Of aliens and alienation
The United States pulled itself together again somehow after the trauma of the Civil War. Or rather, slavery ended formally only to be replaced by a system that rendered the South’s once-enslaved persons free in name only for another 100 years. What persisted was one nation with two systems deeply divided by culture.
Those war’s psychic wounds were thinly disguised behind monuments to the Lost Cause that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades planting across indivisible nation. Meanwhile, the Invisible Nation enforced white supremacy for nearly a century. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the peace, at least regionally.
The trauma of electing the country’s first black president in this century reopened the wounds to white pride that never fully healed after Appomattox. Donald Trump, his own psychic wounds worn on the outside, exploited that grievance to win the presidency immediately following Barack Obama’s White House tenure. Talk of a second civil war persists among Trump’s red-hatted brownshirts and did so even before Trump lost reelection in 2020. A New Lost cause was born. Or the old one got a makeover.
Where that leaves our indivisible nation now is anyone’s guess. How long it may take the country to recover from the MAGA insurrection I can only speculate. One wonders if even the appearance of space aliens could knit the country back together the way World War II seemed to, at least for a time.
Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars posted that she’d recently rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It was better than she remembered. I watched it last night, after decades. Susie’s right. It holds up pretty well. Steven Spielberg’s aliens (also E.T. from 1982) are quite a contrast with spiky, stabby black aliens from Apple TV’s series Invasion.
But one doesn’t suppose even a hostile alien invasion could mollify the intra-human grievances of centuries.
The sense of being alien in one’s own home is nurtured among a certain brand of Christian. There is us, the believers, and them, the unsaved tools or allies of the Devil. Or gays or transgenders or liberals or anyone distrusted as not “us.” Outsiderism is a defining identity reinforced in many churches weekly. An old (secular) friend who has worn that identity his entire life once said that if he ever found himself on the inside of some social group, he would have to create an outside just to feel normal.
As for our new(ish) faction of rebels, it is difficult to see how they embrace a common national identity once Trump is gone. Pondering how an even more alien species’ appearance could achieve that brought to mind a scene in “The Last Battle” from the C.S. Lewis Narnia series.
A multicultural society of humans and talking beasts, Narnia has been invaded by the Calormenes. The last Narnians have taken final refuge in a stable. But the dwarves have decided that they can trust no one but themselves. Aslan the lion (Lewis’ Christ figure) appears inside the stable to rescue his faithful, but in their bitterness and cynicism, the dwarves can no longer see him.
As blogger Brenton Dickieson put it:
Their skepticism isn’t just, “I need to be convinced by the evidence,” but “I will not be taken in, so I’ll just stick with my own kind.”
Readers do not reminding of the MAGA response to the country’s invasion by COVID-19.
The scene plays out:
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a Stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said, ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’
But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot.
But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said: ‘Well, at any rate, there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!’
‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘ They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out.’
There is no brotherhood of Man for MAGAstan, no solidarity, no coming together, not even in the name of preserving the country, humanity or their own lives. Their prison is their own minds.