Like many American men entering middle age on the brink of the Millennium, I recently found myself reading poet Robert Bly's bestseller Iron John: A Book About Men. Bly begins his mythic exploration of the psychological path to mascul-ine maturity by taking a look at some of the forces holding men back from such maturity in our time, including that much-publicly-vilified figure, the "absent father." Writing about the hard blow dealt the family by the Industrial Revolution, which left Dad no choice but to work away from his family in distant factories and offices, instead of on the farm, where he had worked side by side with his loved ones throughout the long Agrarian Age, Bly quotes the German psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich:
When a son does not see or participate in what his father does all day, his occupation, his work, a hole appears in the son's psyche, and the hole will fill with demons who tell him his father's work is evil, and that his father is evil.
The son, cut off from any experiential knowledge of what
Dad is up to when out of his sight, begins to suspect the worst –
maybe he's a criminal, or has another, secret family some-where. Maybe
he spends his days plotting the napalm deaths of Vietnamese villagers,
or conspiring to assassinate presidents, or to lock away the plans for
pollution-free engines in his corporate Detroit safe. He could, right this
moment, be deep underground at Area 51 in the Nevada desert, rushing to
sell out the human race to evil alien abductors before the 5:00 whistle
blows...
Bly never actually mentions aliens or UFOs in Iron John,
but that's what the quote made me think of. America has probably always
been a paranoid place, but an odd brand of uniquely generational mistrust
seems to have appeared among us over the last thirty years like some demonic
shadow cast by the meteoric rise of the "Love Generation." Think
back to the paranoid visions of the past: Anarchists, Fascists, Nazi's,
Communists – America's nightmare bogeymen throughout the first half
of the 20th Century were seen almost exclusively as outside agitators,
those quasi-mythical "others" beyond our borders, at the edge of vision,
categorically anti-American by virtue of being unquestionably non-American,
non-WASP, and, whose, we were sure (to quote H.G. Wells), "... intellects
vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth (read "Country") with
envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
The next line of Wells' classic novel The War of the
Worlds is surely less famous, but it turned out to be more prophetic by
far: "And early in the Twentieth Century came the great disillusionment."
Mr. Wells may have missed the date by a few decades (and
he was, admittedly, British), but when the great disillusionment finally
came to America, it swept over our society with all the disruptive fury
of a Martian heat ray, leaving no institution or symbol of authority unleveled.
The cultural explosion of the 1960s, as much as anything else attributed
to it (as so many disparate things are in the retro-rave days), was a great
shrugging off of old beliefs about the real identity of both us and them,
a reversal of our nation's understanding of just who they (make that They)
were, and where they were likely to be found. Like the invisible microbes
that conquered the Martians in Wells' classic story, They were insiders,
as close to us as our own skin. The '60s flower power slogan, "Don't trust
anyone over thirty" cast a wide paranoid net that respected no national
boundaries, and located the enemy's lair as home, next door, upstairs,
downtown. The bad buys were no longer "out there," twisting their mustaches
in the night while they plotted to infiltrate our Godly ranks – They were
here, amongst us; they were us.
But when you consider the historical fact that many a
Hippie was ready to trust Ho Chi Min, Fidel Castro or Chairman Mao –
who were hardly teenagers at the time – it becomes clear that lurking
behind much of the rhetoric of the '60s "Cultural Revolution" lay the angry
whisper of Mitscherlich's demons, filling holes in the hearts of a generation
of young American men for whom the Pentagon had come to symbolize all the
hidden places of the father, all the dark, distant boardrooms where, at
that very moment, their happiness was surely being betrayed by evil, absent
Dad.
Let's look at the insidious legacy of this belief on
our culture, on the stories we tell ourselves about reality. In the TV
world of FOX's The X-Files, the American government is in league with evil
alien abductors, carries out midnight abductions of its own (disguised
as aliens), tracks us all through labyrinthine records of genetically-coded
small pox vaccinations we were given as innocent children, and is plotting
to wipe most of us out with designer viruses transmitted by killer bees,
then to cooperate in the enslavement of survivors under the brutal authority
of a few turncoat human "commandants" (a condensed mishmash of particularly
memorable episodes). What is most frightening to me about this dark vision
is that many Americans not only do not find it outlandish, they accept
it as fact, or at least possible, if not likely. Listen to a week of AM
radio anywhere in this country for a quick outline of The Conspiracy –
unmarked black UN helicopters, secret concentration camps in Canada and
the American desert, rainbow money and the impending devaluation of the
dollar, the far reaching and centuries-in-the-making plan of the Illuminati/Bilderbergers/Trilateral
Commission ad nauseum to bring down God-fearing Christians, institute global
government, and secure planetary totalitarian fascist rule...
The UFO enigma has become a centerpiece in this dark drama,
with the Grey aliens – those ubiquitous, egg-headed abductors with
the hypnotic, black, wrap-around eyes – taking the brunt of the speculation,
either as interdimen-sional demons, invaders in league with world governments
in a plot to enslave Humanity, or even as creations of a high-tech government
deception developed to "explain away" the Rapture of millions of Fundamentalist
Christians just before Christ's return ("Abducted by Aliens: Film at 11:00").
As a '60s-born child of decidedly '20s-born parents,
I was raised on the Golden Age, The Day the Earth Stood Still dream of
kindly Space Brothers here to lead us to peace, brotherhood and Universal
Wisdom – a notion which seems ridiculously naive by today's conspiratorial
standards. But consider the possibility that this '50s era "naive dream"
may be no more or less realistic than the paranoid nightmares of the 90's
and beyond. Outside of a small group of experiencers who have personally
seen or interacted with something they interpreted to be extraterrestrial
in origin, the rest of us, the majority of us (even in the UFO community),
simply do not know if real aliens haunt our skies, or, if they do, what
they want. We have only our beliefs – and beliefs, however passionate or
paranoid, stand equally devoid of demonstrable verification from the world
outside our heads and hearts.
It has been a scant 50 years since the first flying saucers
were sighted by Kenneth Arnold over Mt. Rainier, Washington in the summer
of 1947. Considering the vast distances of interstellar space, it
seems likely that whatever real aliens might maintain a presence on or
around our world are the same group that have been here all along. That
our view of them has changed so dramatically over such a relatively short
time has much more to say about us than it does about them.
Ours is a Collective Consciousness in tran-sition. The
cultural, technological and psychic distance between the average 1997 American
and one of H.G. Wells' imagined turn of the Century Brits (or even of the
modern American's 1950's counterpart, for that matter) is vast indeed.
It may turn out to be cool an unsympathetic as well, should we allow the
nefarious whisperings of Mitscherlich's demons to lead us into the fascist
future the purveyors of paranoia describe.
It's time to take a break from all the paranoia and suspicion,
to recognize that it is we – not our fathers, our children our leaders,
or any alien "outside agitators" – who control our destiny, and to finally
release the dark dream that has us by the throat.
"All I knew was that these things that had been alive
and so terrible to me were dead," Wells writes of the mysterious ending
of the Martian campaign of destruction. "I stood staring into the
pit, and my heart lightened gloriously, even as the rising sun struck the
world to fire about me with his rays."
It's time, on this brink of the Millennium, to invite
Dad home, to begin the long work of repairing the many "holes" in our society
and ourselves where demons whisper and breed. It's time, even, perhaps,
to take our eyes off the aliens for a while, and to pay some much-needed
attention to the one and only space-faring species in the whole Universe
of whose existence we are absolutely certain – our own.