Aliens: past and present

Last night at 2 a.m. I realized I had spent two hours of my life watching a bad action movie about killer aliens for no reason other than the sad fact that I wanted to fill time until I fell asleep. In the course of the night, somehow the idea came to me to point out all the egregious logical inconsistencies and plain idiocy of the film. Then, in the morning, I thought better of it. It's been done to death. We know how screenwriters with good, dare one say groundbreaking, ideas have their souls eaten by studio executives. I wish I had something on tape to show for it.

One thought did come out of it, though. If there is to be a crippling interspecies conflict in the not-too-distant future, we will not be blameless in the perpetration of it. We've seen how cultural insensitivity has created an escalating spiral of violence, an unstoppable juggernaut against which appeals to "reason" are pretty much useless. If people are ready to pre-judge other humans as "savages" or "inherently violent" or "imbecilic" just by slight phenotypic differences such as melanin concentration, the presence/absence of epicanthic folds, lip size, etc., what monstrosities will we ourselves build out of some utterly alien species? (Here's a tie-in to my Women's Studies). Without sounding like a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist, I'd like to posit that Hollywood has been brainwashing us into just this kind of mindset for generations. We’ve got to stop demonizing the "other".

As I write this, my brother is playing Halo II. I was playing it yesterday as well. It is an entertaining look at interspecies genocide.

Consider: "our attempts thus far to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence, like the Voyager Golden Record. Hey, I find it interesting."