Just as I walk into the living room a young woman, who will be back immediately following the commercial, is telling Maury Povich she had sex with an alien.
I settle into a chair that faces slightly away from the set. Should we watch this thing together, or should we talk about the important things of life? For instance, what has the cat been using since she stopped using the litter box?
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This whole flying saucer thing has been bugging me for years since it’s such an obvious pack of shit. I’ve lost track of how many books, magazine articles, and television “documentaries” I’ve been subjected to, not one of which seems to have found anything unusual in having some creature travel 60 million light-years just so it can circle the earth and never once settle down to talk to anybody except the kind of people who stand around in K mart waiting for a blue-light special or, cough, cough, writers. Frankly, my dear, the only thing more amazing than that story is that anyone would believe it in the first place.
What’s even more amazing is that nobody ever produces a television show debunking the whole thing. This disturbs me–almost as much as a sentence like “One out of every five Americans can’t even read a story to their child.” Not only have Americans forgotten how to speak their own language, they’ve given up one of their most priceless cultural legacies. Debunking. I never thought I’d live to admit it, but this country finally has reached the point where it really needs my father.
From Mark Twain to H.L. Mencken to the forgotten vaudeville comedian who gave my father the line “Vas you dere, Charlie?”–there once was a real tradition of debunking in America. Smart people took care that no one mixed them up with the rubes and the hicks. No one wanted to be the chump who fell for the tall tale.
Much of this stuff seems to be written by baby boomers, and, yeah, I guess that may be how it looked to them. But the parents of the 50s were people who grew up during the great Depression and lived through the most destructive and unspeakably evil war of all time. Take my word for it, they knew that people lied and cheated and stole and that very often even the good guys took no prisoners.
At any rate, there I was, standing before the microphone with the announcer’s arm wrapped around my shoulder. He was real chummy, this announcer. “Now, Paul. You have ten seconds to answer. Which of the following was the shortest war: the Civil War, the Spanish American War, or World War I?”
