Almost fifty years ago, in November of 1959, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” aired an episode entitled “Special Delivery”. It was adapted from Ray Bradbury’s story “Come Into My Cellar”, which also appeared in periodicals under the title “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”. I was fourteen when I saw it. It scared the hell out of me.
In this tale, eleven-year old Tommy Fortnum receives a package of mushroom seeds in the mail from an undisclosed source. He’s responded to an advert in a boy’s publication for the seeds. To the bemusement of his parents, Tommy then raises a particularly delicious variety of mushroom in his home cellar. He’s protective of his crop and very secretive. At the same time, Tommy’s father, Hugh, notices subtle changes in his neighbors. They’re different from their usual selves in important ways. They’re belligerent, detached and hostile.
Hugh knows something is wrong and so does the viewer. There’s a connection between the mushrooms and the altered states of the neighbors, but Hugh figures it out much too late. Tommy is distributing the mushrooms. Whoever eats them vanishes, and their bodies become animated shells inhabited by aliens. Hugh tries to warn his neighbors, but they scoff at him. They’re content with the temptations and comforts of a summer’s day while being slowly, peacefully replaced.
The screenplay doesn’t tell us how this story ends. In the last scene, Tommy is shown with a mushroom to his lips, in a darkened cellar, calling to his father, who peers into the darkness from the top of the cellar stairs. Hugh’s final horror and indignity is to be betrayed by his own son. Betrayal is a central theme in this story. It isn’t chiefly, or even mainly, about aliens and conquest. It’s themes are lying, betrayal, weakness, comfortable indifference and the delusion that, if things look the same, they are the same.
It’s also a yarn about the feebleness of our defenses when everything seems stable and permanent, and how easily power and dominance can be exchanged by weakness, by simply doing nothing. Doing nothing, and being seen doing nothing, in a competitive universe, is an invitation to be superseded or colonized by other powers and ideas. Competition goes on all the time; there is no peace, only stasis, and competition for power often has no other motive than perceived weakness in the passive party.
Conservatives are familiar with these themes. We sense a fraud and a threat early in the game. It’s this acute awareness of dishonesty and ubiquitous danger that modern liberals view as the conservative paranoid personality, as the alienated right-winger. This idea stems entirely from the reality that liberalism today is establishment and conformist, risk-averse, and sickeningly repetitive with its tired, shabby and devitalizing theories. We’re diligent, skeptical, anti-ideological and strength matters to us. Not the strength to dominate others, but the strength to avoid being dominated by others. We wouldn’t have eaten the mushrooms, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.
As far as we know, the invading entities in “Special Delivery” never resort to violence or force. Their current circumstances might have weakened them in some way, so they seek habitation elsewhere. We never see their real form. They simply exploit a weaker state of mind in humans, and avail themselves of an opportunity on earth. We know nothing about their ideas, but we know that they will win. And this is where my little screed intersects with politics and government, and the Bush/Kennedy Immigration Bill, which as of Thursday, June 27th, appears to be dead. It’s a continent-sized cave of mushrooms, my friend, and they expected us all to partake. They still do, and the meal will be back in some other form.
We might as why we elect and pay people like Bush and Kennedy, Lindsey Graham and Trent Lott to be stupid and offensive when we get enough of it for free every day. Well, we don’t elect them for those qualities, but that’s what we get. Compensatory arrogance and megalomania grow in sanctimonious buffoons like Graham and Lott and Reid and Pelosi when we place them in public office, because they can’t abide the real existential weakness that elected office beholds. We can dump them back into the common swarm of humanity from whence they came, and this simply cannot stand. They seek office for power, permanence and self-projection, and they need to solidify the fantasy of their immovability by staking their terrain in noticeable ways, like tomcats and coyotes.
If they would just express their bone-deep mediocrity by bloviating and squandering money, we might leave them alone. Give them a trillion dollars and two-thousand microphones, put them behind the chain link fence and walk away. But some times, like now, they sail off through a fogbank into some mental Sargasso Sea. They end up mired and becalmed, yammering to each other from their rotting deck chairs about some Big Idea, like The Great Society or immigration bills, and cursing the rest of us for declaiming their navigation skills and attentions spans.
Their last Big Idea, The Great Society, planted a fetid jungle of despair for millions, and the immigration bill is just as bad in the same grandiose ways. It won’t work, for starters. It’s too complicated and its assumptions too spurious for it work. It’s a replacement for other un-enforced immigration bills, and contains new laws to replace identical but currently ignored old laws, and it has the potential for real mischief. It’s the product of the end state of a political class past its prime; those who compose it are shockingly unaware of how ridiculous they seem to the rest of us. And even though the bill might be dead, they’re plotting revenge strategies as I write.
Forget, for a minute, the multiple idiocies of the bill itself. It has an ethical flaw, too. It’s packed with economic charity of the kind that fills the empty hearts of power-hungry politicians with instant virtue. Bush and others are possessed of a bizarre kind of charity, they need to give away things they do not own. Things like American sovereignty, like rational citizenship standards, like social benefits and sensible wage standards, and even more important, the legitimacy and validity of a government matured over 250 years, held together by dried blood and torn web gear, and legitimized by the “consent of the governed”.
The President and others don’t see America in this way. Their America is an economy without an ethos, a friction-free collection of buyers and sellers who can be manipulated and tuned by immigrant labor supplies, productivity and business interests. When necessary, this cynical vision of America can be ornamented with crap about “family values” not stopping at the border, but the simplified mercenary vision is really all there is. It wouldn’t pass the approval of a hung-over, semi-comatose college freshman in his first Political Science course, but it’s enough for George W. Bush, most of our elected side-show performers, and the fearful big business class of America.
Whatever happens with this great mess we call illegal immigration, it’s likely that something shattering and revolutionary has happened in American politics. For the first time in seventy-five years, not since Herbert Hoover and Smoot-Hawley, has American government seemed so counterfeit, so weak and remote from the interests of lawful immigrant and native-born citizens, and so bent upon forcing its vision of American on Americans who don’t buy it.
It’s a time of great danger. When there’s mass awareness of the political class as truly sinister in its assertion of itself against the people, a struggle will ensue, and there’s no guarantee of victory for us in the long term. We can never forget that “freedom” is a dull and lifeless word until we attach a preposition to it. Freedom from. Freedom to. Freedom for. Freedom against. Freedom with. Action. We need to do something with our freedom, and not just declare ourselves as free. We didn’t eat their mushrooms today, but the political hacks responsible for the meal are still there, perched like gargoyles on our backs. Maybe it’s time for a Conservative Party.
……Thank you Beth at MVRWC for the link and article.
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