Travis McGee on the automated imagination

It’s been a slow month on the blog for a variety of reasons including but not limited to illness, work, and car trouble, but fortunately not a slow month for reading. Last week I read a book I’d recently had recommended to me, The Long Lavender Look, the twelfth in John D MacDonald’s long-running Travis McGee series, which began with The Deep Blue Good-by in 1964. I greatly enjoyed it, not least because it was so quotable, with “salvage expert” McGee providing sharp observations on everything from criminal character, law enforcement, the myth of the hooker with the heart of gold, and raccoons.

This passage about a third of the way through, in which McGee muses as he follows a woman home through the neighborhoods of a small rural Florida town, hit especially hard:

“We sped through old residential areas where the people sat in their dimly lighted rooms, watching all the frantic imitations of festivity on the small home screens, watching the hosts and the hostesses who were old, dear, and familiar friends. Long ago their parents had old familiar friends named Alexander Botts and Scattergood Baines and Tugboat Annie. But reading was a lot harder. You had to make up the pictures in your head. Easier to sit and watch the pictures somebody else planned. And it had a comforting sameness, using up that portion of your head which would start fretting and worrying if it wasn’t kept busy.”

As I said, sharply observed, especially that bit about the narcotic effect of electronic entertainment. And I’ve recently had cause to consider the way older popular forms are suffering at the hands of newer, easier, flashier, but less creative forms.

After the above passage McGee, his mind wandering into parody, imagines Jim Phelps of the original “Mission: Impossible”—of “This message with self-destruct in five seconds” fame—finally rejecting one of his impossible missions, an act that causes the TVs all over the country to wink out forever:

And the screens go dark, from the oil-bound coasts of Maine to the oily shores of Southern California. Chief Ironsides retires to a chicken farm. Marshall Dillon shoots himself in the leg, trying to outdraw the hard case from Tombstone. The hatchet bounces back off the tree and cuts down tall Dan’l Boone. The American living room becomes silent. The people look at each other, puzzled, coming out of the sweet, long, hazy years of automated imagination.

Where’d all the heroes go, Andy?

Maybe, honey, they went where all the others went, a long time ago. Way off someplace. Tarzan and Sir Galahad and Robin Hood. Ben Casey and Cap’n Ahab and The Shadow and Peter Rabbit.

Went off and joined them.

But what are we going to do, Andy? What are we going to do?

Maybe… talk some. Think about things.

Talk about what? Think about what? I’m scared, Andy.

But there’s no problem, really, because after the screens go dark and silent, all the tapes of the watchers self-destruct in five seconds.

This isn’t just a funny aside. The woman McGee is following, and with whom he’ll develop a relationship in the course of his investigations, has a mind shaped entirely by screen stories. She behaves as if slipping in and out of pre-scripted scenarios she’s seen enacted a thousand times—“playing games,” McGee calls it—and can’t approach much of life with genuine seriousness. There’s very little of her underneath all the clichés. McGee eventually gets to see some of it, but not always in scenarios with TV-friendly happy endings.

The Long Lavender Look, I should have mentioned, was published in 1970. One wonders what McGee would make of the smartphone era and its even more fully “automated imagination.”

I was able to pick up four more Travis McGee novels at our local used bookstore over the weekend. Looking forward to those, and to more from their wry, hard-bitten, observant narrator. But first, I’m about halfway through an excellent Eric Ambler slow-burn and have the last of Len Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy lined up for Thanksgiving. Fall and winter look to be shaping up nicely. I’m certainly eager for the break.

Twisters

PhDs and Hillbillies—Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones unite to chase storms in Twisters

It’s been a slow year for movies in the Poss household, with Dune: Part Two and The Wild Robot being two of only three movies we’ve gotten really excited about. Over the weekend my wife and I finally got a chance to see the third, Twisters, after having to cancel plans to see it several times over the summer. We weren’t disappointed.

Twisters is old enough news now that I won’t recap the plot in any detail. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a former meteorology PhD student who got several friends killed in an experiment. When Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor, approaches her about a new opportunity to learn more about tornadoes using new portable military radar, she agrees to a brief return to the field to look things over. With Javi and his corporately-sponsored team in Oklahoma, Kate meets Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell), a cocky amateur with a wildly popular YouTube channel. Then a monster storm arrives.

As a movie, Twisters is rock-solid old-fashioned entertainment, with good acting and a well-structured, suspenseful script that also makes room for much more realistic and nuanced characters than the original. Given the format in which we finally saw Twisters—projected on an inflatable outdoor screen with a portable sound system—I can’t fairly comment on a lot of the technical aspects of the movie. But despite the setting in which we saw it the movie looked and sounded great. I learned afterward that it was shot on 35mm film, which is a credit to the filmmakers. I hope to watch it again soon.

But while Twisters’ story and the technical aspects were good, they are not what made me want to write about it.

When the movie came out, our political schoolmarms were affronted that the movie did not lecture its audience on climate change. (The byline on that Salon piece sounded familiar, and, sure enough, that’s the same guy who wanted 1917 to sit the audience down for a talk on nationalism.) Again, to the filmmakers’ credit, the director explicitly stated in interviews that movies aren’t for “preaching”: “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

Hear hear. And yet, while Twisters does not “put forward a message” in the sense of “preaching,” like all well-crafted stories it does have something to say. And like all well-crafted stories, it does so not through speeches but through its characters.

This begins when Kate, tagging along with Javi’s well-funded storm-chasers, first meets the crowdfunded livestreaming Tyler. The two sides are explicitly set in opposition as “the PhDs” on Kate and Javi’s side and “hillbillies” on Tyler’s. Javi’s company receives funding in exchange for data, and Tyler receives YouTube money and adulation from his viewers in exchange for risking his life to chase storms. It’s a familiar American dynamic in microcosm—elites vs populists.

But while Twisters introduces these two sides in opposition, it doesn’t hold them there. Both sides have hidden depths. Beneath their slick equipment and university backgrounds, Kate and Javi genuinely care about using their research to help people, and beneath his media-hungry machismo, Tyler has actual scientific knowledge and wants to help, too. Neither is blameless—one takes money from a shady real estate mogul, the nearest thing the movie has to a villain, and the other hawks t-shirts. Despite all this, they are more alike than different, and both want to help people.

This last point is important, because the key moment in bringing Kate and Tyler together, working toward a common goal, is a small town rodeo, an event that opens with the national anthem and is presented completely unironically. There is no wink or condescension toward the people at the rodeo, and, significantly, it is here that Tyler first opens up to Kate and the two begin working together. Twisters is the first movie I can remember in a long time that unequivocally presents small-town American life as good and worth preserving, and the suspense of the film’s final act comes not only from whether Kate’s experiment will finally succeed, but whether Kate and Tyler can save a town in the path of a once-in-a-generation tornado. Why? Because the people there are worth saving, period, regardless of their political affiliation or whom they vote for.

Twisters does not preach, no, but it presents a vision of an America where the elites and the people, the PhDs and the hillbillies, work better together. That demands a common goal, and on one side realizing that the people are more than data or raw material, and on the other realizing that the elites are people, too, and being willing to work alongside them toward a common goal.

This may not be a life-changing movie or high art, but Twisters is well-crafted and both entertains and uplifts. That’s rare enough in this day and age, but Twisters also tells a story of what can united Americans, which is worth contemplating during an election year—or any year.

Further notes on aliens and the gothic

A few weeks ago when I mulled over the taxonomy of UFO believers as laid out in a recent New Atlantis essay, I mentioned my pet theory that aliens had worked their way into a cranny in the cultural imagination formerly occupied by the gothic. I wrote:

Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

(I first propounded this theory a few months ago when I volunteered, very early one morning, to help my wife prepare bottles and medicine for the twins. She had not had her coffee yet and is grateful for your readership.)

I’m speaking very generally, of course, but a few of the specific, superficial things that suggest a parallel between the stories emerging from the gothic and the UFO phenomenon include:

• Remote, lonely locations

• Nighttime—ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and greys all apparently being nocturnal

• Individuals or, perhaps, a small, intimate group being targeted

• A sense that the otherworldly is fixated on or preying upon specific people

• A psychological arc that grows from uneasiness to dread and often ends in paralyzing terror

• Inexplicable phenomena and occult powers (occult in the sense of hidden or unknown)

• Relatedly, unpredictable comings and goings

• Ambiguous and minimal physical evidence

I could probably come up with a longer list, but these immediately suggest themselves. Again, all of the above are superficial general parallels and there are plenty of exceptions—about which more below—but if you were to construct either a gothic or alien story, it would probably have most or all of those traits. But there are deeper and more important qualities that both have in common:

• Their intrusive quality, the way the uncanny or extraterrestrial is perceived as breaking in upon normal life from somewhere else

• Their subsequent disruptive effect upon the normal

• The dense secrecy surrounding them

This gets us really close to the semi-religious dimensions of both, the mysterious, scary, and disruptive being neighbors to awe.

To summarize, the alien story was able to supplant the gothic because both scratch the same itch: otherworldly, slightly or overtly scary, and with religious overtones.

Two caveats:

• UFO stories sometimes originate in heavily populated areas, the two most famous examples probably being Phoenix and Mexico City.

• UFOs don’t always appear at night. In fact, some of the most perplexing unexplained incidents occurred in broad daylight.

I think the rest of my superficial observations hold true, though: the widely-reported “Phoenix lights” were seen at night and Lonnie Zamora and Kenneth Arnold, to pick two daytime incidents, were individuals in out-of-the-way places. All three of the deeper similarities remain. I’d even say that the superficial things—individuals alone in remote places at night—are probably best explained as setting the necessary mood for the intrusion of the mysterious.

Note that I’m treating all of the UFO stuff as fictional, just like the gothic. Remember that I’m mostly a “disinformation non-enjoyer,” though I do enjoy the aesthetic, atmospheric side of all of it. I think the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are sufficiently explained by terrestrial factors or simple fraud, though some—with unimpeachably honest people seeing something inexplicable, like Zamora and the others in the video linked above—remain tantalizingly unexplained.

I’m also interested in what UFOs say about culture, symptomatically. Why do these stories appeal? I think my “scratching the same itch” theory explains some of it, and yet this is where the most significant difference between the gothic and UFOs comes in:

• The gothic is historically-oriented. When intrusion and disruption occurs, it is the forgotten past intruding on the present. Hence the roles of old houses, family secrets, and medieval monsters.

• The UFO phenomenon is future-oriented. The intrusion and disruption are those of the future breaking into a less advanced past—our present. Hence the roles of laboratories and military facilities, government secrets, and monsters from outer space.

The shift from a delight in the spooky rooted in the past to a delight in the spooky giving us hints about the future is a significant one, and not easily summarized here. Food for thought.

The virtues of Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man and Doc Ock (Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina) battle atop a New York City el train in Spider-Man 2

Last week I spent a day at home with a sick kid, my eldest son. He’s seven, and enamored of Spider-Man, so I thought a sick day on the couch warranted finally showing him the ultimate in Spider-Man movies, as far as I’m concerned: Spider-Man 2, which is now twenty years old. My son loved it, and took in every minute with a wide-eyed openness to enjoyment that I long to rediscover for myself. What I did rediscover, though, was how good this movie is.

I’d always enjoyed it and remembered it fondly, but after letting more than a decade pass without watching any more than the subway train chase that leads into the final act, I was stunned.

First, on a technical level, it holds up. Some of the special effects are better than others, but if CGI has improved since then it hasn’t improved much. If anything, the CGI in Spider-Man 2, still being somewhat experimental in 2004, is better integrated. And having been shot on 35mm film by a great cinematographer, the movie looks wonderful—even on the old DVD my son and I watched, the warmth of the color palette in scenes with Aunt May or Mary Jane and the palpable coolness of nighttime scenes look wonderfully filmic. None of the recent Marvel movies, which all have the dull, lusterless clarity of digital cinematography, can compare.

I could praise other aspects as well: the acting (from all but James Franco, anyway), or the perfectly balanced tone, or the meticulously structured script, or the obvious fun Sam Raimi is having throughout with snap-zooms and histrionic open-mouthed screams from bystanders.

But what stuck out most to me was the richness of its themes. On top of everything else, this is a legitimately moving drama. The film opens with Peter Parker struggling to fulfil his obligations in every aspect of his life except his role as a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and his frustration grows as he loses the respect of an admired teacher, loses his job, loses an old friend, and seems set to lose Mary Jane forever. He briefly gives up his crime-fighting and, though gaining superficial success in the rest of his life, he can neither win Mary Jane back nor escape the feeling that he is not following his calling.

Spider-Man 2 dares to suggest that vocation and duty are more important than following dreams, and that doing the right thing might mean abandoning a cherished hope.

This underlies two points of grace in the story. First, when trying to earn a living and succeed at school and provide for Aunt May and win Mary Jane back on his own strength he fails, but by embracing his duty as Spider-Man he finds fulfilment and love. As much as we might desire autonomy and individual success and wish to escape duty, it is duty that most powerfully connects us to other people and gives everything else in life meaning. To paraphrase CS Lewis, when Peter aims at happiness he doesn’t get it, but when he aims at duty he gets happiness thrown in.

Second—and this is only a half-formed observation—I was struck that the turning point in the film comes not during an action scene, but in a quiet dining room conversation in which Peter tells Aunt May the truth about the night Uncle Ben was killed. Peter does so despite the discomfort of facing his lies and the petty desire for revenge that contributed to Uncle Ben’s death, and despite the risk of losing Aunt May. She forgives Peter, but not because he deserved it. This feels awfully close to the sacrament of confession. Certainly Peter’s life is more characterized by grace afterward than it was before.

After watching Spider-Man 2 I went to the kitchen to make lunch for myself and my son and idly looked up the late Roger Ebert’s review. Four stars, introduced with this wonderful paragraph:

Now this is what a superhero movie should be. “Spider-Man 2” believes in its story in the same way serious comic readers believe, when the adventures on the page express their own dreams and wishes. It’s not camp and it’s not nostalgia, it’s not wall-to-wall special effects and it’s not pickled in angst. It’s simply and poignantly a realization that being Spider-Man is a burden that Peter Parker is not entirely willing to bear.

It’s striking that, this early in the superhero movie glut, a year before Batman Begins and four years before Iron Man, Ebert accurately described the overwhelming majority of superhero movies to come, whether the CGI vomit of the later MCU or the mordant navel-gazing of Zack Snyder, and exactly what it is that set Spider-Man 2 apart. Better artistry, certainly, but serious and sincerely explored themes of duty and love as well.

It seems trite to point out, but it’s impossible to imagine such a movie being made today.

Saving the world from the reading nook

Writing at Front Porch Republic in response to several recent news stories—like this one—that suggest our civilizational decline is further along than even the pessimists thought, Nadya Williams argues that saving and restoring civilization begins at home:

In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

The right domestic tone is key. So is opportunity. Williams continues:

When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.

This combination—a mood at home that encourages reading and abundant opportunity to do so—reminded me of the early passages of Lewis’s spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy. Here he describes the home his family moved into when he was seven:

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Lewis’ father, you see, had the same bad habit I do: he “bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.” Feel free to consult my wife for more information on me, but for the young Lewis this was the happy result:

There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The results speak for themselves.

But of course opportunities have to be seized, and the decline of reading, at least among the American populace, is not for lack of reading material. Books are plentiful and cheap. Where a private library used to be a ruinously expensive luxury, the most precious resource of a monastery or the hobby of an aristocrat, Williams argues that “in this day and age, with periodic public library sales and book giveaways, one doesn’t have to be rich to accumulate an impressive home library.”

But that word accumulate my put off the more Marie Kondo-ish among us. Williams suggests we embrace the stacks:

[S]peaking of luxuries, let’s forget aesthetics at least to some extent. Does my home feature many cheap mismatched bookcases? Yes, it does. Do we have too many books for our little space? Most definitely. Are there too many books piled up on every desk, side table, coffee table, and even hidden under the covers in the five-year-old’s bed? Yes. Is everyone in this home living with the joy of books as their primary companions each day? Yes, and that is the point.

Our home library is several thousand volumes, now. I stopped counting at over 3,000 a long time ago. We have a stuffed home office lined with the IKEA Billy bookcases I recently described, three tall bookcases in the master bedroom and large bookcases in our kids’ rooms, shelves on the landing, baskets of kids’ books in the living room, and you can always find stacks here and there that Sarah valiantly keeps under control. Clutter is the danger, but we’re creating opportunity.

Lewis’s memories of tone and opportunity resonate with me. In the little house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, my parents had one big white wooden bookcase in the foyer by the front door. It had a 1970s-era set of World Book, a big hardback book on the top shelf mysteriously emblazoned Josephus, and scads and scads of kids’ books: Value Tales, Childcraft, Berenstain Bears, Golden Books, etc. We were free to read any of it, any time. I certainly did.

As a high schooler with a taste for literature, I discovered that classics series were helpful. I started as cheaply as I could with Dover Thrift Editions, which at that time were mostly one or two dollars apiece. You got what you paid for, to an extent (when I took a bunch of these to college a friend started calling them “Dover Homeless Editions”), but they gave this hillbilly kid with little pocket change easy access to lots of great old books for very little money. From there, Signet Classics, mass market paperbacks that ranged from $5-$8 when I was in college, and finally the larger and marginally more expensive but better quality Penguin Classics beckoned. I have hundreds of the latter.

The rest of our library has grown up around these like an artificial reef. And I’m glad to say that our reef is now teeming with little fish, busily reading. It is sweet to see them nestled down somewhere with a book, even when they should be doing something like sleeping. For once, I am not so pessimistic about the future.

Read all of Williams’s essay here and be encouraged—and motivated. Relatedly, read this piece on moving a home library from my podcasting friend Michial Farmer, which posted at Front Porch Republic just a day or two after Williams’s. Cf. his thoughts on collecting and loving cheap paperbacks versus cultivating a perfectly matched room full of leatherbound hardbacks. And you can read more about Lewis’s bookish childhood here.

Wanting to believe

Back before the hurricane, Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack quoted a recent essay by Clare Coffey in the The New Atlantis, “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” It’s an excellent essay, making the case that the rinse-repeat pattern of UFO revelations—purported new evidence, new whistleblowers, new openness on the part of the government and media, and new excitement followed by… nothing much—indicates a turn toward “something much older and weirder” in the way the public thinks of this phenomenon.

That Coffey also brings in two works on our changing views of the cosmos over time, CS Lewis’s Discarded Image and his close friend Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, as well as the work of the late Michael Heiser, an expert ancient Semiticist with a sideline in “anything old and weird,” only makes it that much better. It’s well worth your time.

Two specific aspects of Coffey’s essay gave me a lot to think about. First, her informal taxonomy of attitudes toward UFOs etc. If mentioning Lewis and Barfield is bait, giving my wannabe Aristotelian mind a set of categories to sort things into is setting the hook. Coffey gives us three basic groups:

• Disinformation non-enjoyers—aggressive skeptics who “do not merely disbelieve in aliens; they see public discussion of UFOs as an embarrassing social scourge foisted by hucksters on an ever-gullible populace.”

And among believers:

• Explorers—adherents of the more scientifically- and technologically-oriented and, until recently, culturally predominant vision of UFOs as evidence of intelligent life “over there,” elsewhere in the same universe we inhabit and bound by the same laws. Hence the emphasis on technology.

• Esotericists—the burgeoning newer view, a vision of UFOs as evidence of deeper hidden truths “in here,” which naturally lends itself to theory-of-everything mix-and-match worldviews in which everything is evidence of everything else though, seemingly paradoxically, they “are both profoundly open and restlessly systematizing.”

Both types of believer have specific fundamental assumptions and hopes. Both also have shadow forms or “negating modes”:

• Negating explorers believe the evidence but interpret it as part of some kind of purely terrestrial psyop.

• Negating esotericists are the folks who interpret aliens as demons in disguise.

As Coffey herself points out, these are loose categories with fuzzy boundaries and significant overlap. I’ll add that, even if the esotericists in the form of the Graham Hancock and Missing 411 and Joe Rogan types are gaining the upper hand, they are not new. Charles Portis, a sharp-eyed observer of the UFO scene circa 1975, just after von Däniken made the ancient astronauts thesis popular, portrays the type realistically in Gringos, as I’ve noted here before.

To lay my cards on the table, especially since I’ve written about this stuff several times and don’t want to be misunderstood, I’m probably about 15% negating explorer and 85% solid disinformation non-enjoyer. I’m simply never impressed with the purported evidence, its interpretation, and the fact that new whistleblowers inevitably turn out to be frauds. Not that I’m a killjoy. My attitude is basically that of Jimmy Burns in Gringos, one of amused observation and even enjoyment without a bit of belief: “[T]he flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”

Which brings me to what I think is the one weakness of this taxonomy: its inability to account for what I’ll call aestheticists. These are people for whom the actual existence of UFOs is immaterial; their interest is purely in the atmosphere, the vibe of UFOs and aliens.

My recently developed pet theory is that UFOs and UFO lore have, for modern people, filled the hole left by the gothic. Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

I suspect a significant subset of interest is based on this appeal. Add this as a third-dimensional Z-axis to the X and Y axes of the explorers and esotericists and I might be able to plot myself more accurately. I’ve always gotten a similar kind of thrill from both Baskerville Hall at night and the atmospheric dramatizations of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

That’s a quibble, but I think a potentially fruitful one since Coffey does not discount the human need for the uncanny. (Her section on the flaws in the argument that UFO obsession is a substitute religion, something I’ve suggested here myself, is especially good and probably mostly right. The religious impulse is real but better fulfilled elsewhere, though I still think that the religious overtones of much UFO lore is not accidental.)

The other thing that I found particularly thought-provoking is, in a reconsideration of the “roundelay discourse” on UFOs, the endless cycles of approach to new knowledge that never actually reveal anything, Coffey’s argument that the “meta-discourse” of the phenomenon—talking about what the enthusiasm about UFOs and aliens means in and of itself—is “the only productive line of inquiry.” She goes through five possible explanations and repercussions based on which of the groups in her taxonomy turns out to be right. I won’t recap it here in the interests of space, but it’s excellent—another good reason to read the essay.

And it leads into Coffey’s concluding thoughts on the reason the UFO phenomenon is impossible to “culturally metabolize”—cosmology or worldview. Reductivist, mechanistic materialism has ingrained itself so deeply in our culture that it shows up in our unthinking turns of phrase, even among the religious:

The biggest development seems the elevation of chemical and electrical mechanisms within the machine universe: we love to talk about love as “a chemical reaction,” and our Twitter compulsions as “dopamine hits,” as if we were actually clearing obfuscation by speaking in these terms. We love to discuss thinking as “our synapses firing” and our world as a tiny rock hurtling along its orbit through space.

UFOs, at least as interpreted by esotericists, flout this conception of the world, and the esotericists know this. “[T]hey are tired of the machine universe,” Coffey writes. “They want out.”

I do not think, as Coffey seems to suggest, that the disinformation non-enjoyers feel threatened or that they need to defend a materialist, mechanistic universe. Far from seeing earnest UFO obsession as a threat, I’m usually simply grieved by it, and Lord knows I am no materialist. But this essay is an excellent examination of much of what is going on in popular enthusiasm for UFOs and I recommend it heartily.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

After a slight delay, I’m pleased to introduce a new project that may or may not become an annual event on the blog. I’m calling it Chestertober, a dedication of the month of Halloween to the work of GK Chesterton, the prophet of the kind of madcap but meaningful topsy-turvydom that Halloween at its best embodies. For this inaugural Chestertober I wanted to look at some of Chesterton’s novels, and I figured I would start with Chesterton’s first: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, published in 1904.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill begins in 1984. A king still rules England, but only as a formality—he is selected at random from among the citizens. Real power is exercised by the bland professional functionaries of a smooth, efficient, and utterly joyless technocratic state, a state that has gradually absorbed and homogenized the entire world.

The last holdout, Nicaragua, has recently fallen, and in the novel’s opening chapter a group of London bureaucrats encounter the deposed Nicaraguan president wandering the city alone. They witness him cutting up a poster to make ribbons with the national colors of his country and, failing to find any red paper, he soaks some paper in his own blood and pins it to the breast of his uniform jacket. The government functionaries treat the former president to lunch at a café, where he makes his pitiful case to them before they go their separate ways. Most of them revile his backward, tragic attachment to his former country. One, a small, wide-eyed man named Auberon Quin, is intrigued. They find out later that, after this encounter, the president died of heartbreak, alone.

Not long after, to the surprise of his unimaginative bureaucratic friends, the eccentric Auberon receives word that he has been selected as the next King of England.

Auberon, a prototype of hipster irony, thinks this is a grand joke. He underscores the absurdity of his own position by reinstating medieval titles, honors, and customs, requiring strict court etiquette and elaborate costume, and issuing a charter to all the neighborhoods of London granting them specific rights and duties under him as their sovereign. Heraldry and courtesy make a comeback. The bureaucratic types bridle at the uncomfortable robes and chains of office that King Auberon insists upon, but beyond the superficial trappings of pennants and coats of arms and sumptuary codes business continues pretty much as usual. No one, least of all Auberon, takes any of this very seriously.

No one until a young man from Pump Street, Notting Hill named Adam Wayne. Having been a child when Auberon ascended the throne and surprised and annoyed everyone with his charter and reforms, Wayne grows up in the world Auberon created and sees it with utter sincerity. The red and gold of Notting Hill’s coat of arms is dear to him, and he does not find the idea of Notting Hill as a place with cherished customs and a distinct identity born of the people who share life there a joke.

So when the bureaucrats propose a massive new highway project that will obliterate Pump Street, Wayne, as Provost of Notting Hill, begs audience of King Auberon and appeals to him to spare his neighborhood. And he is shocked to discover that Auberon only thinks him amusing and that, to the bureaucrats who actually make the decisions, Pump Street is mere raw material for their projects. The road will go through. Defending Notting Hill is up to Adam Wayne.

And so a war begins. After raising a few hundred men from some of the other London boroughs under Auberon’s charter, the bureaucrats, chief among them a cold-blooded calculator named Barker, launch an invasion of Notting Hill meant to crush Wayne’s resistance movement and force compliance with the road project. Wayne’s men, knowing the neighborhood and its streets and byways, allow the army to penetrate to Portobello Road and then turn out the streetlamps. Most of Barker’s army is lost and the survivors are driven back to Auberon in humiliating defeat.

The war escalates, with larger and larger forces brought against Wayne and his neighborhood army and Wayne resorting to more and more desperate stratagems to defend Notting Hill, like building barricades out of stolen hansom cabs—thus protecting his streets and depriving the enemy of mobility. Finally, like a besieged medieval lord on the verge of defeat, Wayne sallies forth from Notting Hill, striking south into Kensington before apparently being halted and surrounded at the local waterworks. Barker is delighted, thinking Wayne finally defeated, but then Wayne issues an ultimatum—surrender and guarantee Notting Hill’s rights under the charter or Wayne will empty the reservoir and flood London.

This is not the end—there is a coda in which the war is renewed and finally ended ten years later, with Auberon abdicating to fight on Wayne’s side against the forces of Barker and the rest of the technocratic state—but this is a good place to leave off. Without giving anything away, the final chapter, a dialogue among the wounded through the long night after the last battle, is among the most moving scenes in Chesterton’s fiction.

Chesterton was only thirty when The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, and it is remarkable for a first novel for its control, its imaginative world, and its thematic richness. Its characters, as heightened as any in Chesterton’s fiction, nevertheless feel like real, recognizable people, not mere avatars for the isms Chesterton wishes to pit against each other. Quin and Wayne are the highlights, but the many side characters, especially the quietly villainous Barker, contribute to the teeming, energetic feel of the book. And while not having the breakneck plotting of his fictional masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, it is more tightly and briskly paced than some of his more meandering later novels. In some of those the ideas threaten to overwhelm the the story, but The Napoleon of Notting Hill feels always like a marvelous fable first.

And what is the point of this fable? The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton’s anthem to localism. Pump Street, with its handful of shabby shops, is an irrational place to love, but Wayne loves it not out of some rational, material conclusion. That’s the way Barker’s type thinks. For these deracinated globalists, all places everywhere are fundamentally interchangeable and attachment to home is a risible relic, especially in the face of Progress. All their studies and statistics show that the road through Notting Hill will be a quantifiable improvement, and so the people must bow to the greater good.

No, Wayne loves Pump Street not because it is perfect or beautiful or scientifically useful to do so, but because it is home. The heraldic trappings and ceremony only allow him to act out his love in visible ways. The love is already there; the ritual deepens it by giving it shape.

And so The Napoleon of Notting Hill arrays sincerity on one side against detached irony and chilly pragmatism on the other. It is easy to imagine it taking place today, especially given the way the clique at the top scoff at Wayne and the terrifying speed with which Barker and the bureaucrats, in their assurance of progressive righteousness, move from disdain to brutal violence. What is heartening in the novel’s tragic, almost Arthurian ending is that Auberon allows himself, at last, to be won over by Wayne. What had started as a joke at everyone’s expense transforms him, suggesting that even the ironic still have hope since they still have a sense of humor.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill may not be the most famous of Chesterton’s novels but it is deservedly well-remembered. It has all the best qualities of his later fiction and few of their faults, but most importantly it is a fun, rollicking adventure in a strange near-future Edwardian dystopia. Wayne’s defense of Notting Hill is genuinely thrilling in places, and I’ve read several times that this novel has been a favorite of urban guerrillas like Michael Collins. But in addition to its fun and odd story, it presents a compelling vision of the goodness of place and the ever-present need to protect hearth and home, to defend the small in the face of Leviathan.

Bigfoot and the resurrection, a Frog Pond test case

A few weeks ago I wrote about Alan Jacobs’s three-strike system for determining whether a current book is worth reading. He laid out some of his system here back in April, writing specifically of new literary fiction. (Brooklynite, three strikes; Ivy Leaguer, two strikes; MFA, one strike, etc.) I brought it up in the context of elite cultural bubbles in general, Edgar Allan Poe’s hated Boston “Frogpondians” being a paradigmatic example.

This was already on my mind because of a trip to our local library with the kids during which I picked up a new book on a whim: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, by John O’Connor. Leafing through the book at home, I alighted on this paragraph:

Even demonstrably batshit belief—in headless cannibals, in Jesus rising from the dead, in the COVID-19 pandemic being a global hoax orchestrated by the CDC and Zoom to prevent the Tangerine Tornado from being reelected—can make you feel as if you’ve pierced the Baudrillardian veil to see the world as it truly is. Not so long ago, perfectly reasonable people thought exposure to moonlight could get a girl pregnant. Or that rainwater found on tombstones removed freckles. Or that 7,409,127 demons worked for Lucifer, overseen by seventy-nine devil princes and helped by countless witches who multiplied faster than they could be burned alive. “I believe because it is absurd,” went the credo of third-century Christian theologian Tertullian. In many ways, our lives remain influenced by beliefs that were set in place when we crucified people on the regular.

It’s hard to know where to start with a specimen like this: the flippant tone (flippancy being the devil’s preferred form of humor), the cloying in-group signaling in which the author invokes meme culture and internet slang and Baudrillard at the same time, the cheap dunk on a bad-faith misquotation of Tertullian—all are worth attention. When Strunk and White condemned what they called “a breezy manner” (elsewhere O’Connor refers to Beowulf as “Mr Big Dick himself,” and Leviathan as “God’s way of reminding Job . . . that He is not to be fucked with”) they had good reason.*

No, what stuck out immediately was the lumping together of COVID conspiracy theories, superstitions, creatures reported in Herodotus, early modern amateur demonology, folklore, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ as “batshit.” (Presumably he means “batshit crazy,” though he chooses to economize his words here, of all places.) And not just “batshit,” but “demonstrably batshit.”

Someone should alert the press.

I decided to find out more about the author, and what do you know? Ivy League MFA, has written for The New Yorker, teaches at Boston College,** and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him an actual Frogpondian. Using Jacobs’s system, the Columbia MFA is three strikes by itself. At this point the knowing, dismissive tone is self-explaining.

Jacobs’s strike system is a simple heuristic meant to weed out works produced within and for intellectual bubbles. The passages I read—many more than the paragraph I quoted—and the author’s credentials suggest just such a bubble pedigree. So who is O’Connor’s Secret History of Bigfoot written for? As with all bubble writing, the likeminded. NPR, voice of the Frog Pond, called it

a smart, engaging, incredibly informative, hilarious, and wonderfully immersive journey not only into the history of Bigfoot in North America and the culture around but also a deep, honest, heartfelt look at the people who obsess about, the meaning of its myth's lingering appeal, and the psychology behind it.

But ordinary readers aren’t so sure. Here’s a well-put sample from a reader review on Goodreads, where the book has three out of five stars—a vigorously middling score:

I’m really confused as to what the purpose of this book was. As a person who’s uninitiated into Bigfoot lore I didn’t learn hardly anything about the phenomena. The same could be said for the commentary on psychology and delusion. I also don’t think this book is designed with Bigfoot enthusiasts in mind (nobody wants to be casually shrunk and mocked), or skeptics, who wouldn’t have much to take away from this book.

In a bit of serendipity, Jacobs wrote a short, one-paragraph post on his blog that I missed during the hurricane. It’s called “Parochialism,” and is a response to a New Yorker essay by Manvir Singh (Brown undergrad, Harvard PhD, UC Davis anthropology faculty). Jacobs notes simply that “the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing” and that, for a writer of Singh or O’Connor’s ilk, “ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist.”

Point (a) is especially important there. Living in a bubble leads the people in the bubble to think that the cocksure, mocking tone characteristic of work like this is just wit. The author can assume that everyone who matters agrees with him, and that anyone who disagrees doesn’t matter.*** We used to call this “preaching to the choir.” And the thing about preaching to the choir is that it’s unnecessary, and no one pays attention.

If you’d like a quick demonstration of just why it’s, well, batshit crazy to lump the resurrection of Jesus in with conspiracy theories and folk medicine, you can start with Richard Bauckham’s Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, a short work by a careful, earnest scholar for Oxford UP. Pages 104-9, which you can start reading here, offer an excellent précis for just why billions of people have believed something like this for two thousand years.

* “The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric.”

** I find it curious, albeit not terribly surprising, that someone who teaches at a Catholic college can blithely describe the resurrection of Christ as a “demonstrably batshit” idea.

*** A different Goodreads user counted 28 mentions of Donald Trump—by name, with more through brilliant nicknames like “the Tangerine Tornado,” which is, bizarrely, indexed—in O’Connor’s book. What writer who is not a well-submerged Frogpondian would risk alienating half of his potential readership to make puerile political digs in a book about Bigfoot?

Poe and Wolfe

Building off of my post about modern Frogpondians yesterday, at the same time that I started studying Poe’s life more deeply—especially his letters and criticism—I also read more of the late great Tom Wolfe’s journalistic monographs. These include From Bauhaus to Our House, a takedown of modern architecture; The Painted Word, a similar treatment of modern art; and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a brilliant pair of essays about high-minded leftwing activism and its distance from grungy reality.

With all of these assorted things floating around in my mind I realized one day that Poe and Wolfe took a similar glee in identifying and attacking cliques. Both objected to the self-identified, self-satisfied, and self-righteous cognoscenti who have found a way to dominate a particular field and enforce an orthodoxy, all while feathering their nests and basking in a success lauded primarily by its members, whom they treat as the only people that count. Poe had Longfellow and Emerson, Wolfe had Mailer, Updike, and Irving. And Leonard Bernstein. And Le Corbusier. And…

And once I noticed this similarity, I noticed others. I’ve kicked this idea around with a few of y’all in conversation, but wanted to get some of this down in writing. Consider the following notes toward a comparative study of Poe and Wolfe:

• Both were Southerners

• Both were Virginians specifically—Wolfe by birth, Poe by rearing and explicit self-identification

• Both worked primarily in big northeastern cities

• Both were accounted personally charming and gentlemanly despite their acid literary criticism

• Both worked in journalism and fiction—Poe considering himself a poet who worked for magazines to (barely) make ends meet while Wolfe was a successful journalist who moved into fiction mid-career

• Both, in rejecting and attacking the dominant literary cliques, made themselves political outsiders, though neither was particularly interested in politics except as an epiphenomenon of something more important

• Both had an intense concern for authenticity in fiction

• Both developed immediately identifiable styles intended to convey something more truthful than the dominant style at the time

• Both were mocked for their style

I’ve returned to this and thought about it a lot, especially since realizing that the similarities are not just biographical but thematic.

The regional dimension, especially in Poe’s case, is too easily overlooked, but I think it’s fundamental to understanding both men. Back in the spring I watched Radical Wolfe, an excellent recent documentary on Wolfe’s life and career that I meant to review here but never found the time to. I recommend it. It doesn’t cover Wolfe’s youth and education in detail, but the sense of Wolfe as a Southerner amused by the unquestioned pretensions of the Yankees in the society he was forced to keep from Yale onwards comes through clearly. It certainly resonated with me.

And now, after mentally connecting Wolfe with Poe, I have to wonder whether the man in black, whom we are so used to imagining with a far-off gaze and a tired frown, used to wander the streets of New York and Philadelphia with a small, wry smile on his face the way the man in white did.

Speaking of Wolfe, Joel Miller recently posted about the delicate art of book cover design, beginning with the recent news that Picador is reprinting thirteen of Wolfe’s books with new matching covers. I’m not crazy about the cover art, personally, but my Wolfe shelf is a jumble of different trim sizes and if I can someday tidy that up and Wolfe can experience a much-deserved posthumous resurgence, all the better.

The Frog Pond

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed since I began studying Poe’s life more deeply and systematically a few years ago is his running feud with the Boston literary elite. Poe called them “Frogpondians,” as if they were a bunch of frogs croaking at each other in a Boston park, and faulted them for plagiarism, uncritical public appraisal of each other,* slavish imitation of British styles, false humility in the face of their white-knuckled grip on American letters,** and—my point here—self-righteous uniformity of opinion, a uniformity they didn’t intend to limit to themselves.

Yesterday a cartoonist that I follow on Instagram cheerfully announced that he had “checked his registration”—i.e., voter registration—and cheerfully reminded us to go check ours, too. This came with a collage of glossy, cheerful images of his preferred presidential candidate and her running mate. If you catch my drift.

This didn’t bother me so much as make me tired, especially when I noticed the small print: “Comments have been limited on this post.” A well-to-do cartoonist, with a line of “merch” and a TV show, stumping for the same phony candidate with the same phony excitement as everyone else in his milieu… When people like me complain that actors should act, cartoonists should cartoon, and athletes should athlete without sharing their political opinions, it isn’t so much the fact of their sharing opinions as the sameness of those opinions that I find so wearying.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for a while, anyway, especially since Alan Jacobs shared his three-strike system for choosing whether to bother with a work of contemporary fiction. Author lives in Brooklyn? Three strikes. Book is set anywhere in New York City? Two strikes. Author has an MFA, or lives in San Francisco, or the book is set in the present? One strike.

This might seem arbitrary—though I understood immediately what this system was designed to detect—but Jacobs’s aim is to avoid the tedium of the monoculture:

Literary fiction in America has become a monoculture in which the writers and the editors are overwhelmingly products of the same few top-ranked universities and the same few top-ranked MFA programs . . . and work in a moment that prizes above all else ideological uniformity. Such people tend also to live in the same tiny handful of places. And it is virtually impossible for anything really interesting, surprising, or provocative to emerge from an intellectual monoculture. 

After laying out his strike system, Jacobs continues:

I am not saying that any book that racks up three strikes cannot be good. I am saying that the odds against said book being good are enormous. It is vanishingly unlikely that a book that gets three strikes in my system will be worth reading, because any such book is overwhelmingly likely to reaffirm the views of its monoculture.

See numbers 9 and 12 in this list of “Warning Signs that You are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” from Ted Gioia.

Occasionally you can witness an up-and-comer being absorbed into the monoculture. Another favorite web cartoonist achieved surprising success doodling in a parttime museum job in a rural area and, after a few years, moved to New York City to be part of the webcomic scene there. A sharp decline in quality followed. The artwork might have improved, but the jokes conformed quickly to the political standards of the terminally online. The cartoonist I’d enjoyed so much disappeared into the frog pond.

And woe unto the artist who fails to adhere perfectly to the monoculture! The civic-minded cartoonist who reminded me to check my voter registration yesterday was subject of a brief pile-on a few years ago when it came out that he had once said mildly pro-life things online. The obsequious apologies necessary to remain in the good graces of the right-minded were duly performed. And it’s hard, of course, not to interpret politically-tinged messages like the one yesterday with past incidents like that in mind.

That croaking sound you hear is the frog pond, and the frogs want you to register to vote.

* One of my biggest surprises in reading about this specific point was that “puff,” meaning to falsely praise and promote, usually quid pro quo—as in writing a “puff piece”—was already in common use in Poe’s day. Poe hated puffing.

** Monopolies can easily outlast the people who establish them. Why else are we still boring high schoolers with Emerson, Thoreau, and other Brahmins, and why else is the American Revolution still presented as a predominantly New England thing?

Martin and Lewis, envy and fascism

No, not that Martin and Lewis!

This morning a friend passed along an insightful Facebook post from science fiction author Devon Eriksen regarding George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. The series, Eriksen argues, is unfinishable because what Martin wants to do with it clashes with the form. His story naturally inclines in a direction he refuses to take, leading to the current yearslong stall-out.

And why does Martin refuse to follow his story where the form leads it? “Because he’s a socialist,” Eriksen writes. “And a boomer.”

This combination, part deliberate, part instinctual, gives Martin an inflexible cynicism toward heroes and heroism, a cynicism that has always clearly marked his work. And not just cynicism: people like Martin

want to convince themselves that anything which appears good is secretly evil, actually, and that anyone who makes them feel or look bad is obviously evil because reasons. So when they see a hero, they tend to call him a fascist. . . . [I]n George's world, heroism must be a sham or a weakness, because then George's own bad character is wisdom and enlightenment, instead of just lack of moral virtue.

I seem to remember some very old admonitions against calling good evil and evil good.

I’m less convinced by the generational dimension of this critique—generational labels being a kind of materialist zodiac as far as I’m concerned—but I think Eriksen is onto something with regard to Martin’s vocal leftwing politics. One line in particular struck a chord with me: “Socialism’s motivational core is envy, and its one underlying rule is ‘thou shalt not be better than me’.”

This brought to mind one of the concluding lines of CS Lewis’s essay “Democratic Education,” which was published in April 1944, at the height of World War II: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism.”

Envy also leads to bad art, or to no art at all.

Lewis’s insight is especially ironic given what prompted Eriksen’s post in the first place. In a blog post from late August, Martin lamented “war everywhere and fascism on the rise,” leading to this slightly unfair but funny riposte:

Dissidents in the Soviet Union composed entire books in their heads until they could scribble them down on toilet paper and smuggle them out despite the threat of torture and imprisonment. But then again, writers like Solzhenitsyn were geniuses, and actually believed in something.

You can find Lewis’s “Democratic Education” online or in the slim paperback Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is one of my favorite collections of his work. And for a writer with a stellar work ethic, who got his books done 350 words at a time come hell or high water (or fascism, presumably), here’s historian Thomas Kidd on the slow-burn success of Mick Herron, whose Secret Hours I’m about halfway through right now. As if to underscore the contrast between Herron and what we’re considering here, Kidd titled his post “Writing When You Have No Time to Write.”

On the fine art of insinuation

Eric Idle and Terry Jones in Monty Python's "Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge" (1969)

Earlier this week, in my notes on a recent historical controversy, I mentioned some of the “dark insinuations” that were one part of the furor. That particular aspect of the controversy wasn’t the point of my post, but I did want to revisit it in general terms—especially since I was working on a post on the same topic last year, a post I eventually abandoned.

Since facts and sound historical interpretation prove dangerously prone to turn back on them, conspiracists rely heavily upon insinuation—the “you know what I mean,” “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” implications of whatever factual information they do put forward. This approach allows them to present information in what seems to be a purely factual way, but with a tone that implies the conclusion they want you to reach. It’s a technique used in what David Hackett Fischer called “the furtive fallacy” in historical research.

The fine art of insinuation crossed my mind again just before the interview that prompted my previous post when I watched a recent short video on the Cash-Landrum incident, a genuinely weird and interesting—and genuinely unexplained—UFO sighting in Texas in 1980. Briefly, during a late night drive on a remote East Texas highway, two ladies and a child spotted a glowing, white-hot, fire-spewing object that hovered in their path for some time before drifting away, apparently escorted by US Army helicopters. The ladies subsequently developed severe illnesses related to radiation poisoning.

It’s a decent enough video, so please do watch it, but the YouTuber behind it provides a few textbook examples of insinuation. After describing the ladies’ attempts to get compensation from the military and the government following the incident, the narrator relates the first formal third-party research into the incident this way:

[Aerospace engineer and MUFON co-founder John] Schuessler agreed to investigate the case and was taken by Betty and Vickie to the site where they claimed it had happened. When they arrived, they found a large circular burn mark on the road where the UFO has supposedly been levitating, cementing more credibility to their claims. However, several weeks later, when Schuessler returned to the spot, the road had been dug up and replaced, with witnesses claiming that unmarked trucks came by and took the burnt tarmac away.

This is already a UFO story, and now we have unmarked trucks destroying evidence! The story autopopulates in your mind, doesn’t it? But this part of the story, as presented for maximum insinuation, is vague—which points toward the best tool for combating the use of insinuation: specific questions. For instance:

• What’s so unusual about a damaged road being repaired?

• Did Texas DOT vehicles have uniform paint schemes or other markings in 1980?

• Who were the witnesses who saw these unmarked trucks?

And, granting for a moment the conclusion that the narrator is trying to imply:

• If some powerful agency was trying to cover up what had happened, why did it take “several weeks”? And why did they allow witnesses to watch them?

Insinuation relies on context, especially our preconceptions and prejudices, to do its work. It’s a mode of storytelling that invites the listener to complete the story for you by automatically filling in details. Questioning the vague prompts and implications that start this process can bring the discussion back down to earth and the basic level of fact and source. And, perhaps more importantly in this kind of discussion, specific questions can force people to say what they mean rather than letting them get away with insinuations or implication.

A 44-year old UFO sighting offers a pretty harmless test case for interrogating this technique, but pressing for clearly stated details might have proven more helpful to everyone—as well as more revealing—during that interview last week.

The Cash-Landrum incident was memorably dramatized in a 1991 episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” which you can watch here. It’s worth noting that the ladies involved always assumed the UFO was purely terrestrial and that they were the victims of some kind of government or military test gone wrong.