hazy gloom

Epilogue

from The Death of Time; Or, If Highlighters Could Talk, my forthcoming novel

Ultimately, however, it didn't do much good.

That night, as Brad and Diane slept--peacefully, the first time in years--NORAD noticed several small blips that briefly danced across their radar screens. The scattered photons were so fast and small that the technician on duty merely smacked the radar monitor, thinking some sort of electrical interference must have caused the fuzz.

Naturally, this was a mistake, but one could only reach that conclusion in hindsight. In this technician's defense, most everyone who sat watching a monitor that night (or night, at least, in the U.S., which makes it night everywhere else for convenience's sake) saw much the same thing, reached much the same conclusion, and did much the same thing, with much the same result. If nothing else, there was a worldwide smacking of electronics that went largely unremarked by anyone, for reasons that will become obvious shortly.

The one sole exception to the monitor smacking was a lone man in Liechtenstein who understood what was happening. Unfortunately, he had recently fallen in a skiing accident and lay in bed encased in a full body cast so he couldn't really do much about it besides sit (lie) and stew about it. This is a tragedy on several levels, none of which are of particular interest here.

In space, high above the planet, the little blips turned out to be not-so-little alien vessels that were deploying 'round the world for a coordinated attack. Lest you think this is going to be a generic version of Independence Day, everyone dies, so don't get your hopes up. There is no Bill Pullman inspiration; no Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum screwing the aliens with a clever nuke up the wazoo. These were rather clever aliens who were well aware of the mess humans could cause, given half the chance, so they figured they'd just get rid of all of them at once and save themselves a whole world of trouble.

Shortly after 7:30 a.m., as Bob Edwards finished his humorous news brief, the aliens struck and destroyed everyone. This was, of course, tragic for several reasons, not least of which that this is not Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and no one survived.

Look for an upcoming chapter from my next novel: Where Do We Go From Here; Or, Is That Really That Much Quieter?

My Next Invention

Janet Jackson's Boob and the Rise of Conservativism

The now legendary wardrobe malfunction has had a seemingly disproportionate response among the leadership the way myriad Girls Gone Wild videos have not. The response, however, simply seems to be a symptom—the crowning one, to be sure—of the very slow, very real, return to Puritanism.1

America is seemingly caught up in a near-religious fervor over morality. Politicians’ speeches are peppered with morality of this, immorality of that, all very vocal protests to what seems to be the decaying moral fiber of the nation. I can’t argue that the social structure seems to be collapsing, falling into ever more hedonistic pursuits, but I will dispute the repeated implicit assertion that we can arrest this degeneration through legislation.2

Michael Powell, head of the F.C.C., has vowed to seek new legislation that will severely penalize indecency on television, and, in something even more suggestive, he’s argued that he should extend those same or similar rules to cable television.3

This is something far out of proportion to a solar-capped nipple flash. This is the beginning of a new wave of censorship that will eventually threaten more than just television. Once the legislation is in place for broadcast media, what’s to stop legislators from defining what is indecent for print? or film? or thought?

A treaty the Bush administration has sent to the Senate for ratification promises just that: in the name of “war on terror,” the treaty seeks to employ Carnivore, an FBI computer program that will actively monitor any terrorist activity on the Internet, as well as radically restructuring the rules that govern how evidence is gathered and used against individuals. The treaty is not simply a dangerous impedance to free thought, but it also suggests the government doesn’t trust its own citizenry. Is this the action of a democratic society?

Conservatives, it has become increasingly clear, are unwilling to live in a world that contains ideas or lifestyles that don’t exist within their narrow framework of morality. If people cannot live the moral lives conservatives would have them live, then legislation must be passed to force conformity to that worldview.

Yet the underlying notions of freedom that are supposed to guide American government are being lost in this return to morality. As Oliver Wendell Holmes stated (perhaps apocryphally), “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”4

Janet Jackson’s boob notwithstanding, it is a dangerous and slippery slope the conservatives would send us down. A breast is not the downfall of modern civilization (inappropriateness aside), nor will Showtime’s Queer as Folk or The L Word cause us to descend into immorality.

We cannot legislate morality (witness the brilliant success of the eighteen amendment), nor can we enforce a worldview—unless we wish to construct a new nation, under Christianity, where morals are handed down from a religious, and infinitely conservative, government.