Last bitchy post of the year!

Well, today is not one of my best days, so I’ll make this a bitchy entry. M’kay?

I’m still working on this beshitted cold, you see. My Nyquil-addled think-meat is coming up with some really ingenious new ways to torture me in my sleep (the dreams, you guys, Oh MY GAWD the dreams) so I snuck out to the living room for a little napsky on the couchsky with the tv on-sky. I picked a channel that I figured was safe. It was either the History Channel or the Weather Channel, gentle readers, and I needed no persuasion when it came to deciding which one would put me to sleep fastest.

So that is how I made the mistake of falling asleep to the History Channel. Not a deep sleep, just a gentle, oozing sleep. The kind of sleep you get when on the couch, filled to the brim with ibuprofen, hot tea, peanut-butter toast, and throbbing and swollen sinuses the size of basketballs.

See, the History Channel is supposed to be about, History. Right? Like stuff that happened. Stuff that really happened, in the past, and that is a part of who we are today and the motivation behind the decisions we make in our lives (social, economic, political, grammatical… whatevs) today. Right?

So – like, when I came to, it was hard for me to understand what I was looking at. On this noble station, dedicated to education and enlightenment, was an ignorant, alarmist program about the pyramids of Egypt and (dear gods save me from this phrase) how ALIENS built them.

‘scuse me while I go die inside a little.

Then I looked into the programming schedule, you know? Like, maybe it’s an end-of-year gag or something. Nope. Coming up is about how allll the gods ever, and every mythological story ever told is actually a retelling of actual extra-terrestrials coming to primitive earth. (stargate anyone?)

But wait! They started talking about how churches and stuff are. Actually. Stargates.

Oops, another piece of me died again. I’ll pick that up later.

“why else” asked the talking head “would someone build a church and have such powerful inscriptions all over it declaring the specialness of the location and the glory of its inception?”

And then I screamed at the tv “BECAUSE IT IS A CHURCH YOU DUMBASS”

So after dying again, and re-administering my cold medication because I was clearly hallucinating, I did some research that I’m not proud to admit took me much longer than the 15 minutes I originally allotted to it.

You see, a lot of people are getting into this. It’s quite fun, actually. And Sadly, it is part of our human nature to not only create things like this, but to believe them and try to sell other people on them.

Let’s start with “my daddy can beat up your daddy”.

It’s a standard power grab that you hear on any playground anywhere. Ever.

Sure, it’s bold and brassy but it’s not often true. It can’t be proved, though, because the daddies don’t usually come down to duke it out. SO it lingers. It’s a statement that just lingers out there, unproven and unprovable.

And there’s power there.

It’s kind of like, “my God can kick your God’s ass”. Just as childish and ignorant, but still holding firm to that can’t-be-proved and can’t-be-disproved rope of logic. Just like “Jesus was a demigod” or “God Hates Fags”. Say what you want, spew what bile and hate you can think of… stick to that party line and you’re safe with how it can’t be proven, and it can’t be unproven. So whatever, right?

Wrong.

Start saying things like “the moon is made of cheese”. Well, that’s something we can test. Isn’t it? Or how about “there are alien spaceships on mars”. That’s a little farther afield, but still something we’ll eventually get the Yes or No out of. These kinds of arguments though, have a special card up their sleeves. There’s one more level of slime below the “can’t prove it is, can’t prove it isn’t” argument. It’s the old familiar line that goes “I’d be happy to prove it, but the government won’t let me.”

Ahhh. It’s infallible. Yes? Pin your hopes to that little gem and you’re safe as safe can be. You can put whole civilizations at the center of the world, you can hide cancerous agents at the EPA, you can smuggle all kinds of poisons into fresh fruits and all you have to say when contested is “I’d be happy to prove it for you, in fact I have lots of proof, but the government won’t let me show it to you.”

And THAT is where I not only die, but I start to weep for the future of humanity.

Because really, I have to admit, it’s a wonderful position to take. Ignorant and childish and weak though it may be, it’s safe. It’s the holy grail, it’s the golden calf, it can not be touched. Gubbermint is always evil. Even BIG SCIENCE is in on it. They’re all in on it, yessirree and you and I are the only ones smart enough to figure it out.

Really? Really? Really?

Let’s go back to the whole aliens building the pyramids thing. All other hookie pookie aside, I hate that theory for one very solid, very real reason: It sells humans short.

I, for one, can’t imagine going my whole life without a flush toilet or electric lights, but people did it. If I recall, humans have been on this planet for much longer without electricity than they’ve been here with it. You know? Plumbing is kinda new. We had to figure something out though, so we did. That’s what we do. We’re people, we’re human, we figure stuff out. We are just as smart now as we were then… and the spectrum is just as broad. We are just as beautiful, just as cruel, just as bold and funny and wicked and horrible now as we were then.

To say that humans needed help for these great wonders, is to cheapen the whole creature of humanity.

And I hate that. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. We made computers. We did. We made the pyramids and the great wall of china and Eiffel tower and we make all kinds of things. We made all kinds of things. We made tools. We made eachother into tools and slaves. We dug deeply into ourselves and found wickedness and evil that is as yet unmatched in the history of this planet. We dug more deeply and found beauty and love and peace. And we continue to build on our scales of history and create and destroy and we are still here, on this planet. We came from a time, so long ago, when even things like hammers had to be invented. Things like crops had to be invented.

Imagine the first person to invent a door. He’d have been a mensa of his time, and yet there he was, figuring things out. Making things work. Without aliens or monsters. By himself.

Imagine the first person to do any thing, peel fruit, sew leather, sing music, build a wall, make a knife, unite a tribe, breed sheep, play a drum, predict the weather, …. All of these people were real and brilliant and frightening. They had feelings, and they felt hunger and they had to go to the bathroom, and they did all the normal people-y things we do today.

How dare you take their accomplishments away from them? How dare you imagine those people, stare them down in the fog of your own imagination, and cheat them their final glory by saying that “well, hell, I dunno how they did it, it musta been extra terresteals”.

How dare you? How dare you? How dare you?

You spit on your ancestors. And mine. You spit on the sacrifice of every bloodied back, every slave, every corpse that went into the construction of those pyramids. You shit on their memories and tell them they suffered died for nothing. You can’t imagine us doing it today? Really? WE HAVE THE INTERNET!!! Is that not saying something? I can’t imagine even now how the internet works, yet I won’t dare try to sell myself on the idea that some otherworldly creature came, all benevolent and glorious, and was like “here kids, have some internet, bye!”

That’s bullshit. And I do not apologize for saying so.

Humans are terrifying, and ugly, and horrible and mean.

And they always have been.

And you know what else? They’re smart as hell, too. So shut up, damned history channel. I hate you and your conspiracy theories and your ignorant bile which you KNOW is just a pair of naked boobs away from being the worst smut on television. You have lost your way, you have lost your soul, and you are calling your audience idiots, to their faces, and they pay you for the privilege.

I have to go die again.

So yeah, Don’t try to sell me on the whole “atlantis was a space ship” I saw that show and it was on the Science Fiction channel. Great story. Not history. I saw the one about how humans are robots, too. And the one about Mayans and time-aliens. And the one about how if you die in your sleep then you die for realz. And the one about how if you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. I’ve seen it all. It’s all good fun.

And it’s none of it real or history.