The Paranoid Alien Looks at Public Health on Earth

The Paranoid Alien Looks at Public Health on Earth

 

Boxing Day, 1994

Hello, out there in Radioland. This is Paranoid Alien Radio, broadcasting on 1519 Killing Hurts.

      What has become of our Victory over the Shadow, which we had believed had been won for all time by the heroes of the 1940's?

      About the same time your sister began developing breasts, she discovered that the Great Abomination was not the Silence of God, but rather, the inability of the weary partisans of the ‘40's to admit that the downfall of the Twisted Cross had been only a provisional victory. The luminescence of 1946 proved to be a False Dawn. We subsequently learned, that until the Powers that rule this world are made accountable to the cries of those who suffer because they have been left behind, these brazen Powers shall attempt to use material technology to reverse the direction of the Wheel of Karma.

      That is why the constellations beneath which children were born in the ‘60's gleamed so brightly, in the canopy of a night which was so dark that nearly every intelligent person contemplated suicide.

      Maybe it’s a miracle that anything survived. Or maybe it’s just that the Creator has a rather perverse sense of humor. 

 

Bulletin on the Public Health of Your Planet

 

(Alien Voice with mechanical Intonation)

• Good morning from Paranoid Alien Radio, broadcasting on 1519 killing hurts, and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. In the interest of public health upon your planet, we must warn you of a plague which is to be taken just as seriously as the White Plague that swept through all of Continental Europe during the 1940's.
• When you study the Holocaust and the Gotterdammerung, you usually leave out the influence of the Anti-man Djinn. Yes, certain stars do have anthropologists who do come around to take pictures of the savages torturing each other. They are tricked when you nibble at each other with lovebites, because their reptile minds can’t understand how it is possible to love and hate at the same time. But so long as you let yourself be ruled by games of serious dominance and submission, you’ll find you are caught in the nets of Cosmic Imperialists, who want to keep you bound in rituals of self-destruction, because they fear the day that your perversities shall become fashionable among their reptile-women.
• That is why you are suffering from this epidemic. We know that the first thing your rulers will do, shall be to try to control the epidemic through rites of human sacrifice. When this doesn’t work they shall try torturing victims, in hopes that the Gods shall smile. Because they live their days in the shadow of enormous pride, they can’t understand why the appetite of the Cruel Gods for human blood seems to escalate like a heroin habit.
• That is why we Paranoid Aliens have had to come down to inspect your military installations. We have had to intervene, because we are the only ones who are being allowed to question the chastity of your heroic soldiers. We may need to carry some of you off; this may be the only way that we can put an end to the gang-rapes that a certain group of us hears about when it tunes in to the voices of the mothers’ prayers.
• It would have been better if you had allowed the soldiers to drag all their harlots in tow. Then, at least, there might have been some honor, and some accountability for how they were spreading their own social diseases among the natives.
• It would be even better if these women were to gang together, to comfort and protect each other, and to demand the proper rites of atonement from men who’ve subjected their loved ones to pain and humiliation. When our Paranoid Alien Public Health Officers are able to observe this sort of response, we shall be able to conclude that your species is developing an immune reaction that is capable of suppressing the disease. Until that time comes, we shall need to continue our inspections, and we may need to carry some of your leaders off for special re-educational sessions.

 

A Place Where Mutually Incompatible Universes Collide

 

Hello there, let me introduce myself. I have come to your Great American Desert. I shall let you call me, “Roswell Man.”

      Some of you shall question, whether I should be called a man at all. The experts on who is a man are supposed to be the Anthropologists – but I’ve found that these Anthropologists are prejudiced against us Flying Saucer People. So prejudiced, that if one of us has a motor vehicle accident in New Mexico, he gets turned over to the Feds for scientific dissection.

      If you want to know, that is the reason why I am a Paranoid Alien. But I’ve been down here long enough to discover that, in the plains that are now staked with oil derricks, almost everyone is just as paranoid as I am..

      The Staked Plain of New Mexico is a place where several mutually incompatible universes are colliding. In most of the towns except Roswell, it’s snake-oil evangelism and Seven-Day Creationism. On the military bases it’s top-secret agendas and random particles from the nuclear physics lab. Out where the money is made, it’s drilling rigs send out by Napoleonic consortiums, as well as the human trafficking in illegal workers. Is it any wonder, with all this crazy-making, that there are Native villages in which a new Jesus gets nailed to a cross every year?

      If shoes are put out on the doorstep the next day, Christ has survived his ordeal.

Given the sort of confusion that your economic system imposes on the conscience, I really don’t think it’s surprising that some people want to believe in me as a God, while some of your leading theologians will insist that I must be the very Devil.

      Since my race is more like yours than I care to admit, it’s possible we may end up becoming your devils. But just for the record, the only reason I was flying around over Roswell the day of my motor vehicle accident, is that I was gathering data for a post-graduate thesis in Anthropology. As an anthropologist myself, I am aware that the cross-cultural excuse for Imperialism is that it is better for a people to be under the occupation of masters who rule by The Book, than to allow them to wallow forever in child-sacrifice and civil wars.

      When I deliver my report to the Starlords, I shall advise all to take solemn warning from the sinful conquests and terrible downgoings of the Conquistador caste in Roswell. I pray to what you call Allah that, in the fearful event that we are mandated by the Star Council to be your protectors, the people of my star shall do better than those of your planet have done in similar situations.

But knowing as I do the terrible similarity between my race and yours, I cannot guarantee it.

5. Reliable informed sources indicate than even though their home planet is many light years away, at warp-speed they can arrive here in 15 minutes.

The Alternative Current

 Good Morning. Welcome to the Paranoid Alien Radio Hour. This is Paranoid Alien Radio, broadcasting out of Roswell New Mexico on 1519 Killing Hurts. Is there an immigration lawyer in the house? All of our little green aliens from the outer limits are getting paranoid. Maybe it’s all on account of some chemical the agribusinesses sprayed on the lettuce.

We just want to let you know, there’s something going on out there that only the big almond eyes of the paranoid aliens can see. For one thing, we want you to know that your tax dollars have been supporting the best wrecking contractors money can buy. Bang bang Shamballah!

Oh oh! There goes Hialeah, New Orleans, Mobile, Alabama, Biloxi, Tallahassee, and other cities of the Aztec Gulf flood plain. Gone, gone, gone with the dreams of the ancient Atlantis which was supposedly lost under the Atlantic Sea.

Good morning. This is Paranoid Alien Radio, waking you up so that you can realize, that the coyotes really are howling over the remains of what used to be Western Civilization. Hello. This is Paranoid Alien Radio, trying to tell you that if you do not find the Green Tree of Peace, the ecologically sustainable garden of grace & mercy, lots of people are going to find that they have had to surrender it all to the Revolution.

Encounter With the Fire Marshall

Encounter With the Fire Marshall

April 2, 1994

    Again, Regina and I are seated at her breakfast nook table, when the ghost of Soren Kirkegaard flies in from Denmark to join us.  He introduces himself as the Fire Marshall.

    “If we would be spiritual explorers,” declares Soren, “we must acknowledge that the karmic road is paved with gravel. And if we accept that we are the adopted brothers and sisters of the God Who Died on the Cross, then we must also accept that we shall have our turns to scream and groan when the slaves get flogged.  It’s only those who are too punch-drunk with pain to say no to God, who can win the good race, and gain admission to the House of Lords in Heaven.”

    “You are the one who were the bandit,” Regina critiques. “You were the one who frightened the Church and the State by proclaiming that you had been led to establish, not a new theology, but a division of natural science which would examine social parasites!”

    “I wished to lead the people of sincere devotion away from the decadent castles of Ludvig, so that they could build the kind of defenses which would be of some actual value in resisting the coming tide of bestiality,” the Fire-Marshal answers. “The masses of so-called Christians will not join me in this effort, because their leaders have too much regard for a fine purse. But when they recognize the nature of the plague which is encroaching, and which is carried by the amiable mediocrity of popular Christianity, the few who are healers shall appreciate my vision of the Vanishing Point. Quite simply, we must be able to look at everything from both unbelief and faith, so that we may develop a hyperbolic relationship to the True and Unattainable Ideal.

    “Once we have developed that sort of quiet and inward relationship, we shall be able to appreciate the potential oil wells that lie beneath so many avocado ranches and other small and independent farms. We also shall appreciate that certain resources must remain potential, until the rapacity of certain economic systems have been chastised. You see it every day, but you refuse to look. You say that God takes care of his own, but what happens when the smallholders try to hold back the developers’ bulldozers? Of course, their petit-romanticism is too small for the world, and therefore doomed for failure – but is the more efficient System of the Beast that drives it out, any sort of real improvement?”

 

Encounter with the Real Peoples' Grandfather

Behold another voice, whose visible image at the table appears as a scowling tribal face, a mask carved rather crudely out of a log:

      “Before you go on and on in your discussion of what is or is not appropriate for a Christian, I believe that I have a right to ask of you one little question. By a Christian do you mean a Lutheran or a Methodist – which is to say, one whose life is programmed by the ideological structions of the mercantile idealism of Europe? Or does being a “Believer” imply a relationship with the sense of Prophesy which you recognize in Jesus the Christ, but which so-called primitive peoples also see in the teachings of Medicine People like Deganiwidah or the White Buffalo Woman?”

      “Ho there!” chuckles the Fire Marshall. “I now see what it is I longed to seek through travel, but despaired of finding on account of the thorn in my flesh. That is not a little thing you ask of me. I know that our Western Civilization is going down, and that on this account the man of discretion is likely to be the solitary.”

      “But love lurks in the woods,” insists Regina. “Your world is knocked out of equilibrium, because the weight of large estates and big crimelord houses puts everything out of balance. You can’t have love while you are trying to shoot a gatling gun. It is only when you can begin to appreciate the inspiration in the flowing water, that love has a chance to survive.”

      “In order to become a people,” grins the crudely carved wooden mask, “you’ve got to develop traditions of courtesy, which are founded on the awareness of past inspirations. Or you can act like the Crude Oil Brothers, who are always bringing in their mercenaries to take all the valued resources away from the little brown men. It’s just like your domestic violence problem. Whether it’s gas and oil rights or the rights to favors in bed – your so-called Christians have shown the world that they are not to be trusted. Or at least, not until you have begun to let your women have a chance to civilize you.”

Spider-Woman and the Smoking Chimney

    “Look at the board on which the cruel game is played,” declares The Happy Hunting Ground’s attorney-general. “Look how the rules all have been re-written by the God of Jealousy. You turn everything in life into an all-out struggle, and then, to make sure no one else can win, you change the rules as you go. For this reason, we’re convicting Jealousy of High Treason. Has the Felon Angel anything to plead?”
    “I don’t think he has any answer,” witnesses the Fire Marshall, “because Felon Apollyon knows that anything he declares may be used by the prosecution. And, as the Fire Marshal, I have got to take the Prosecutor’s side. I have seen too many instances of arson, and all of the evidence seems to indicate that the Indo-European Gods have not only managed a hostile takeover of Christianity, but that they are using the resulting consortium as a pretext for burning and imprisoning women.”

    “Let us examine the scene of the crime from the perspective of the Back Door,” imparts the Crudely Notched Mask. “Then, I believe, you shall see how the Guardian of the Ice and the Oceans would look at what has been coming down ever since Europe’s so-called enlightenment. Ever since the end of the Dark Ages, we have noticed that more and more hot smoke has been rising up from Europe’s chimneys. At first, it was just blacksmiths building fires so they could manufacture swords and armor for the knights.
    “The kings in those days thought they owned it all. What they did not understand, as they looked out on their Large Estates from the Manor Houses and Castles they farmed out to their vassals, was that their conquest of the common people was only the first stage in a process of avalanching entropy. The kings will try to develop enough prosperity to satisfy the people, and hope to settle down to a 500 year long Elizabethan Age, where gentlemen from varied nations shall duel upon the Spanish Main.
    “The Spider-Woman who spun and wove this fine tapestry died, and was remembered for the next 500 years as a lady who got tired of torturing her boyfriends and became a little old maid. The next kings were to find that Elizabeth’s peace could not last 50 years, let alone 500. For one thing, there were now by far too many chimneys, through which more and more smoke was rising up to disfigure the ozone. Beyond that, the Royal Privateers were becoming Disloyal Rats, and financing their treasonous aims through the most dishonorable sorts of commerce. No Crusader at the walls of Jerusalem has ever smitten a Saracen with such venom, as the Masters of the European Chimneys now inflicted on Africa.
    “You-all have studied the Great Bourgeois Rebellions in High School. What your instructors neglected to mention, was that these rebellions were simply the turbulence that was being generated by more and more smoke that was going up more and more chimneys. About the same time that Kings and their loyal retainers started getting their heads chopped off, the chimneys began reaching a critical mass, and chimneys started building chimneys. It wasn’t just the armory blacksmith anymore – now any little hamlet with a mill had to have a chimney too, so that a boiler could be stoked till it produced live steam.
    “And now the boilers with their chimneys were starting to walk over the land and across the Great Waters. Wherever these walking chimneys would travel, stationary chimneys would rise up to service the traveling chimneys. We have arrived at the point at which the Chief Engineers will try to stop this proliferation of chimneys, and will find out that they cannot. They will try to spread the alarm that all of the chimneys built since 1980 are united in a Communist conspiracy, and that any new chimney must be licensed by an old chimney – but in the end they will fail. We, who are the Spirits on the Northern Mountains, could have informed them long ago, just what an avalanche is all about – but the Chief Engineers were always too proud to listen.”

The DownGoing of High Romance

April 1, 1994

     “I am beginning to suspect that you are one of those travelers,” Regina needles me, “who are so spiritually restless that they find themselves uncomfortable in any clime.”

     “I don’t want to live my life as a B-Grade movie,” I respond. “However, the B-Grade shoot-em-up Western seems to be about all that the Vespucci mentality is able to accept.”

     “Where would we be without their jazz rhythms?” Regina objects. “The Vespucci may have lost the ability to say anything worthwhile in a philosophical vein, but their music is really divine.”

     “That music,” I remark pointedly, “is something that has been developed by the Atlantaens who always get shot whenever the Vespucci begin firing their B-Grade Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles.”

     “I just like to listen to their rock and roll,” she says.

     “What used to be rock and roll has now become the music of hard drugs and hard time,” I find myself critiquing. “I find it rather hard to believe, that a society so wealthy should be so cold and callous towards its poor people and disenfranchised ethnic groups.”

     “Thank you for confirming my feeling,” she declares, as she allows me to kiss her hand. “What I am concluding is that the Vespucci are really afraid of their own shadowgraphs. The Western Man needs to sympathize with us, because he has allowed the woman to do all of the feeling, while he does all of the thinking and directing. But of course, naturally, feeling which goes beyond our capacity for assertive action must necessarily be tragic.

     “The historic Culture of the High Romance,” I find myself responding, “tried to build up a sense of courtesy and custom, which would bring a man and a woman to the point at which they experience each other as suffering souls, before they get so naked that they know exactly how to kill each other. Unfortunately, when the Vespucci popular culture decided to get rid of everything the Communists from the Maquis had tried to smuggle over, respect for the comradeship of women was the first thing that had to go.”

     “Lethality,” she agrees, trying hard to pronounce the word with a Boston accent. “That is the exactly the problem.”

     “When I examine the statistics on Domestic Violence among the Vespucci,” I reflect, “then I become thoroughly shocked. I know that I am one of the Children of the Wanderer – but even normal, conservative Muslims become shocked, when they see how the Frontier Lords of the Vespucci brand their women like animals and then ride them into the ground. Of course, under this sort of condition, you’ve got to convince the women that they really are free and equal. Women who acknowledged they were servants would keep something in reserve for themselves, and know better than to give themselves so completely to their masters.”

     “That is a rather extreme statement,” she shrugs uneasily.

     “I guess, when men let us develop a positive image from the shadowgraph,” she quickly recovers with a wicked smile, “they don’t like what they see.”

Must all Ishmael’s children suffer, because he cursed the rain?

Why the Aliens Are Paranoid

Why the Aliens Are Paranoid

March 30, 1994

Good Morning, to everyone staked out on the plain. This is Paranoid Alien Radio, broadcasting out of Roswell, New Mexico, where all the aliens are very paranoid.

     We who have been stationed here on a galactic peacekeeping mission would like to ask you if you have ever stood under the stars, while the moon is shining down on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains?

     If the moon is full and the stars are bright, you shall be able to hear Kit Carson howling in the night.

     If you will listen to his mournful howls, you shall hear him complain about how he was abused and cajoled and deceived by people who thought that they knew what was good for the country because they had West Point educations. He is howling because he is coming to realize, that the things that these generals and colonels ordered him to do, are things that would nowadays be filed under “G” for Genocide or “E” for Ethnic Cleansing.

     Kit Carson is lamenting the fact that he chopped down the peach orchards of his neighbors, simply because he was given orders by generals who felt that the Union was in danger and the Navajos were a threat. He is howling because he knows too well how often the Navajos had given aid and comfort to runaway slaves. He is howling because the people with big educations had him so hypnotized, they were able to trick him into acting in a way that made war with his conscience.

     Originally, having grown up in a contested settlement, Kit Carson had worn a chip on his shoulder where “Indians” were concerned. But the longer he served the U.S. Cavalry, the more he came to realize the slime that lay hidden beneath the macaroni. The more new settlers he led out here to New Mexico, the less encounters between the U.S. Cavalry and the Natives were conducted as contests of honor, and the more that it was beginning to look like plain old genocide.

     Kit Carson ended his life as an advocate for Indian rights, but his ghost will still howl in the night, because he wants to wake you up so that you do not need to spend your old age atoning for the sins of your youth. And Kit Carson will keep howling, until those who have come in the big ships across the ocean learn a proper respect for the little Native canoes being tossed about in the wake of the big ocean liners.

     We who are paranoid aliens are establishing a beachead on this planet, because your galactic neighborhood is tired of watching re-runs of the old Cowboys & Indians serials. We cannot allow you to begin colonizing Outer Space, because your rapes, acts of domestic violence, acts of vendetta, and wars which result from vendettas are bad examples. We who are Paranoid Aliens simply cannot afford to have other young races follow in the path you are leading.

     Incidentally, we who are Paranoid Aliens are not alone in this feeling. We have spoken with the elders of many traditional tribes. The elders are all in agreement, that the public fashions of your age are far too violent. There are some among the Pueblos who warn, that on account of the sins against the Tree of Peace, the White Snake soon shall take a flogging from the Black Snake which shall leave him writhing in pain. It is a pity, but if the fanatics did not rise up to oppose you, the White Snake would become so bold, that everything that is warm-blooded would be poisoned.

     “To be quite blunt, we see your planet positioned on the brink of a Global Civil War. We who hail from the planet which we call Iblees are of the opinion that it would be just as well, if we were allowed to encourage you to act out your aggression in a way that would bring mutual extermination, and the extinction of your ‘human species.’ Quite frankly, the Real Estate of your planet is too valuable to be wasted by being set aside as a nursery for an immature species that would just as soon exterminate itself in an orgy of mass violence.

The Hour of the Neighborhood Frog King

The Hour of the Neighborhood Frog-King

 

Where have all the flowers gone? What happened to all of the poppies?

    The answer is, the Roman soldiers trampled them when they were raising up the cross on which they nailed Adonoi.

    Hello, this is the Frog-King, broadcasting on Paranoid Alien Radio, to ask you now, where have the young girls gone? The answer is, that you are tuned in on a soap opera. There are no perfect lovers, only duets and triangles which demonstrate how thorny a soap-opera pretty rose can really be.

    Do we ask why Isis weeps? Look out on the Aegean Sea, and you shall see reflection of a dreadful moment.

    The Great God Pan is dead.

    Didn’t the same thing happen to the Runner of the Marathon? Was it not with his dying breath that he delivered his victory message to Athens?

    And don’t we all discover in the end, that each one of us has been running a marathon race, which we can only win by crossing over, and leaving this world behind?

    Hello Again. This is your friendly Neighborhood Frog-King from a not so distant star, broadcasting over Paranoid Alien Radio. Do you understand, why we have been brought here?

    I used to have a tail that was so fine it would shine in the darkness. In those days, I used to be a preacher. I’d put the people into a trance, and all the pretty women would lay out their fish-baskets in front of me, and ask me to jump into bed. But then I made a mistake, because I started telling them, that my green and gold tail was much prettier than anything that God had. That’s why the Angel of Judgement came for me. With one whack of Her double axe, she severed my tail from my spine.

    That’s why I became the bandit who rides through the Staked Plain, driven by the pain of his lost tail. I still will be fleeing the men that I’ve killed and searching for my lost Evangeline, even after the real-estate agents have drawn and quartered Santa Fé, and platted the suburbs of Taos.

    “I’ve always known that the Priest and the Satanist hve a dirty secret in common,” Renata declares, with a certain set of her jaw. “That’s why the time has come when both the Patriarchs and their familiars must step aside, so that the Corn- Mother may return in glory from the underworld into which the Myths of the Fathers have cast her.”

    “Then let us be joined, in our commitment to bring about that transmutation,” I declare.

    “I’ve got to keep my distance, because I am still shattered by the pain,” she complains, with hurt emotions. “I’ve got to hide my love for you, because I am afraid to take the risk of having any more accidents.”

    “You speak as though it were a sin to acknowledge the reality of class conflict,” I make my counter-complaint.

    “I’ve reached the limits of what I can do for the struggle,” she demands emphatically.

    The trouble is, not only have I heard these words before – I have been the one who uttered them.