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The crystal ball says …
| British cinephile Robbie Graham, who took a look at Hollywood-government collusion in shaping perceptions of The Great Taboo several years ago in a book called Silver Screen Saucers, tried another angle in 2017. He asked an eclectic cast of UFO culture vultures to steer the controversy away from the usual futile debate over origins. The goal was to consider the impact of the phenomenon on society, the mind, religion, politics, etc., and the result was an anthology of essays, UFOS: Reframing the Debate. |  By Billy Cox De Void 2-26-18 |
“Taking UFOs seriously would certainly embody the spirit of self-criticism that infuses liberal governmentality and academia in particular, and it would, thereby, foster critical theory,” they wrote. “And indeed, if academics’ first responsibility is to tell the truth, then the truth is that after sixty years of modern UFOs, human beings still have no idea what they are, and are not even trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and cast doubt on the structure of rule that requires and sustains it.”
In Graham’s compendium, critic M.J. Banias dives even deeper with a challenging assertion titled “UFOs and Modern Capitalism: Dissent, Disenfranchisement, and The Fringe.” Without a moneyed or proprietary constituency, the UFO phenomenon, says Banias, poses an unprecedented dilemma for an array of institutions — military, corporate, scientific, you name it — because its existence is truly egalitarian. He says merely staging a formal conversation about The Great Taboo is an implicit form of dissent, because the issue is democratized by its lack of “hierarchy, domination, or subordination.”
“It is a discourse with no locus of control, no elites, and no ivory tower that establishes ideological truth. There is no established power in the discourse, therefore power moves openly between constant shifts in ideas.” Because the “consumable aspects created by UFO discourse are economically inconsequential,” Banias adds, “modern capital is unable fully to negotiate that threat into something it can fundamentally control as it has before.”
Banias’ bottom line: “Mainstream capitalist culture has no choice but to resist UFO discourse,” although “Ufology must continue to push towards democratization, towards a shared body of knowledge and ideas that cut against the grain of mainstream official culture.”
And that’s why, at least superficially, the emergence of the To The Stars Academy last October, and its stated goal of harnessing and exploiting technologies associated with UFOs, plus transparent public access to boot, might test Banias’ argument. It’s hard to know for sure – TTSA’s business model has its share of critics, and the company isn’t exactly loosey goosey with making its sources available. Moreover, the kind of hyper-technology being discussed comes with inherent and very sobering national security overtones. Is it reasonable to think that a capitalist venture, TTSA or anyone else, would ignore its own for-profit self-interests and not hoard any acquired self-financed knowledge and expertise?
Maybe the capitalist model on its current path is unsustainable. The widening and potentially cataclysmic gulf between the super-rich and everyone else – not just in the U.S., but globally – shows little evidence of deceleration. The institutions that support it here are beginning to look like pigs or castrati. Congress, with its approval ratings in the teens, subsidizes the plunder of the Treasury with even more lavish rewards for its corporate sponsors. As “legacy” media platforms dissolve by the week and #fakenews rushes in, info-junkies cluster at digital information niches dispensing coveted dollops of dopamine-strength anger and fear. The Defense Department spends $586 billion a year, but it can’t protect taxpayer hearts and minds from an epidemic of gasoline-slinging Russian bots wreaking havoc across a sizzling spectrum of American insecurities.
And oh, by the way, that UFO stuff going on upstairs? No money can stop it from happening. At least they’re not Klingons (yet).
As reason and independent inquiry asphyxiate beneath unending gushers of special-interest cash, and fringe thought infects the mainstream, maybe a Reframing the Debate
essay from a contributor whose pseudonym is Red Pill Junkie is more relevant now than it was even a year ago. RPJ’s take on where UFOs fit into this transitional period – “Anarchy in the UFO” – doesn’t sound all that that far-fetched. And by anarchy, he apparently subscribes to the “V For Vendetta” definition, in which anarchy means without leaders, not without order.
“… As we observe the events unfolding in the second decade of the 21st Century, the eventual disappearance of the Nation/State, as we currently know it,” writes RPJ, “seems a more likely scenario than for those entities to recognize an anomaly over which they have no control whatsoever; an anomaly that refuses to conform to our ‘sensible’ expectations and seems hell bent on throwing into question everything we take for granted – even the nature of reality itself.”
Not much else from RPJ about what, exactly, might replace that disappearing nation-state, only the certitude of a receptive market for an end to things as they are: “That which is a nuisance to the governing authority becomes appealing to those with a distaste for orders and regulation,” RPJ writes, “and the unruliness of UFOs seems to stir something in the core of the most marginalized layers of society.”
Shudder … Well, it’s been two months now since Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The Hill’s Jordan Fabian, who asked about the December NY Times piece on the Pentagon’s $22M UFO research program, she’d “check into that and be happy to circle back.” Sanders hasn’t circled back and, judging from all that smug White House press corps giggling around him, Fabian has decided to leave well enough alone.
So it’s up to De Void again, and here goes:
Mr. President — If you truly want to do something no POTUS has ever had the guts to do before, start tweeting about UFOs, now, before it’s too late. It’ll be a worthy diversion, you’ll go down in history and it’ll be totally amazing, that I can tell you. That I can tell you.
.jpg "Leslie Kean (60 px)")
