I saw this movie last week and was very disappointed. I actually thought it was bad, but not as bad as War of the Worlds. In my opinion, Spielberg’s good days are behind him. After watching it, however, I did find myself thinking again of the old and fairly common tradition of elongating skulls, such as was done in Egypt, the Middle East, and in the Americas, etc. I actually have not studied the origins of this particular tradition in these places with the exception of Central America, where I remember reading that this shape was supposed to resemble a head of corn/maize among the Maya royals, which makes sense. Apparently, this Maya tradition is well documented, but I do not know if it was the exclusive privilege of royal males, although I would assume so. Since the corn/maize plant was one of the models for their World Tree, this caused me to wonder whether the elongated skull in these other places might be connected to the World Tree/Mountain as well. I think this is not unlikely.

You know, just for the record, I have never attributed, in my mind/imagination, the discovery and development of the mythical “arts of civilization” to aliens, like Spielberg has so consistently done. This seems like a very Hebraic thing to do. Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think, would have attributed these same developments to our own ancestors, as I do.

Ken

Well, I think you forgot the movie in your excursus on technology. Fact is, the movie trivializes politics, caricatures the Russkies who were then creating the space age with sputnik, and makes a roadrunner cartoon out of myth. Given all you know about myth, don’t you think you have the cart before the horse? The extraterrestrial gods come first, bringing the arts of civilization to primitives; then a more organized society creates the cult of the ancestors because they are in the Dreamtime of origin closer to the time of contact with the extraterrestrial gods. The new conservatism helps to keep the new priest class in power. Who says we should revere the ancestors? The priests, of course, who are threatened by innovation. Remember when Xeng Hu in the Ming dynasty sailed around the Indian Ocean in 1433 in huge ships and challenged the ancestor worship and Confucian conservatism of the Eunuch bureaucrats at court, the Eunuchs responded by burning his maps and records and moving the Ming capital inland from coastal Nanking. China was then the world’s most advanced civilization, but when it withdrew from world projection, the rapacious Portuguese and Spanish jumped in, with tragic consequences. Ancestor worship and the distrust of innovation is no great thing.

Interestingly enough in the pop Roswell Myth, the ETs are said to have warned our leaders of the danger of atomic weapons wiping out all life on earth–hence the fact that neither we nor the Russkies have used them in war–and in compensation the ETs are supposed to have given us all the new things that have lead to the rapid acceleration of postindustrial civilization since 1948. So the myth of the ETs as culture heroes bringing the arts of civilization and “cargo” (chez Diamond) to primitives still continues. The fact that the movie is about gods and not ancestors is also revealed when the NKVD colonel demands to see all knowledge and disintegrates in the process, as this is literal quote of the myth of Dionysos and Semele.

I think you need to add on a couple more paragraphs to your review to critique the movie. The decay of the 1970s mythic movie into a Hanna Barbera cartoon is also part of the decadence you are tracking.

Yours,

William Irwin Thompson

As for Obama, I hope he can win in Indiana, but it is more likely to go the way of Pennsylvania. But let’s hope. We, at least here in Maine, lined up the falling snow in a queue four blocks long to vote for Obama. And Maine is not a rich state; it is very working class.

Bill

Interesting note re: the possible Jerry Brown administration. Yet another instant of what could have been, if things had went a different way (Or are you saying that Lindisfarne is indirectly responsible for Reagan’s presidency by adding to Brown’s patchouli-scented patina?). It seems history–personal and collective–is littered with such instances; on a personal level it is easier to see the “greater good” that can come from what seems like a bad experience at the time, yet on the collective level it seems more difficult. Didn’t we think that things would change and people would rise up after living through eight years of Ronald Reagan? What about eight years of Bush? Do we need eight years of McCain/Rice/Huckabee?

My hope is that given the last eight years, and the fact that Obama is the first politician that most people born after John and Bobby Kennedy have actually been inspired by, enough slacker Gen-Xers will crawl out of their basements to vote. To quote your blog, Obama inspires us to “hope that there really is hope.”

Bill

To respond to your perhaps rhetorical question, unfortunately I don’t think Americans as a whole are capable of the relatively moderate degree of subtlety of cognition to see beyond the black-and-white vision stimulated by Rovian tactics, Republican morality, and mass media. A small percentage will, but not enough. However, I’m hoping that enough people vote for Obama despite of that, if only because he is hipper than Clinton or McCain. If Obama takes the reins in Chocolate City because enough college students fawn over him, I can live with that.

Jonathan

I wish our elections were limited to 60 days, to true debates on CSpan without questions from shallow network reporters, and that political ads were not allowed at all.

Yes, we will have a series of rolling thunder catastrophes and not a big bang apocalypse. And some of the catastrophes will not be visible and have already happened. You are not old enough to remember the last sentence of my second book, AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY (1971), so I will retype it here: “But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.”

I too shudder to think of our country under McCain or the Clintons. Since Bill Clinton has made over a hundred million dollars as an ex President, imagine the business he will be able to do on the back porch of the White House as First Laddie. The corruption of a Clinton regime could rival the worst sort of Latin American presidential dictatorship. I hope Obama can recover, but the Republican hate and attack machine hasn’t even started to work him over. People are going to have to be really smart this year and look through all the Rove tactics and swiftboating. Are we Americans capable of this?

WIT