I’ve spent the summer mourning the loss of my favorite TV series, The X-Files, which finished up its final season last May (although it had finished being a good show the previous year, so I’ve had plenty of time to grieve). There was no other TV location where one could find so many references to aliens and government conspiracies, perfect for the paranoid freak always lurking just inside my generally normal exterior. After such a devastating loss, one that left Sunday nights so painfully empty, I was delighted to discover a replacement so quickly.
Thank goodness for the November elections! I mean, we all know what kind of nuts run for office these days. Hell, you have to be nuts to want to run for public office, don’t you? This year, though, there are extra-special goings-on.
I came upon this bit of surprise political entertainment as I flipped through various news channels last week and had the good luck to catch an interview with Maryland Congressional candidate Stephen Bassett-K (Kook Party). But was it actually luck, or was it a conspiracy consisting of all the other channels that had agreed to air bad programming? I may never know. I stopped flipping channels only because the image being shown at first was a fuzzy UFO shot, similar to photographs frequently displayed on my beloved The X-Files. But as I listened, I realized that UFOs were actually the campaign platform of Mr. Bassett.
As he argued with great passion, the people of Maryland and the United States have a right to full disclosure of the alien situation in this country. Not the illegal alien situation. The space alien situation. For my political dollar, that’s the kind of issue that needs to be debated during elections. I’ll be the first to agree that it’s pointless drivel, but isn’t everything else bantered about during elections? At least this is entertaining drivel.
I suspect that my peers would agree. Despite the probable fallacies in The Third Millennium study of several years ago, which claimed that more Gen Xers believed in aliens than believed that they would ever see a dime of Social Security benefits, I must admit that — among people I know — the study’s claims aren’t far from the truth. In actuality, most people I know, even Gen Xers, are fairly skeptical about the existence of aliens. But the Gen Xers know for a fact that they’ll never get a Social Security check in the mail. So with all of these candidates promoting the rights of the elderly, Stephen Bassett and his pursuit of the truth about aliens starts to sound kind of uplifting.
It’s not that we Gen Xers don’t understand why our grandparents are kicking and screaming about Social Security. We’re well aware that if we were on the government dole, we’d want to stay on board, too. And our Great Depression-era grandparents don’t annoy us by taking their Social Security benefits. After all, they’re frugal people who always made us clean our plates as children. (They still frown at us if we ever mention that we’re “dieting” or even “diabetic.”) They send us food whenever possible to make sure we don’t starve while surfing the internet or engaging in whatever incomprehensible pastimes we love. At least on them our Social Security dollars are not squandered.
Our parents are another concern entirely. The Baby Boomers are the ones who make us so nervous about the fate of Social Security. With improvements in medical technology increasing boomers’ expected lifespans with each passing day, we start to wonder how we’ll ever provide benefits for these people, who more than outnumber us, for the next 30 to 40 years.
Plus, how can we actually trust the boomers with all of that money? These are our parents — the people we’ve actually watched waste money over the last few decades. We’ve waited patiently through their mid-life crises, as they’ve purchased speedboats, sports cars, gym memberships and trophy wives/husbands. We’ve also taken the money they’ve shoved in our direction over the years, knowing that to them money is love, just as food represents love to our grandparents. In fact, the boomers have managed to accrue more wealth than most of us will have when we’re well past their current age. Yet, we’re supposed to pay their Social Security?
Anyway, this is why it sounds like a good idea to put in Congress a guy interested in unveiling the alien conspiracy. Not that he’d accomplish more than anyone else, but at least we’d all have a larf while he made speeches about alien invasions and tried to pass bills demanding the full disclosure of all alien-related government documents. C-SPAN could potentially become watchable.
Sadly, Mr. Bassett represents the only point Gen Xers even see in government: entertainment value. Don’t forget: we were impressionable children and adolescents when Reagan was president. To us, politics and show business are one and the same. Why else did we get such a kick out of Bill Clinton, except for his unquestionable value as an entertainer?
This year’s campaigns already bode well for the election season ahead. With any luck at all, the speeches, interviews and commercials will be as effective as sitcoms in relieving the monotony and hopelessness of our day-to-day existence. Let the mudslinging begin!
This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2002.
