Time to Transcend
David Lynch’s friends and relatives calling for him to be remembered with simultaneous around-the-world meditation this past Monday afternoon is apt. His film work, properly understood, wasn’t so much about wallowing in weirdness and ugliness as it was about remaining calm—and creative—in spite of the weirdness and ugliness. It’d be nice to have him around, but I don’t think he’d want us to freak out in his absence.
The same could likely be said of one of his actors, David Bowie, who passed away in January 2016, guaranteeing that no matter how you felt about that year’s presidential election, it wouldn’t be a perfect year. It never is. (I don’t mean to suggest that Trump being elected kills beloved celebrities. Decades of smoking—followed by years of emphysema in Lynch’s case—tends to kill beloved celebrities, hard as people, especially people employed by tobacco companies, try to blame more outlandish drugs or other mysterious lifestyle factors.)
If looking weirdness in the face and retaining one’s inner peace is a virtue, the past several weeks have offered plenty of opportunities for virtue. That isn’t the same thing as saying one should remain oblivious. Indeed, I like to remind my fellow skeptic/rationalists that while one shouldn’t chase after maximum weirdness or leap to irrational conclusions, intellectual honesty demands acknowledging a certain “irreducible weirdness” that remains in the world even if one takes the most mundane, materialistic, and optimistic view of it all. Take the drones, for example.
The drones aren’t what they seem, some say. A wave of drone sightings in New Jersey and surrounding areas in late-2024—reportedly larger than normal drones, moving in strange ways, some not far from Trump’s Bedminster golf course—had people theorizing about aliens, semi-sapient atmospheric plasmoids, hidden ocean launch sites, booming hobbyist numbers, multiple possible hostile foreign countries, and ultimately, fairly enough, our own untrustworthy federal government whether menacing us or trying to save us from illicit radioactive materials, perhaps in the process creating those weird fogs people have been talking about, the ones some people claim made them feel sick, or reminded them of real biowarfare experiments conducted on the public decades ago.
Even if the whole thing dies down and people move on to other topics such as the new presidential administration, in short, we can’t really pretend that all those questions raised by the flap just go away now. That in itself would be a form of insanity, like people in the town of Twin Peaks trying to maintain tight smiles and go about their business after a demon killed Laura Palmer. I don’t want to make you nervous—like Lynch, I want you to be happy in the end and to escape horror—but all those areas of uncertainty are still with us.
Almost simultaneously with the drone flap, TMZ of all organizations released a three-episode season of the documentary series UFO Revolution, climaxing with an odd tempest-in-a-teacup that ought to leave one asking questions about media and politics regardless of whether it leaves one asking whether there’s alien life.
UFO documentarian Jeremy Corbell, de facto hero of the show, was thrilled that serious congressional hearings, chaired by avowed UFO disclosure advocate Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, took place in November last year but was enraged when some of the UFO information he had presented to Mace—a document naming willing whistleblowers and describing the government’s (real) secret database of UFO sightings called Immaculate Constellation—was shortened and attributed on the official record at the last minute to slightly more mainstream reporter Michael Shellenberger.
Why, fumes the muscular and perhaps narcissistic Corbell, racing off in a huff after the hearing and denouncing both Mace and Shellenberger? Note that at that point, Corbell isn’t even insisting there are aliens, only that there are lying politicians and some media figures more willing to play along with them than others, which is undeniable.
This may be another of those cases where the most mundane interpretation is still pretty horrifying, and by most mundane interpretation, I mean this: For all the weird things Corbell has seen, maybe the innocent and well-meaning man was for the first time encountering something that many of us have learned the hard way—and usually learned first-hand because so few people are willing to talk about it and risk being ostracized over it. Namely, that the tacit code among successful people, especially moderately successful people operating in large bureaucracies, is not to give credit where it’s due, as we normal folk might expect, but rather to give credit to the people who are already big names, already rich, already powerful, already glamorous.
It’s almost as sickening a revelation as finding a dead body mutilated by space aliens, but despite all the explicit, self-conscious, often excessive and even radical egalitarianism in our culture, the opposing and sleazily stealthy truth is that the head scientist gets the credit for all the late nights of work by his grad students (until they get something wrong, of course), the film director gets fawningly interviewed about those brilliant scenes that were actually handled by his second unit director, the popular author gets to plagiarize (or sexually harass) while his less-popular associates keep their mouths shut if they want to protect their own futures, and the people who already have money receive generous gifts and invitations to lavish parties.
I don’t think violent revolution would fix these problems. Afterwards, you’d just have to deal all the more frequently with political leaders who conveniently forget which underling handed them which document, and the odds are you’ll be one of those underlings, not a leader. At the same time, I admit counseling meditation may be as ineffectual as telling people living under Caesar to pray. I wouldn’t, in any case, tell them to stop noticing what goes on, even when it’s unsettling.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey