skonen_blades: (blurg)
Deep in the subterranean tunnels of Earth’s jawbreaker heart, loneliness boomed. White and orange Cadbury-crème-egg lava swirled by itself. Bored and horny, the earth decided to send up a flag. A little “I’m here” personals ad for any other planet out there to hear.

Round one. Dinosaurs. Good golly, those creatures were never going to invent radio waves or television or teleportation or space travel. Erase. Start over.

Here we are. Humanity. Pumping information out in the universe on a loudspeaker. The content doesn’t matter. It is a mating call. A shout-out to the dance floor of the universe. We are pollen that yells. We are the sex organs of this rock. We are the perfume and bright colours that Mother Earth is using to get noticed.

Far away, a sentient insect species that has almost exhausted it’s own planet by turning it into one giant hive will need to hear us. They will never have developed radio waves or television. They will have no dishes set up to receive Earth’s hail. They will not hear us and they will die, that planet will have to start over. Alone.

Earth created us to yell. Let’s do it. As loudly as possible. And let’s leave Earth when it gets too crowded. Let’s go to Mars. Let’s populate the asteroid belt. Let’s turn up the volume.

Let the life of other planets hear us and come running.

The idea of ‘Earth’ will spread to other alien civilizations when we meet.

Every human man, woman, and child in our culture will know the name of that other race’s planet, whatever it’s called, after we meet.

That is why we are called cultures. We are mold that turns into spores.

A planet develops an ego and wants to spread its fame across the universe. It wants to make children that it can be proud of. It wants the idea of itself to spread beyond its borders, to become a story, to ascend from rock into legend.




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skonen_blades: (didyoujust)
I’ve often thought that the life and death of Christopher Reeve made for a fantastic metaphor for the United States itself.

Superman in a wheelchair. The hero we all looked up to, the alien Jesus from Krypton come to take the bullets for us, could only breathe with the aid of a respirator. The Hollywood vision of a super hero created as an ubermensch, the ultimate tale of the ultimate immigrant, struggled valiantly. In the comic, he was a child from somewhere else. He was raised in a small town with small-town values, moved to the big city and made good. He was the American Dream made flesh. Impervious to harm, blue-eyed, generous, accepting, and honest to a fault. The propaganda of the last and greatest of human dreams.

And then came Nixon, Vietnam, the death of JFK, Reagan, Bush, greed, 911, and the recession. America riding a horse and getting thrown.

Snap. The American dream smiling for the cameras and heart-breakingly paralyzed, trying desperately and perhaps naively to make a difference in the face of insurmountable odds. Our heart goes out.

And then there’s the Superman movie itself. An actor playing the man of steel. The morally-depraved playground of Hollywood creating a piece of film that manages to capture the spirit of this amazing fable from an old comic. A paragon of virtue embodied by an actor that has, at his heart, a simple beauty that is obvious. Audiences in movie houses watching the movie the way that they watch television and films like no other nation on Earth. An unreal tale of hope sold to an audience. Propaganda.

Born into a somewhat wealthy and educated family, Reeve excelled in both academia and sports. This period of his life can be likened to the post-WWII America. Buoyant, rich, confident, vindicated, creating babies by the thousands. Jovial, powerful, fair, and aching to be morally superior. Then a long road takes that moral superiority apart piece by piece over decades. A slow decline into base entertainment and eroding anyone who chooses to be upstanding.

This dream founders and it taken apart. Trust becomes weakness. Christopher Reeve breaks his neck. And that accident puts an end to the horrible string of Superman sequels that Hollywood was squeezing out.

I think that his senseless accident was a tragedy and that he shone brighter in the face of it. I only hope that this new Obama-driven America does the same thing. If Superman is dead, let this be heaven. Let this be the Lazarus moment of the Constitution coming back from the dead, free of the green greed of dollar-bill Kryptonite.




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