The Aliens

Been re-reading parts of William Burroughs' "The Place of Dead Roads," a sci-fi time traveling Western saga filled with gun battles, queer sex and extended philosophical riffs. But no matter what time period Burroughs wrote about, his mind was always on the present.

In this section his protagonist Kim Carsons, master gunfighter and humanist, reveals that an alien strain -- they -- is infesting human beings at an alarming rate and must be resisted: "Far from seeking an atheistic world as the communists do, we will force Christianity to compete for the human spirit."

Burroughs was aiming primarily at our domestic Born Again phalange, but you'll probably recognize some other actors currently on the global stage.

Kim now realizes that they can take over bodies and minds and use them for their purposes. So why do they always take over stupid, bigoted people or people who are retarded or psychotic? Obviously they are looking for dupes or slaves, not for intelligent allies. In fact their precise intention is to destroy human intelligence, to blunt human awareness and to block human beings out of space. What they are launching is an extermination program. And anyone who has sufficient insight to suspect the existence of a they is a prime target.

He listed the objectives and characteristics of the aliens . . .

1. They support any dogmatic religious system that tends to stupefy and degrade the worshippers. They support the Slave Gods. They want blind obedience, not intelligent assessment. They stand in the way of every increase in awareness. They only conceded a round earth and allowed the development of science to realize the even more stupefying potential of the Industrial Revolution.

2. They support any dogmatic authority. They are the arch-conservatives.

3. They lose no opportunity to invert human values. They are always self-righteous. They have to be right because in human terms they are wrong. Objective assessment drives them to hysterical frenzy.

4. They are parasitic. They live in human minds and bodies.

5. The Industrial Revolution, with its overpopulation and emphasis on quantity rather than quality, has given them a vast reservoir of stupid bigoted uncritical human hosts. The rule of the majority is to their advantage since the majority can always be manipulated.

6. Their most potent tool of manipulation is the word. The inner voice.

7. They will always support any measures that tend to stultify the human host. They will increase the range of arbitrary and dogmatic authority. They will move to make alcohol illegal. They will move to regulate the possession of firearms. They will move to make drugs illegal.

8. They are more at home occupying women than men. Once they have a woman, they have the male she cohabits with. Women must be regarded as the principal reservoir of the alien virus parasite. Women and religious sons of bitches. Above all, religious women.