Nothing Important Happened Today (On Revolutionary Events)

King George III (1738-1820)

One of my favourite stories concerns George III who, on July 4, 1776, wrote in his diary with regal indifference to unfolding events in the Colonies: Nothing important happened today. 

Royal biographers and historians - overly concerned with the facts as these people often are - insist that this is entirely false; one of those apocryphal stories that enters and continues to circulate within the popular imagination simply because people wish to believe it to be true. King George didn't even keep a diary, they protest, but, sadly for them, to no avail; even former Deputy Director of the FBI, Alvin Kersh, referenced this fictitious journal entry.         

I suppose, philosophically, why it interests is because it makes one question what constitutes an event of any description; that is to say, what has to happen for something to be recognised as a happening? 

Without necessarily wanting to posit an absolute ontological distinction, it's tempting to think of events as things that occur dynamically in time, contra objects that exist concretely in space. The cat that sits on the mat is an example of the latter; his grin, or the flick of his tail as he leaves the room, might better be thought of in terms of the former. But it could well be that events are simply unstable objects and objects monotonous events and that there is thus no essential metaphysical difference.

For Deleuze and Guattari, whom we might characterize as philosophers of the event, the task of philosophy is to invent concepts which express events, or, more precisely, extract them from the material facts of the world; i.e., concepts that allow one to engage with social and political reality in such a manner that one challenges received ideas and royal prerogative. 

No wonder, then, that George was thought keen to turn a blind eye to (revolutionary) events ...

What Big Extraterrestrial Eyes You Have

Matilda the Cat is something of an internet sensation, with thousands of followers on social media. But, despite her appearance, she's actually a perfectly normal moggie. The poor thing does suffer, however, from a rare condition in which the lenses of her eyes have spontaneously detached, causing blindness, and giving her the look of an alien being. 

Those who are interested in reading more about her case should visit: aliencatmatilda.com - her official website. Because, fascinating as her story is, what I really wish to discuss here is the origin of the idea that aliens - particularly those known as Greys - have large, black, glassy-looking eyes. 

Obviously it doesn't come from the actual world, because there are no entities from out of space visiting planet Earth on a regular basis and abducting large numbers of human beings in order to probe them and fuck with their minds. Many people - mostly Americans - might believe contrary to this and insist that there's a global conspiracy covering up the facts, but, alas, it is of course complete nonsense; a mad fantasy on behalf of the needy, the lonely, and the fearful. A bit like the belief in a loving - but vengeful - God. 

For God, like ET, is a convenient fiction. Not surprisingly therefore, we find that our idea of what an alien looks like first comes from literature: H. G. Wells to be precise, who, as long ago as 1893 was already imagining futuristic grey-skinned beings with big heads and large eyes. Then, in 1901, he depicted the natives of the moon (Selenites) in very similar terms. 

He was followed in this belief that alien races would conform closely to a certain body type, by the Swedish writer Gustav Sandgren who, in 1933, under the pen name of Gabriel Linde, published a sci-fi novel translated into English as The Unknown Danger. Here, once again, a race of aliens were described as chinless wonders possessing big bald heads, large gleaming eyes, and small mouths. 

Thirty years later and press reports of the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case described those doing the abducting in this identikit manner. All stereotypes are grey; but by now all Greys were stereotypical.

Spielberg unimaginatively gave us more of the same in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). And then, in the 1990s, Mulder and Scully chased very familiar looking aliens for nine seasons, The X-Files firmly establishing the link in the paranoid imagination between Greys and the military-industrial complex of the New World Order.

As Oscar Wilde once said, Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. The disappointing thing is how few people realise this (and how tragic the consequences can be).