Even as a free-peeing preschooler, knowing nothing of the concrete facts of the material world, I could assert with confidence that certain things were unquestionably true. Fire was hot, freezer pops were cold. Count Chocula was sweet, Wheaties were poison. Birds could fly, humans drove Pontiacs. The sun came up with Garagiola and went down with Cronkite. And Cronkite meant bedtime was imminent, a truth dependable every single evening.
I was usually in bed before dark at that age, but I was outside this particular night for some reason, standing with my friend, Ted Barrett, in my backyard, its well-coifed lawn and mossy trees consumed in inky blackness. We stared into the starfield sky, contemplating its infinite mysteries. And that’s when Ted told me aliens were going to come down from space and kill me.
Alarming though this was, I’m not sure I entirely accepted his premise. Because what he told me specifically was that the crew from Star Trek was going to come down and kill me. This was their kink, according to Ted, swooping down in the Enterprise in the dark of night to kidnap children, take them into space, and send them into final orbit. I was no Trekkie, but this seemed out of character for Captain Kirk’s crew, who may have been known to lip-lock multi-colored alien chippies from time to time, but whose ribald appetites did not appear to extend to infanticide. Plus I was pretty sure those guys weren’t real.
Still, Ted must have gotten this on good authority from somewhere, and he’d been 100% right about Bigfoot living in the woods behind my house, so I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that, at the very least, he’d been misinformed. After all, he was just passing along a safety advisory, like my father telling me to watch out for snakes and cars. This was important information to which dimwitted tykes like me should be duly hipped. Maybe he was just trying to help in a McGruff the Crime Dog sort of way. “Don’t talk to strangers, kids. Especially if they have tricorders.”*
But soon enough, it became apparent that the whole neighborhood was eager to distribute this brand of caution. Wendy Douglas explained how the Ouija Board made a kid go crazy and kill his parents with a screwdriver. Joey Hodges gave me a trigger warning about the subliminal cuts in The Amityville Horror that made a woman in Tucson gouge out her own eyes. That kid who ate the Pop Rocks and drank too much Pepsi? He was Marcus Phelps’ cousin.** Tamera Reese advised that Love Gun was one record you should never, ever play backward.
And lo the fibs did multiply. My childhood chums came through with every shopworn cultural myth polluting the zeitgeist in that coke-lined era, from Beaver's grisly fate in Vietnam to Rod Stewart’s stomach pumping to Frank Zappa’s onstage snacks. The gang got me up to speed on “the call’s coming from inside the house,” the hook hand on the car door handle, and instructions for how to get Bloody Mary to appear in a mirror. They were all full of shit, from pop to the classics. And all I had at my disposal was my verbal defensive move, “Nuh-uh!”
Actually, I rarely disputed these claims, trusting that my dimwitted contemporaries would kick the suburban legend jones on their own as we all grew older and wider. They would stop trying to convince me that Proctor and Gamble products carried the Mark of the Beast, and I would no longer be forced to nod and smile and change the subject. But life has taught me, with fiber-rich regularity, that people do not change; they worsen. And I’ve been nodding and smiling and changing the subject through more than five decades of Loch Ness/Chemtrail/Paul is Dead/Great Replacement/Vince Foster/Bermuda Triangle monologues from full-grown adults who still believe Pop Rocks killed a kid.
In my own full-grown adulthood, having survived the threat of the Star Trek crew, I studied factual reality in college and got a job nodding and smiling at the public library. Rational, verifiable, a world of peer-reviewed reliability. Here, manning the circulation desk for twenty years, I provided medical research and auto repair instruction to the grateful villagers of smalltown Carolina. And it was here I was toiling that fateful day in 2001 that we all remember with deep remorse and no small measure of trauma.
Planes exploding in New York, towers collapsing, bodies falling, the Pentagon attacked. No urban legend this time – real, absolute, world-shattering horror. We’ll need to get prepared, I thought. People are going to depend on their library for hard information about global terrorism, Middle East politics, and airport security.
And as expected, the locals rolled in, petitioning our credentialed investigative skills to secure resource materials about … Nostradamus. “Satan’s face is clearly visible in the towers’ smoke,” they demanded. “The prophecies about the number 11 are coming true!” Without fail, they all wanted further validation for some tall-tale, conspiratorial mysticism they’d heard about from their sister-in-law’s cousin’s boyfriend. They might have sought practical information about which kind of duct tape protected against anthrax, but the folks at Home Depot were fielding that one.
Clearly, they had worsened. The national crisis, with its color-coded terror warnings and burgeoning “inside job” speculations, had dropkicked Tabloid America completely over the edge. And we soon found we’d matured from Faces of Death to FEMA camps, from Jersey Devils to George Soros. The country that put a man on the moon no longer believed a man had been on the moon. All was lost. Beaver had died in Vietnam for nothing.
At least I’d like to conclude it’s the stress that drives the neurotics into the waiting arms of Hal Lindsey. I’d like to think they’d shake the stupor if only it were carefully explained to them that CBD oil won’t cure stomach cancer or that Hunter’s laptop doesn’t contain secret evidence of the Covid hoax. I want to believe they’re just misinformed. But I think people are just dumber than discount pudding, and they will always choose witchcraft over wisdom. Scientific calculation, historical precedent, and evidential inquiry don’t stand a chance against a Dollar Tree copy of Is Elvis Alive? Because the business of ballyhoo, especially for the Americans who excel in slinging it, will always provide proof of Obamagate, Pizzagate, Sharpiegate, and Bill Gatesgate to a public easily bored by budget legislation and tax reform policy. Walter Cronkite has gone to bed.
My brother and I were watching TV one day, in the waning days of that Cronkite Dynasty, around 1980. We were enjoying some of that newfangled cable television, remarking on how much trashier and dumbed down the new cable channels were compared to the slicker, Madison Avenue productions of the major networks. And at one point, we spied a particularly low-grade TBS commercial for a certain kind of hat (available for only $12.95 with a bonus gift included if you call now). Utilizing the amazing power of the sun itself, this plastic visor had a solar panel built into the rim, which powered a small, motorized fan, blowing a cool breeze into the clearly satisfied face of the wearer.
Cue the montage, showing cute, white couples sporting their sensational, face-cooling headgear while camping, relaxing on the beach, manicuring the lawn, dining on the patio, or even playing tennis. And I noted that, with this last example, rather than being filmed on location, the racket-swinging couple had been videotaped against a green screen with a still photo of a tennis court badly superimposed in the background. This had been fobbed off in an aggressively shoddy manner - I’d seen better special effects on Land of the Lost.
I voiced my indignation. “How hard would it have been to go shoot that scene on an actual tennis court? They shot on a real beach. They shot on a real ski slope. Why cheap out on the tennis shot and make it look so obviously fake? No one could possibly believe that’s a real tennis court!” My brother responded with words that chill me to this very day.
“These guys know more about how to appeal to their audience than you do.”
Years later, my brother told me he’d seen proof that real ghosts existed on the SyFy Channel.
-A.H.
* This remains solid advice.
** The claim made most often was that the prominent victim of the Pop Rock poisoning was the child actor who played “Mikey” in a popular series of Life cereal commercials. Why this particular kid, whose name was unknown and who had no dialog in the ads, became the focus of this urban legend is one of those great mysteries of meme culture, generally untraceable in a pre-internet era. Perhaps he just looked like a kid dumb enough to consume an unreasonable amount of candy and soda.
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)
It is a miracle that humanity ever emerged from the dark ages. It is also a fact that the dark ages were firmly entrenched for 1,000 years, and died hard....