COLUMN DEP’T.
MR WRONG: Unidentified Federal Objects
YESTERDAY ON TV and the Internet on C-SPAN, I watched our Government, that I pay taxes for, have a serious hearing or a committee meeting or a subcommittee meeting or whatever they call it where members of Congress get some people in a room like in The Godfather Part 2 and then the Elected Officials get to ask questions that are pre-loaded with whatever statements and cheap shots they want to take at the other side. Your Government in Action!
I’ve seen a lotta dumb and crazy stuff going on in the name of Government, and yesterday was maybe gonna be the most entertaining yet, because they were talking about UFOs and stuff, and a thing that may have been a vessel the size of a football field, and another thing “not visible on the FLIR system (whatever that means), and so just a buncha stuff that people saw or say they saw or say they heard someone say they saw or say that you can’t see, and The Government is behind it all, somehow. UFOs unfortunately now are called UAPs, which means “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” which just isn’t as fun as Unidentified Flying Objects, you know? Who changed this? I want a Congressional Investigation and stuff! I guess it’s funny that UAP is only one letter away from WAP, though, good times. Half a letter if you take the name "Double-U" literally, I guess?
Look, I got excited about this hearing because all my life I have been waiting for the Aliens, you know? Either they will come to us with marvels of Science and Technology to share and make everyone’s life better or else they will come to subjugate the population—like Humans have been known to do right here on Earth, so it’s the way to bet—and give us new diseases and make us work for them, or maybe even be food for them, in which case we would all rise up and unite as the population of a single Planet and realize we have more in common with each other than we have differences and then go and kill The Invaders! I know, it’s kinda sad that the only way we’re all just gonna get along is because we have to destroy the threat from Outer Space.
I noticed a lotta Elected Officials needed to mention in their remarks that were supposed to be questions that there were Chinese Spy Balloons, I think to make fun of The President for shooting at them? Also one Congressperson, this dingleberry Tim Burchett, felt the need to work into his blowhardyness that he was mad about people having to pay taxes for making more than $600 on eBay, OK, but what about the Space Ships and stuff?
It was nice that the famous Congressperson AOC was at the hearing. AOC is so famous that all you need for the ID is AOC, and I bet a lotta the Congressers are envious of that, you know? AOC said some stuff about how it’s important for whistleblowers to be protected, which is good, but what kinda whistle was getting blown, you know? I can’t hear it!
They had a real cast of characters at this hearing, besides the wacko Congress, there was this guy Commander Fravor, who was once in the military and had a creepy little smile on his face the whole time, and there was this goofball David Grusch, who kept saying all kinds of crazy shit like “transdimensional holographic teleportation,” but like, he would say that it was stuff that people told him, and he could tell the Congress other stuff, but they’d have to meet in a secret room or some shit? C’mon! I dunno, I just wanted to see a picture of an Alien Autopsy, you know? Howabout one fucking piece of a flying saucer? Nothing!
I was disappointed in this C-SPAN show because I have been watching The X-Files every night on a free TV channel called Comet, and they’re in the episodes where David Duchovny’s Agent Mulder disappears and shit’s gettin’ deep! Agent Sculley’s got a [SPOILER ALERT FOR A 20-YEAR OLD TV SHOW], and I am totally primed and stoked for some Spaceships and Dead Spacemen, you know? Or live ones! THEY ARE AMONG US!
So in the words of the X-Files, I WANT TO BELIEVE, but nobody brought anything good for show & tell.
The MR. WRONG COLUMN is a general-interest column appearing weekly wherever it can appear. Always Be Columning. No refunds. Go ahead and write Wrong if you want: wrongcolumn@gmail.com
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, July 26. 2023
★★ The humidity eased enough to make it possible to think about hanging up laundry without depending on the air conditioner to dry it out. The sky was hazy blue again, and the sun was as hot as a seat by the hearth. The cat scratched at the balcony window in the mistaken belief she wanted to be part of the scene outside. Breeze pushed a fallen green leaf uphill, away from the Park, in the middle of the street. Metal barricades surrounded a stump on the lawn above the Pool, sawed off almost flush with the grass. Had the tree only just been standing there, before? A long, green fish kept its pectoral fins and black tail waving to swim in place at the top of the falls, against the flow, in water hardly deep enough to cover it. After minutes there, it suddenly purposefully propelled itself back upstream. The breeze was not reaching the top of the Great Hill, and the grass gave off a thick and sluggish atmosphere, rich with oxygen though it must have been.
EASY LISTENING DEP’T.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP’T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of select sandwiches from "Dame Curtsey's" Book of Recipes, by Ellye Howell Glover, Author of “Dame Curtsey’s” Book of Novel Entertainments, etc. Published in 1909, this book is in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Ripe Olive Sandwiches
SOAK ripe olives for half an hour in olive oil in which a clove of garlic has been bruised, stone, and chop. Spread between brown or whole wheat bread which has been well buttered.
Walnut and Cheese Sandwiches
CHOP half a cupful of walnut meats fine and mix with half a cupful of Neufchatel cheese. Add a dash of pepper and salt if they seem to require seasoning. Spread between slices of white bread. If desired this sandwich may be further improved by putting between the folds a crisp lettuce leaf.
Creamed Cheese Sandwiches
LIGHTLY butter rounds of Boston brown bread. Make the filling of Neufchatel cheese mixed with whipped cream, one-half cupful finely chopped walnuts, and enough salad dressing to make it the proper consistency to spread nicely.
Cheese Sandwiches
TO half a cupful of grated mild cheese and half a cupful of Roquefort cheese rubbed to a paste, add one teaspoonful of paprika and half a cupful of cream. Beat till smooth and spread between graham bread.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
19 FOLKTALES collects a series of timeless tales of canny animals, foolish people, monsters, magic, ambition, adventure, glory, failure, inexorable death, and ripe fruits and vegetables. Written by Tom Scocca and richly illustrated by Jim Cooke, these fables stand at the crossroads of wisdom and absurdity.
HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Your $20 plus shipping and tax helps fund The Brick House collective, a Publishing Concern featuring a globally diverse set of publishers doing their own thing, with interesting items and publications available for purchase at SHOPULA.
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The hearing needed a guy making a mountain with mashed potatoes and another mustached guy saying he seen Bigfoot once.
It's funny you mentioned X-Files (in this piece: https://indignity.substack.com/p/the-aliens-conquer-c-span). I enjoyed and watched it regularly, but I dipped out/faded away at the point when I understood that, in it's fictional world, the aliens, not our government, the driving force behind The Cover Up. What would happen once or twice every season (usually over two episodes, and always at the season finale) was this:
-the story opens with the promise of some tangible, undeniable evidence of the aliens' existence
-Scully and Mulder and company go after this mcguffin
Then, either they find it, but the aliens deploy some entity or use some power to hide it or destroy it, or it is snatched away by some reverse deus ex machina before they can examine it or show it to the world.
At some point, it becomes a story about the inevitable process of the aliens accomplishing their strategic goals. We (the humans) can't hang on to one piece of solid evidence, and the aliens are (demonstrably, repeatedly) able to keep their presence a secret, which presumably is part of their plan. What use is anything we have against that power?
Of course, the reason Scully and Mulder can never lay their hands on the proof is to keep the "secret aliens" storyline running. Discovering the aliens would, necessarily, change the X-files. No more shadowy, trenchcoat skullduggery - some humans start attacking alien "Friendship Centers" with improvised explosives while others collaborate, and then, either the human drive them off our planet (given their almost god-like power, this is unlikely) or we watch two more seasons of a bleak story about generations of human servitude in support of our colonizers. No more intrigue, no more mystery. Just normal, everyday stuff. Blech.
The latest alien/UFO/UAP cycle seems, to me, exactly like that. The people enamored with the idea of aliens visiting us want to keep the story going. Everyone can talk about it and speculate about what the aliens want, why they're here, where they come from, and so on. This bull session can expand from theories on to hypothetical futures - our extermination, our subjugation, or our ascension into a higher mode of existence, with the help of our alien stewards.
To get to this mode of storytelling, you have to sidestep practical questions like "wait, are aliens actually visiting us?" and "how do you know aliens are visiting us?" What evidence do we have for this? None that's direct: the best we have is personal accounts and video representations of sensor data, from camera and detection systems the military certainly won't let us inspect.
We've had the "official" conversation about alien visitors for 70 years or so. There are rumors of alien corpses and crashed or captured alien vehicles. What you had at this hearing is the alien "discourse", encapsulated in a day - round after round of speculation and theories, people riding their hobby horses in and and back out.
Show us the spacecraft. Show us the material. Show us the alien corpses. Put up or shut up. If the government want's to keep this secret, and they, much like the fictional aliens in the X-files, can keep the actual physical evidence out of the hands of scientists and journalists who could examine and study it, well - that's the end of the discussion. If you are asserting that the evidence you need to prove a conspiracy is being withheld by a cover up that is perfectly, flawlessly managed and executed, you are also making an argument that whatever is being covered up doesn't practically matter. It will never be public knowledge that we can engage with. If I never let you talk to or meet my awesome girlfriend who lives in Canada, I don't actually have that girlfriend as far as you're concerned. She will never be anything other than a story to you.
Why this story? People have probably told each other stories about monsters, lurking beyond the boundaries of our known, ordinary lives, since people started telling stories. The contemporary alien story seems to really pick up in the 1950s. Perhaps a story about implacably powerful beings, furtively visiting us, perhaps as saviors, perhaps as a scourge, as colonizers, as conquerors, resonated with us as a way of processing our colonialism and imperialism. When we arrived on strangers' shores, the ostensible reason was to lift them up and bring them the fruits of our advanced society. In reality, we were conquerors, colonizers, and scourges ourselves. The people who were trapped and kidnapped by the network of slavers that served our colonies, and then our nation, were not dazzled or mystified by the largish boats that became their prison, but abduction, whether by strange people or strange beings, for unknown and most likely nefarious purposes, is abduction all the same.
The alien story could be about redemption, that someone out there is good, kind, and just, and will treat the creatures they encounter with patience and mercy, unlike us. It might work as an excuse. It's colonizers all the way up, don't you see? Or maybe the redemption works by setting up aliens as our inquisitors and adjudicators, their incredible power perhaps mirroring how we conceive of our own power as a nation, compared to the rest of the world.
The explanation for why the government would want to keep the existence of aliens a secret is that the proof of extraterrestrial intelligence would drive us "crazy" (in some versions of this narrative, the aliens themselves are keeping their presence a secret). This seems like nothing more than what a person who is given over to conspiracy theories believes about the ignorant masses who don't know the "truth". If you understand that the aliens are real, it's because of your unique intelligence and cunning, your ability too see pattern and tease out mysteries that most people don't notice or understand.
It's ironic to me that if this story were true, the people with the "secret knowledge" would not have an ace up their sleeve, they would be at the mercy of the alien visitors who clearly have the power to keep their presence secret and undetectable. No terrestrial government could prevent the aliens from doing a global flyover, and no one who wants to disclose solid proof on alien visitation has any to disclose. I used to find the idea of actual aliens interesting, and I still enjoy fiction and speculation about them but I think I'm done with the fictional universe we saw on display in these hearings.