They Live

Dear Kate,

Why are we in trouble, so much trouble?

It can't be that we are in trouble with God, even a churchgoer would agree with the scoffers, that there is no need to go backward and regurgitate the Sunday-school stories.  Anyone should know better by now, we say.

So what is it then?  What went wrong?  Who did wrong?  Who's in the wrong?

Well, it can't be me.  It can't be you.  It can't be anyone that you like.  Look at us, on social media, we are pretty people doing pretty harmless things to make the harmless pretty.  We eat pretty drink pretty and smile pretty, and if we do speak about right and wrong, we seldom over-speak.  We tweet a quote out of context to add our voice to what is apparently in the right, for the benefit of a world that clearly knows who is in the wrong.  We mean no trouble.

Our dualistic view of the world and human destiny, a cosmology of good-vs-evil, is as old as....John Carpenter cult classic "They Live."  If you haven't watched it, please don't (or don't come back and blame me for wasting your pretty life); grant me the license to spoil it for you (not that the movie poster hasn't done that already).

The story is about a man who sees trouble in his world, and then finds a pair of sunglasses through their lens he could truly see the real trouble-makers.  Since the trouble he sees is capitalism, the trouble-makers he identifies are capitalists.  The twist, if one could call it that, is that these trouble-makers are bad aliens from outer space coming here to spoil this good Earth for us the harmless humankind.  They are the problem, and the most thorough and thoroughly entertaining way to put the world to rights is to set these bad elements on fire, kill them all, the bad aliens with their alienating ideology.

I wonder if the filmmakers suspected bad aliens might also be responsible for bad filmmaking.  But that hardly matters: the film is a "cult favorite," its propaganda very recyclable, "prophecy" most plastic.  It's all over the internet: if you want to speak about, say, police brutality, or against, say, some bad politicians, you can go the lazy way and pick a screen-capture to post or photoshop your own in earnest.  Whatever They are, identify Them, mock Them, stop Them for Us.

Well, the sun is peeking out.  Stay unharmed and wear your sunglasses.  Anything unseemly you see please at least report them, shoot them on the spot if your gun is not otherwise occupied.

I don't want to end this letter in a negative note.  It is easy to write and read negatively.  But are we willing to think difficult thoughts, do hard things?  I hope you did get a chance to read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" and tell your friends about it.  We all need to hear from true prophets.

Yours, Alex