JUNE 3, 2022 – (Cont.) If Putin is a monster by modern standards (he’s responsible for dastardly deeds in Syria, Mali, and elsewhere too), he has considerable catching-up to do to rival his 16th century predecessor, Ivan the Terrible, who, to teach the upstarts of Novgorod a lesson, ordered 50,000 residents to be hacked to pieces—while he watched. In percentage terms, that would equate to 780,000 Ukrainians hacked to pieces while Putin, as mastermind of the operation, watched . . . in person. Putin’s war has yet to rival the American WW II fire-bombing of Tokyo, which killed upwards of 80,000, or the subsequent atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed an estimated 214,000; nor does the savagery in Ukraine approach total Soviet deaths in WW II, which exceeded 20 million (largely because Stalin the Terrible had purged his own Red Army officer corps before the War, climbed into bed with Hitler, then gone AWOL when the Germans attacked, putting the USSR at a huge disadvantage against the onslaught; oh, and that was after he’d starved millions* of Ukrainian kulaks in the Holodomor of 1932-33) and—on top of six million European Jewish lives taken by the Nazis. So you see, by these simple contrasts, humanity is on the upswing, despite the current madness in Ukraine . . . and gun-fetish that currently grips America.
“No, truth be told, my friend, to a very large extent we’ve replaced real war with war films and videos—‘entertainment war,’ you might call it. Top Gun II raked in $100 million over its first weekend on the big screen.”
“What? Why would you want to entertain yourselves with the depiction of self-destruction?” By its erratic humming I could tell the alien was flummoxed.
“War films aren’t even the half of it,” I said, edging onto a slippery slope. “You should see . . . no, on second thought, you shouldn’t . . . the countless films about gangs, crime, bloody vengeance, and all other forms of violent behavior. Plus an infinite body of literature—boy, are we ever advanced!—featuring death, lasciviousness, other forms of bad behavior, and supreme sadness wrought from tragedy.”
“But why, why, why?” Elevated awareness wasn’t necessary to know the alien was irritated. I feared for humanity that I’d taken things a bit too far.
“Whoa!” I said in self-preservation. “If much of our imitation of sex and violence is debauched and gratuitous, we humans are also instinctively curious about ourselves. We possess an insatiable need to see our reflections. It’s what compels us to create and consume art and fiction of all kinds. It’s what distinguishes our species from all other life forms you’ll find on earth.”
The alien’s filaments glowed with static, increased light. All humming ceased. Though it touted its superior science, perhaps this foreign being (“these unified beings”?) possessed an emotional quotient after all. And like nuclear fusion, when emotion binds with intellectual power is the result not exponential energy? How long, I wondered, before the alien could read my mind? Having downloaded Matt’s cerebral lexicon, why couldn’t the alien download the entire brain of a human? But what about the human heart . . . and soul? Downloadable too? I doubted it.
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*Estimates range from 3.5 million to 7 million, but the true number will never be known.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
