Why "Ancient Aliens" Sucks

Because much smarter people have asked the same questions and come up with much, much better answers.

Just because something is not easily explained is no reason to jump to conclusions such as "aliens did it." If you dig deeper into the work of academic historians and sociologists, I think you'll find that they've explained many things which the "Ancient Aliens" crowd calls "unexplained mysteries." For example, there's no mystery about why the Egyptians built pyramids: they believed in an afterlife. Pyramids were palaces for the Pharaohs to live in during that afterlife. They mummified corpses so that dead people would still have their whole bodies in the afterlife instead of being disfigured. If you're interested in eerie similarities between separate cultures, read The Golden Bough by James Frazer; you'll find a lot of very eerie similarities between separate cultures which have nothing to do with aliens. And Frazer was writing between 120 and 75 years ago, around the same time as Freud, who's also really good. More recently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk and others have attempted analyses of worldwide cultural phenomena, in addition to all of those people who are more specialized in the histories of individual cultures. The real scholars are so much more interesting than the ancient aliens bunch. I don't think it's impossible that aliens have been among us, not at all. I just think that any culture advanced enough to visit us from another planet would have no difficulty whatsoever in concealing every last trace of itself from the likes of Giorgio Tsoukalos.

What I Believe

(That's right, I stole the title for this manifesto from a manifesto by Steve Martin. You don't have a problem with that, do ya, Steve? No? Okay!)

I don't think any subject should be off-limits for humor. (Okay, so maybe the title of this should be "What I DON'T Believe." Phooey. Life is hard!) The subjects of jokes, the things we laugh about, are often pretty horrible things. Freud wrote an excellent book analyzing just exactly what jokes are all about. A really terrific book. With good jokes in it. Laughing at a joke about something bad doesn't mean we don't think that thing is bad. Richard Pryor made great jokes about extremely painful things -- like when he accidentally set himself on fire and almost burned to death, hello, that was painful.

Good comedy heals. Cheap humor can just be crude and mean, but good comedy opens people up. It makes them MORE sensitive. Often it gets them to talk about things that need to be discussed, that they couldn't bear to talk about before. If my joke only made you hurt worse, then I failed as far as you as an audience are concerned.

I saw an excellent TV show recently with Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis CK talking about such things. The title of the show was something like Talking Funny They all agreed that no subject is off-limits for comedy, although it may be very difficult to be funny about horrible things. But precisely that is one of the primary challenges of good comedy.

Reality, Truth and All That

A reader's comment to Understanding the Truth of Advent by Acknowledging the Reality of Death, by Rev. Amy Ziettlow
on Huffington Post:

"Should we as Christian people and families cave in to the secular expressions of the season or should we call things what they truly are?"

Since when do Christians call things what they truly are? Isn't it pretty much a requirement that you DON'T do that?

I think Sigmund Freud would've just loved the way you started out your essay with mentions of the fictional characters of Star Wars and Harry Potter in the imagination of a young child, and then went on to insist that the stories of Jesus are of a completely different nature.

I think I can hear him chuckling in his grave. (No, not REALLY.)

Selections From My Dream Journal

Lately I've been keeping a dream journal. If I can remember to write soon after waking up, I tend to remember a lot of detail. In my recent blog post How Art May Save Us From Ourselves, the part about elephants being penned and painted and a slender earnest beautiful woman trying to set them free was from a recent dream of mine.

In earlier times, people believed that dreams were messages from God or from the dead or other folks. I suppose some people may still believe such things. Why not, if they believe in horoscopes and haunted houses and prophecies from Nostradamusand so forth? Freudbelieved they were a key to better mental health. My attitude toward them is an existentialist one similar to my attitude toward many other things: I don't know how important they are, but they're interesting.

Some highlights from recent dreams of mine:

I was among a large group of people, mostly artists, being driven around in some downtown from one opening, reception or similar event to the next. At first I was underdressed to the point of wearing no shoes and one sock, but then this problem was somehow resolved. A tall handsome painter wearing a tux who looked like Brendan Fraser and may have been Brendan Fraser was accompanied by a small woman who was his art agent and who shouted unpleasant things at him, into a cell phone and elsewhere, just an all-round unpleasant person. People were carrying a two-sided painting by the tall artist, with a full-length portrait of Julian Sand on each side, incorrectly labeled "JULIAN TEMPLE" in large bright block letters on each side. Our group found itself first in the extremely metallic-looking lobby of a huge skyscraper, and then inside a vast apartment high up inside this skyscraper which in great contrast to the lobby was very warmly furnished in wood and other earth-toned things, and went up for several stories, with open-aired spaces going up the full height of the apartment, sometimes with stairs, sometimes with ladders or other fun things to climb.

I dreamed I was playing basketball on a very large court in the courthouse of a hotel or motel, in a pick-up game with large groups of people, many more than five a side, none of whom was dressed to play basketball. Some wore suits, others casual street attire. No-one else but me seemed to be taking the game very seriously, which annoyed me greatly.

I dreamed I was in the middle of a big flea market which was either under a tent or in a large dimly-lit building, and Lindsay Lohan was figure-skating with a partner through the crowd. I was amazed to see that Lindsay could figure-skate in addition to all of her other talents. I was annoyed that the crowd generally ignored her, not even moving out of her way, which made what she was doing even more impressive. I'm no expert on figure-skating, but I was impressed. Her costume wasn't the greatest, a green satin minidress, but she looked very strong and healthy, which was a relief to me, as I've been very concerned about Lindsay's health since she went through that deathly-skinny phase a few years ago. In the dream it didn't strike me as strange that Lindsay and her partner were ice-skating on a surface which didn't seem to be ice for all of us flea-market shoppers, who were walking and not slipping on ice.

I dreamed I was a "Roman" conquering "Gaul," although the conquering seemed to consist of pleading with individual French people who mostly ignored me, and we all appeared to be in 1950's Paris or a good imitation thereof. A large group of beautiful female medical students in long 1950's style skirts came walking toward and past me out of a medical school in the Sorbonne, all carrying books under their arms. The entrance to the medical school had a 1950's, Frank-Lloyd-Wright, spacious and glassy look. I and several other people rode in an enormous Citroën around the edges of Paris rooftops.

I dreamed I was caught in the midst of a cultural conflict of some sort which sprawled over several boroughs of New York City. It was not clear what people were fighting about. It may have had to do with ethnic resentments, or women's rights, or sexual orientation, or all of those things and more. The threat of physical violence seemed to be constantly "in the air," as they say, but luckily, at least where I was, the conflict was waged mostly in the form of a game which resembled basketball in that a ball was thrown at a painted totem roughly the size of a basketball backboard. And in some cases the totem seemed to be mounted on a pole or over a garage door at about the height of a basketball backboard. But sometimes, as on a totem pole, the totems were stacked from the ground up. There was one miniature version of such a totem pole, about a foot high altogether, inside a casing of bars, and one had to throw the ball -- more marble-sized in this case. Usually they were similar to basketballs -- at the totems through the bars of the casing.