Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re a little slow off the block this weekend because we had to go to an out-of-town memorial service for a friend’s dad yesterday. I’m writing this to you on Sunday, guilty that I missed a deadline for you. I hope I didn’t mess up your Sunday morning, but it was more important for me to drive to North Jesus to hug my friend’s neck. I wish I had gotten it together to get this out early Sunday morning, because this week we’re talking about Hell. Also, Jack Hughes has returned to his one and true religion, Dan Quayle, which could be a different kind of Hell, I suppose.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (mesmerize yourself), read (this great review of Forget the Alamo in the Wall Street Journal), watch (Solos on Amazon Prime), and listen to (Marigold, the new EP from Stella and the Very Messed).
And speaking of which, this is your last chance to pre-order Forget the Alamo. (Starting Tuesday, you’ll just be ordering the book.) You know what I’m really looking forward to? Flying to Atlanta to see family next weekend and seeing the book in airport bookstores.
But first, do you know what I loved about Man of Steel?
I was raised on a steady diet of Superman as a patriotic ideal from the time I could hold a comic book in my hands. I would go over to Carl Hoffman’s house when he came home from school and watch Superman reruns in black and white. Later, I saw Christopher Reeve crack wise as the Man of Steel in Superman the Movie. In college, I promised myself I’d get a tattoo when my boat won its first race, which is why have the iconic Superman shield on my left shoulder. “Truth, justice, and the American Way” is as holy a trinity as I’ve ever believed in.
I thought I understood Superman until I saw Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s 2013 reboot. The second half of the movie is straight trash. It ruined the movie, but the first half was revelatory because it uncovered a truth I had been blind to. The world eventually embraced Superman, of course, as a benevolent protector, but not all at once. At first we would be afraid, because at first we would see and not understand.
“Look! Up in the sky!”
“It’s a bird!”
“It’s a plane!”
At first, Superman would appear to us, literally, as an unidentified flying object, and we would be afraid and freak the hell out. Of course that is what would happen. And Superman would eventually earn our trust when we realized he had god-like power that he held in abeyance, exerting it only for our protection. He would live secretly among us in purposeful modesty, the model of humility and restraint, to let us have our humanity. But that’s only after the terror receded. Because Superman is an alien who can kill us all if he wanted to, and at first all we would know is that he could, and we would express our fear in panic and anger. And for the last eight-plus years, I have believed that to be true.
Then the government told us that UFOs exist, and we all yawned. This week, my pal Alex Horton and Missy Ryan at the Washington Post got hold of a government report that said they can’t say for sure what they are, but there are definite reports of unidentified flying objects with no earthly origin flitting about our skies in “apparent defiance of known laws of flight and gravity.”
Way down in the 13th paragraph was this: “One senior defense official … said one possible explanation is that the aircraft belong to adversarial nations harnessing unknown technology.” This is journalism speak for “yeah, there’s some pro-forma box-checking by reactionaries, but this isn’t a big deal.”
Here is what we know: The government cannot identify things that are moving in our airspace. Because this was a government report, they use words no one else does and call them unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, but what we are failing to fully grasp is that UFOs exist and people have seen them here. The Washington Post hid the story behind equivocation (“Report does not confirm, or rule out, UFOs in unexplained aerial events”), but if we can’t identify the flying objects, it stands to reason that they are unidentified flying objects.
UFOs exist.
And for the most part, no one cares.
Sonia and I just walked to get bagels and talked about a lot of things: the midterms, Trump, bagels, her trip to DC, what we’re going to do in Atlanta, and what to get on our bagels. UFOs only came up in the context of what I’m writing about, and we focused exclusively on why no one seems to care. Sonia, who at one point applied to go live on Mars, has not once brought up the confirmed existence of UFOs in conversation. We did not jump up and down holding hands with excitement that UFOs—and I still feel a fissure of crazy-making self-doubt in typing this word—exist.
Did I miss the meeting where we all agreed not to get excited about UFOs? Catch me up. We’re acting cool, right? This is a plan someone came up with so we don’t act like fanboys at Comic-Con? Y’all, my wife got more excited meeting Patrick Stewart (“Sir Patrick Stewart to you!” she corrects me in my head) than she has that—here we go again—UFOs exist.
Here is a list of things that, judging by my Twitter feed, we care about more than UFOs:
Rain.
Joe Manchin.
Whether or not Donald Trump wore his pants backwards at a speech.
Allen West, whose prominence as a political leader at least partially explains why we have not had First Contact. I’d keep my distance, too.
Naomi Osaka and whether sports press conferences are worth a damn. In fact, can you imagine the press conference at First Contact? “Excuse me, Mr. Alien, why did you wait until after the Trump presidency to make contact?”
In fact, look at the screen grab of the front page from the day when the existence of UFOs was confirmed. (I’m using “front page” as the name of the home page of a news website and not the paper broadsheet.) Sure, the story is there, but it has a smaller headline than a story about the violent end to a generation-long war we won, and then lost. Other headlines trumped the inability of our leaders to avoid anti-social behavior on social networks, and to repair roads and bridges, to tell the truth about a pandemic. Other headlines touched on racism, threats to democracy, and our dying planet.
Think of the reader of this front page. The existence of UFOs is literally surrounded with existential threats of our own making—racism, climate change, illiberalism—and our democracy’s failure to achieve basic functions of filling potholes and keeping people alive. These stories are sometimes, by measure of headline fonts, given greater weight than UFOs existing. It’s hard to admire the bird in the sky when you’ve filled the park with trash.
Almost two years ago I wrote about Carlton Pearson, whom you may have heard about on This American Life or whose story you might have seen on Netflix. He used to be a Pentecostal preacher and protege of Oral Roberts who fell from grace when he had an insight: Hell is a human creation.
“I do believe in hell as a state of being or consciousness, and I believe that people can dwell in hell and that many do, right now, today, on this earth before rather than after death,” he has said.
War, famine, wild beasts, and plague? Who needs the Four Horsemen when we create our own apocalypses every day on earth? (Though, to be fair, wild beasts no longer rank with war, famine, and plague. They need to recast that apocalypse.) We create this hell on earth ourselves, knowing what we are doing. This is a bit like the criticism that liberals offer nothing to voters but criticism of conservatives, as if getting rid of racism, stopping war, feeding the hungry, and saving the planet from self-immolation isn’t vision enough.
It’s not hard to understand why no aliens are asking to see our leaders. We are all the Donald Glover meme, carrying pizza into the library, horrified at the fire. These humans were given a whole planet, and this is what they’re doing instead of working together?
At first, I thought we were not getting excited about UFOs even to the extent of being afraid of them because we were distracting ourselves with trivialities such as whether tennis players should be obligated to speak to reporters. But we are the ones putting our attention there in the first place. Given more or less equal weight on a front page, we focus on the hell of our own making because that is where we are putting our energy. And busying ourselves so, we do not seek the divine, so when a higher power shows up, we regard it as the distraction and go back to grooming the horses of the apocalypse.
This is where we get to answer the big question, but the question isn’t why we’re not freaking out about the confirmed existence of UFOs but whether we are ready for when they eventually land. Company’s coming. Time to clean the place up, put on our clean underwear, and at least act like a normal family.
Quayle’s Hunting Season
by Jack Hughes
Find a life partner who finds you as much an enduring source of fascination as Jack Hughes does Dan Quayle, who is charting a new path forward for the Republican Party. The question is whether anyone is paying attention, other than Jack, of course.
How we’re getting through this
Quitting jobs
Mesmerizing myself
Calculating my D.B.B.
Conducting stay interviews
Playing digital jigsaw puzzles
Graduating even when the power goes out
What I’m reading
Jennifer Barger: “Remember the Alamo? A battle brews in Texas over history versus lore” - Nat Geo gets the Tomlinson treatment.
“The Alamo is boring, frankly,” says Austin writer Chris Tomlinson, coauthor of the new book, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. “The average visitor spends less than 15 minutes there; patrons across the way at Ripley’s or the Tomb Rider 3D ride stick around for 45 minutes, and they buy a hot dog! The Alamo is this fascinating place to think about justice, liberty, white supremacy, and other issues, but it isn’t being presented that way.”
Gillian Brockell: “Tulsa isn’t the only race massacre you were never taught in school. Here are others.” - We got lucky in 2020.
This new awareness has prompted calls from many, including musician and activist Common, to learn more about these incidents. On Monday he posted to social media a map of part of the United States with locations and dates of other massacres against Black people. “Pick a massacre and research it!” it read.
Maggie Galehouse: “‘Forget the Alamo’? Old stories die hard, but authors do their best to bust the myth.” - Thoughtful review
“Forget the Alamo,” by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford, debunks what the authors call the Heroic Anglo Narrative that has co-opted this moment in Texas history for nearly two centuries. In muscular prose that’s heavy on deadpan understatement (“Santa Anna was pissed”), the book aims to separate the truths from the tall tales and tell the real story for a more discerning and diverse 21st-century audience.
Andrew R. Graybill: “‘Forget the Alamo’ Review: Legends of the Fall” - The Journal gives Forget the Alamo a helluva review.
According to the writers Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford—all Texans—I was taught what they dub the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” of the Lone Star State. In “Forget the Alamo,” their engrossing new book about the history and memory of the Texas Revolution and especially its pivotal act, the 13-day siege of the Misión San Antonio de Valero, the authors seek to ascertain how, in the time since it fell on March 6, 1836, the Alamo has become “the state’s secular Western Wall, its secular Mecca.”
Stuart Miller: “When will America finally dismantle its racist myths? Two powerful new books try” - In which the other Times makes a pair of Forget the Alamo with Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed.
Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford have also resurrected a long-suppressed slavery saga in “Forget the Alamo.” Home to one of America’s most famous battles, the Alamo is sacred ground for white Texans and central to the Lone Star State’s grandiose origin story — another “Lost Cause.” As a founding myth that belongs to the whole country, it is long overdue for reassessment. “It’s one thing to remove a statue of Jefferson Davis, but this is a national monument on the level of Gettysburg,” Burrough says.
What I’m watching
Solos, a techno-dystopian episodic series examining isolation, is not for binging, but it does have some things to say about the period we just left, when we were isolated and living through history.
What I’m listening to
Juana Molina is an Argentinian television actor who, more than two decades ago, put out an unbelievably cool electronic music album in the analog era. I want to go to a dinner party where the host plays this music in the background.
Yola, a British Americana singer, put out a big album a couple or so years ago that snuck by me.
Stella Maxwell, the lead singer for Stella and the Very Messed, is the coolest person in the world. She used be a pro roller derby player in her spare time from running an after-school gang called the Spilled Milk Social Club. Her latest EP, Marigold, has a song on it that’ll break your heart called “The Feeling.”
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Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself comes out June 8 from Penguin Random House. There is no better way to support this book than to pre-order a copy. You’re going to love reading what really happened at the Alamo, why the heroic myth was created, and the real story behind the headlines about how we’re all still fighting about it today.
