“Fast away the old year passes …”
“Looking forward to the new year?” the receptionist asked me. We were in one of the doctor’s offices where I’ve spent more of my time this past year than I would have liked. “Sure am!” I replied, in the same sprightly tone.
But then the truth-teller inside me forced his way out. I added: “With dread.”
The receptionist, a young black woman, nodded. She knew exactly what this old white man was talking about.
So, I imagine, do you.
2020 promises to be a year of ugliness, of rancor, of armed (figuratively) and fortified (mentally) camps screaming past each other on that insane megaphone we call the Internet. The action–which we’ll want to look away from, but it’s so tempting we’ll keep looking back–will be dominated by a President who’s like no other we’ve ever had.
I don’t want to fall into partisan rhetoric myself. Some of you reading this will love Donald Trump; others will hate him. But can we all agree that for better or for worse, he’s something new in our history, who’s redefining what it means to be “presidential”? As the Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan put it, he’s like a cartoon character who’s gone smashing through a wall, leaving a him-shaped hole behind. And none of us quite knows what’s on the other side.
“Don’t you get into politics, now! Stick to UFOs!”
Is that what you want to tell me? If so, I don’t blame you. I don’t have the qualifications to be a political pundit (whatever exactly they are). I’m one of the Many, my information and perceptions taken from media sources that exist to scare us so that, bug-eyed and shivering and deprived enough that we’ll turn for comfort to the advertised product, we’ll keep on watching.
But I think I would answer: I am sticking to UFOs.
If you’ve followed this blog, by now you know my convictions: that UFOs are not space visitors but something essentially ours–as individuals, as a people, as a species. They’re intertwined with our collective anxieties. Not, as some say, that we look up dreamily to them as saviors–in the best known and most representative UFO story, that of Roswell, the UFO beings are helpless to save themselves, much less us–but that they’re tangible representations of something we know and dread to be real. That’s why we see them. Why we believe in them or fiercely deny them. Why, in defiance of their debunkers’ predictions, they just won’t go away.
Will 2020 be the Year of the UFO? The trends of this past year seem to be pointing in that direction. It would be convenient for me, speaking as someone who’s got a book on UFOs coming out next March–Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, available now for pre-order–and who naturally hopes it’s going to sell well. (Hint, hint.) It won’t be the Year of Disclosure, when the government finally reveals what it knows about UFO reality, or even when the UFOs reveal themselves for what they are. That Disclosure will remain in abeyance, always imminent, never happening. But it may be a time when UFOs claim a place in the national consciousness even more prominent than they have now.
Since December 2017, the New York Times, which may still be the nation’s foremost newspaper, has been unabashedly pro-UFO. It’s perhaps only us old-time UFOlogists who realize how extraordinary that is. For most of the UFOs’ 72-year history, the Times looked down its nose with contempt on the flying disks and anyone foolish enough to believe in them. That’s changed, and I don’t quite know why. I only think: it’s happened since the 2016 election and the Trump-shaped hole in our collective wall; and yes, I know the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, temporal sequence doesn’t necessarily mean causal relationship. But my gut tells me there’s a connection.
Evidence? Take a look at the cover of The Week magazine, June 14, 2019. I won’t reproduce it here–I don’t want to get into copyright hassles–but you can see it by clicking on this link. Taking UFOs seriously: Why the Pentagon is urging pilots to report their close encounters. (And, inside the magazine: Why the military isn’t scoffing anymore.) A US jet is being buzzed by two friendly green-skinned aliens in a flying disk. In the lower right hand corner, amid the clouds: the Baby Trump balloon.
No explanation what Trump is doing there, in the sky that belongs to the pilots and the ETs. But it’s significant; it’s got to be, otherwise the artist wouldn’t have put it there. As if to say: what this is all about, at the level of our group unconscious, is the skyriding infant who’s now the most powerful person in the world.
(Is my own partisanship coming out here? Not necessarily. It’s possible to interpret an artist’s intent without sharing it. But certainly millions do share it–and those millions include the New York Times editors who are suddenly so gaga over the flying saucers. And the equally liberal Washington Post editors who last May printed an op-ed headlined: UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact.)
The UFOs entered my personal consciousness when I was 12 going on 13, wrestling with the unspoken reality that my mother was slowly dying. (I tell the story in Intimate Alien.) They entered our national consciousness in June 1947, when the collective death of the human race had become a real possibility and the Doomsday Clock made its appearance for the first time on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They’re re-emerging in this year 2019, when grim and frightening weather-related events have forced us to face the possibility that another kind of collective death, this time climate change spinning out of control, is already upon us. And Greta Thunberg, whom I find nearly as obnoxious and authoritarian as Donald Trump though a great deal closer to the truth–OK, there’s my partisanship revealing itself–is Person Of The Year on the cover of Time.
2020, though just about to knock at the door, is not yet upon us. First there’s Hanukkah, which began this past Sunday night. Now there’s Christmas Eve.
I celebrate both–Hanukkah because it’s part of me as a Jew, Christmas because it speaks to me as a human being. With its unforgettable, ineradicable, undeniable symbolism of goodness ever-born among us, the light shining forth in the darkness, the evergreen tree with its base in our living rooms (yes, mine too) and its top among the stars.
Next time the Internet gets you down with its endlessly blaring accusations and hatred, click here to let YouTube bring back to you Peter, Paul and Mary’s Hanukkah classic, “Don’t Let the Light Go Out.”
“Light one candle for the Maccabee children
With thanks that their light didn’t die.
Light one candle for the pain they endured
When their right to exist was denied.
Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand.
But light one candle for the wisdom to know
When the peacemaker’s time is at hand.”
(The peacemaker–not just for a place like Israel/Palestine, which PP&M originally had in mind, but for our own torn-apart country. See Malachi 4:6.)
“Don’t let the light go out! It’s lasted for so many years.
Don’t let the light go out! Let it shine through our love and our tears.”
Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. And make this your New Year’s resolution: not to let the light go out.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Now ready for pre-order from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, to be released March 2020.
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