2017 01:43:26 pm

When did I say that history is "bunk"? My favorite writers are all historians.

Reply
David Bradbury
8/9/2017 02:21:56 pm

You definitely Tweeted it (yesterday). However close examination of the context suggests that you were probably being sarcastic (in a discussion of the Hiroshima Bomb, responding to "The fact is that it ended a horrific war. You weren't there but you feel qualified to make this sort of judgement 70 years later. #Revision"):

"no one who wasn't "there" can ever make judgements about the past. History itself is bunk."

Reply
Americanegro
8/9/2017 04:08:41 pm

"All history is the history of crime."

- P.D. Ouspenskii

David Bradbury
8/10/2017 03:44:03 am

Nah.
All history is the history of cups half-full and half-empty.

Americanegro
8/10/2017 05:01:55 pm

Tell that to the Holocaust or the victims of Stalin's forced relocation of the peoples of the Balticum, Sport.

David Bradbury
8/11/2017 03:41:06 am

I'm not denying that crimes happened, merely that crime is not the underlying principle of the historical narrative.

David Bradbury
8/11/2017 03:42:51 am

Sorry, a verb like "suggesting" should appear after "merely" there.

Americanegro
8/11/2017 12:33:21 pm

No one cares. It's a good quote. Go dazzle some drizzly dowagers.

Jason Colavito link
8/9/2017 05:42:10 pm

I didn't think you seriously meant that history is untrue; rather, I assumed that you were being sarcastic and meant it in the sense that Ford meant it, that the history we read is the product of the prejudices of its authors. And, yes, I got it from your tweets.

Reply
Americanegro
8/9/2017 02:17:59 pm

If "morals, manners, marriage, and money are more the concerns of the white upper middle class" that is a problem with society at large, not the "white upper middle-class".

On this I concur with a great American Negro, Dr. Thomas Sowell.

"The UFO preachers and ufology of the 1950s...and even the Shaver Mystery, speak to the desire to believe long before history began when the Beatles landed in New York."

Not to mention Mormonism and the 18th European fad for creating secret societies, e.g. Freemasonry, the Occulists, etc.

And there was a lot more sexy time going on in 1950s television that people generally believe, e.g. face-sitting jokes on game shows. "Our Miss Brooks" is about a woman who is perpetually horny.

I dunno if it's necessary to inject "capitalism" and class distinctions into the argument, but it's not my call.

Reply
Lonnie
8/10/2017 09:31:28 am

Modern UFO phenomenon started after bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is after these events aliens took greater interest us, because for first time in quite some time humanity had become a threat to itself and cosmos around us. This is why US government launched projects like Sign (1947), Grudge (1949) and Blue Book (1952).

Reply
Americanegro
8/10/2017 01:11:53 pm

You do understand they'd have to already be here to notice the atomic explosions, right? It would make just as much sense to say they noticed the V2 rocket and thought "Uh oh, they'll soon develop space travel!"

Reply
LONNIE
8/10/2017 01:48:45 pm

Indeed, they have been here all along. This is why I wrote "took GREATER" interest". It is not certain that we would be even allowed to have a major nuclear war, because UFOs have disabled nuclear weapons on several occasions. Maybe the most famous such incident took place in 1967 at Malmstrom AFB, where Minuteman missiles were taken offline by a UFO. This could have been a training mission and/or a message, that do not try anything naughty.

Americanegro
8/10/2017 04:19:27 pm

Which raises the question: Why were they already here? Just in case? The U.S. Civil War didn't bother them?

"Maybe the most famous such incident took place in 1967 at Malmstrom AFB, where Minuteman missiles were taken offline by a UFO."

Oh yes, of course, that definitely happened.

Are you familiar with the concept of the nuclear triad? Which has actually been a tetrad since the 1960s(ish) with the development of man-portable SADMs.

Let "Puff, puff, pass" be your mantra.

LONNIE
8/10/2017 05:22:31 pm

They are here for a variety of reasons, because more than one alien race is here. Closest relatives are here to assist. Quoting one alien contactee:

Alien: Ore-mining or other mineral mining on a planet or another star is done by us only in extreme emergencies because this process is equal to the destruction of the star. A planet or star is never exploited in the way it is done on Earth. What the Earthuman does by this is equal to the destruction of the planet. The first evil effects of this destruction have already come up on the Earth some decades ago, and at the present time it is already experiencing the pains of the destruction itself. This is to understand the way that the Earthuman exploits his planet and robs from it its fundamental life force when he deprives it of its oil, gas and the various ores. The effect of this is that the Earth then suffers from shifts inside, leading to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, because the Earth is slowly breaking down within itself. The same event is generated also by the construction of dams and similar formations, which cause, by the assembled masses of water, very dangerous shifts. The worst delusion of the Earthuman is carrying out his below-surface and deeper subterranean experiments with atomic bombs, as well as those cruel deep subterranean explosion tests, which he declares are atomic bomb tests, but which in truth are something much more dangerous.

Contactee: These are concerns which I know about, but which all politicians and scientists deny … But, what do you mean … that these mad fools would test still more dangerous things, which they declare are atomic bombs?

Alien: This means another kind of bomb, which is produced by use of products of natural origin, whose explosive effect is many thousands of times greater than the better known atomic bomb. Set off under the right circumtances, it would produce an immense chain reaction, by which the Earth would fall within only seven to eight minutes into a total firestorm and be atomized. Any attempt at rescue would be useless, for if the chain reaction were started, it could not be stopped. Not even we would be able to do anything to halt it.

This is probably the reason that president Eisenhower allegedly met with Nordic aliens (same as in quote above) on 20th of February, 1954, at Edwards AFB, just 9 days before detonation of hydrogen bomb Bravo. Aliens probably tried to persuade him not go forward with the test considering the dangers, but "mad fools" did it anyway.

Americanegro
8/10/2017 06:30:31 pm

As David Brinkley famously said, "More goddam nonsense". Fish, meet barrel.

How do you "mine" "ore" from a star? PROBLEM #1.

"The same event is generated also by the construction of dams" So, the problem is beavers. PROBLEM #2

"which cause, by the assembled masses of water, very dangerous shifts." So the oceans are the enemy. PROBLEM #3

"This means another kind of bomb, which is produced by use of products of natural origin" At least they're going natural. Uranium is of natural origin, so is the totally imaginary alien saying "non-transuranic elements"? I'll wait while you look that up. PROBLEM #4

It would be interesting to hear how the aliens got here without metal or semiconductors (no mining, remember?) and what they eat, and how they dispose of their waste. Are they stealing our water? PROBLEM #5 TO INFINITY.

I can't believe you're really this dim.

LONNIE
8/10/2017 06:56:01 pm

If you cannot imagine a very advanced civilization mining from a star then I am not sure who completely lacks imagination and is dim:) Take care.

Americanegro
8/10/2017 08:09:13 pm

WOW. You've already said they do their best not to "mine" yet they've developed the technology TO "mine". It's not that I lack imagination, just that I know basic facts.

If you say they "mine" with their minds, I will imagine [redacted].

Bob Jase
8/10/2017 03:45:02 pm

"What changed wasn’t the public’s credulity but the media’s unwillingness to exercise a gatekeeping function."

Nope. Check out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_T._Stone , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balloon-Hoax , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_penguin_hoax , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1874_Central_Park_Zoo_Escape

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hoaxes .

There never was a gatekeeper.

Reply
Kal
8/11/2017 12:28:34 am

Aliens coming for our minerals or our water would be kind of dense. The universe in all its vastness has every element they need. They could go to uninhabited planets and get what they need easier than getting it from Earth. They would not need to come to Earth. Hydrogen is the most abundant. Any society capable of traversing the stars at FTL speeds has already mastered how to tap the elements, make anything they wish on the way, and can easily do so without mining, slaves, or laborers.

Now if the aliens were just being total dictator warmongers and were just doing it for kicks, okay, but that too is silly.

If you mean 'mining hydrogen' from a star, this would not destroy the star. A star even like our Sun gives off plenty of solar wind all the time, into space. A more energetic younger star might even be better. All you would have to do is hang some big collectors out there in the corona and pick up the plasma and radiation being ejected. Remember your collector would be insignificant in size to a say, a small moon, not even a planet, and would not use up any solar mass doing that.

The net has some excellent shows on dyson swarms and solar collector hypothesis in fiction and in possible science, for a type 2 civilization, of the type that could easily fabricate all the minerals it needs. Granted at this point is is science fiction. We have never actually contacted any type 1, let alone 2.

Tabby's Star may have a type 1, but it is very far away, They would have to come to us. We're not even type 0, so they wouldn't. Well it probably doesn't.

Reply
Americanegro
8/11/2017 12:35:45 pm

You were doing so well, then "pick up...the radiation"???

Reply
Geo
8/11/2017 02:00:05 pm

I wonder what he makes of G. K. Chesterton's magical flights of fancy, then.

Reply
Kal
8/11/2017 04:19:25 pm

Light and radiation comes from the sun. Okay.

Long post about somehow sucking out the power of the sun so it dims, kind of impossible, as the scale of a star is much, much more massive than all planets in the solar system combined, and woulds not be effected by a little space ship using a sun sucking vacuum beam or some other silly thing.

Reply
Americanegro
8/11/2017 07:41:09 pm

"pick up the plasma and radiation being ejected"

Do you know what plasma is? Where do you get the energy to maintain the matter in its plasma state? And WHY collect plasma to begin with?

How do you store "radiation"? What radiation? Heat? Gamma rays? Beta particles? Proton beams? Ditritium nitride? My personal animal magnetism?

Your understanding of science is beyond deficient. Read. A. Book.

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