Alien Thoughts

(This is a draft I found. For want of anything better I'm going to post it now, even though I have no idea what the events were that triggered my rant.)


Just wondering what an alien from outer space would have made of yesterday's news coverage and entertainment in the U.S.. Two women the focus of so much attention: Hillary Clinton and Britney Spears, and both of them found so very wanting. Would that alien have called home and told how ill-behaved the egg-bearing sex of humans is? Dominating the news like that! Out of control!

I'm imagining the alien sort of following my day, watching television, listening to the radio, surfing websites and reading comments threads on various political blogs, and I'm imagining what the alien might conclude from this condensed visit to our world. It would have to be somewhat humanoid, wouldn't it? Otherwise the chasm would be hard to cross. But suppose it came from a planet with some similarities, what would it think of this experience?

Now that I really get into this story, I can see the poor alien deciding that women are the criminal sex, the sex always in trouble, but also the sex which hogs all the media limelight. It might have wondered why the women who work in the media all look like elongated lamp-posts with a pair of balloons stuck roughly midway up when the men who work in the media appear to come from a wide distribution of shapes and sizes. Perhaps all the good women, the ones not covered in the outrage-stories, perhaps those women look like breasted lamp-posts? Yes, that seems logical.

No. That's a bad beginning. I'm not going to let an alien badmouth the ladies of the Fox News. Aliens should know better than that. But the alien could study some statistics on the numbers of famous women or of women hailed as geniuses or of women leading countries, or the statistics on income and occupations, showing the scarcity of women in the most delectable positions and their abundance among the poor. The alien could then look at the main religions, just to find out what the role of priestesses on this planet might be. Then a light bulb would appear in the alien's conversation bubble!

No. That turns too grim and boring too fast. Perhaps the alien could make friends with a young and eager conservative guy and ask him for answers to some of the questions the media coverage provoked? For instance, what is all the fuss about Hillary Clinton? And the young and eager conservative guy could explain, in great detail, that Hillary Clinton is pure evil. She kills people and stuff. And she used to be an egg-layer.

Then he could explain how women are the egg-laying part of the species, proven by research to be uninterested in most everything else but egg-laying (and being coy and salivating over rich, old, bald guys), and how it's very important that the number and spacing of the eggs must be controlled by the other part of the species, because otherwise we get Britney Spears and the end of this civilization on this planet. Or something like that? Then the alien and the conservative guy could go out for a few beers and to watch a stripper or two.

Or if the eager-guy conservative happens to be a fundie, he could tell the alien all about the bearded guy who also came from outer space and who decreed that the egg-layers must be modest, humble and docile. When they are not, the media rips them a new asshole.

Nah. That doesn't work, because what if the alien has no sex at all? Or even worse, what if the alien is a female alien? It might then conclude that our society is fairly contemptuous of its female half and at the same time almost oblivious of this contempt. Then the alien could just blow this place up.

Oh dear. I got all emotional there, didn't I?