Wednesday, December 09, 2020

Perhaps

 It was my son that picked Ancient Aliens for us to watch. He was interested in that slice of Netflix perhaps because it was under an hour, and therefore if it turned out to be any sort of disappointment, we wouldn't all have to sink our feature film energies into it. Or perhaps it was because he was truly interested in the possibility of the chance that maybe beings from another galaxy visited our planet thousands of years ago and proceeded to mess with us in large and obnoxious ways. 

Perhaps. 

That word is the fundamental building block upon which all the science of Ancient Aliens is built. Those pyramids are awfully big. It would have taken the Egyptians or the Mayans a long time to put them together. Perhaps they had help. All those depictions of scary monsters on the pottery and walls of our ancestors don't look like anything we have ever seen. Perhaps they were genetic mutants spliced together by pranksters from another solar system. Charles Darwin suggested that we evolved from lower forms of life. Perhaps it was ancient aliens that gave them the nudge in the first place. Perhaps Charles Darwin was one of them

All of this conjecture was too much for me. My reaction was that of sitting forward on the edge of my couch, yelling at each "Could it be" with the simplest and most obvious answer: No. And the most likely reason for my vehement denial was the past month of absurd speculations about our most recent election. Perhaps someone tampered with the voting machines. Perhaps dead people voted. Perhaps ancient aliens set this nefarious scheme in motion when they dropped by to put up the Sphinx. Or perhaps there are just too many people with time on their hands left with nothing else to do but make up scenarios concerning all the ways in which the reality in which Joe Biden became the forty-sixth president of the United States.

Perhaps. 

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