Pathetic Earthlings
The poster for the cheesy 1980 film Flash Gordon contained an unforgettable tag line: "Pathetic Earthlings, WHO can save you now?" In the 45 years since then, I have had a sort of harmless hobby of figuring out what constitutes a P.E. Here is my 2025 definition: someone who immediately folds at the approach of totalitarianism, including Columbia administrators, television executives, managing partners of Wall Street law firms, and the CEO's and directors of Fortune 1000 firms. In fact, almost America's entire upper middle class and lower upper (!) class. Why do they give in? Cowardice; greed; ambition; and a kind of vain inertia ("I'm all right, Jack, so fuck you"). I must say that I did not expect that America's entire bourgeoisie would show the white flag overnight.
The 30,000 pound bomb
Speaking as we were of pathetic Earthlings. Wikipedia helpfully says: "The GBU-57 series MOP—the initials stand for Guided Bomb Unit and Massive Ordnance Penetrator—is a 30,000-pound (14,000 kg) class, 20.5-foot-long (6.2 m) precision-guided munition 'bunker buster' bomb developed by Boeing for the United States Air Force". One could of course respond (and not be so pathetic): "Wait, what? Who created that? Why? Doesn't that define us? What if all civilization remembered a thousand years from now was...." and so forth and so on. But, as much as I chatter nonstop, and have been monologuing endlessly in the Spectacle since 1995, I have an inkling that there are a small subset of statements, of sentences, to which I might fitly respond with silence. That is one. Imagine me sitting in the bar at Rowdy Hall in Amagansett, drinking a series of tequila shots,maybe one an hour, on a long autumn afternoon, and discussing all of the immense issues of the human future with another introspective human several barstools down. Then one of us says, "30,000 pound bunker buster bomb", and the other says nothing; we sit in silence looking down into our empty shotglasses. Then, after a suitable interval, one of us waves to the bartender for another round.
Good Night "Good Night Oppy"
This was a 2022 documentary about the Mars Rover. I started to stream it one night during a little fad a few months ago of watching and rewatching films about what we called in the 1960's "the space race". About a minute or two in, something seemed Pervasively Wrong. I stopped the film and did a Google search and confirmed my suspicions.
As a precocious child, I first had an Uncanny Valley sensation while watching a Cousteau documentary circa 1964. Cousteau navigated a small submersible into an underwater cave that, the solemn narrator intoned, had never been visited by humans before. The camera angle was above the submersible as we watched Cousteau unbuckle the hatch from inside, stick his head up and breathe the air which had been trapped there for thousands or millions of years. But, it occurred to me, how could Cousteau be the first human in the cave, if the camera man was already there? In the 1960's, one didn't make assumptions about drones or robotic vehicles or remote cameras on waldos, but even so the shot would have been impossible: the camera would have had to be clinging to the roof of a cave in the air pocket, and if it were on a mechanical arm, you would have seen the arm in the shot. No, I realized they had faked the scene, or as the publicist would have said, "re-enacted" it.
I had a similar moment a few years ago at the Hamptons film festival, watching a documentary about a Dutch man and his special needs brother. They were having a conversation in a car, as the man was driving his brother to a brothel to give him the gift of sexual exploitation, and I suddenly realized that the camera was outside the driver side window. And suspiciously stable.
Even as a child, I perceived the difference between real documentaries and fake ones. The real have the authenticity of grainy, shaky, poorly lit images and staccato sound. The fake ones have a cinematic quality which, as in these two instances, often rebuts any idea that this is a documentary. This is an ethical issue but also an epistemic one.
Good Night Oppy was too cinematic and many of the camera angles were also wrong. A Google search confirmed that much of the footage of the Rover was CGI. I turned it off immediately. A documentary based on real video the Rover took of itself, and possibly some scenes shot by the Mars helicopter, would have been gripping. A CGI version was empty and uninteresting.
A sententious, and, I fear, somewhat superficial parting shot: Good Night Oppy is a product of the same machinery which has vastly contributed to our inability to distinguish between, let's say, California wildfires and Pizzagate.
HTML
In 1995, to launch The Spectacle, I learned ten or twelve HTML commands, and since then have hand-coded every issue. HTML is like the ice cream scoop in my kitchen drawer that has been in my family since, I think, the 1950's: simple, unflashy (un-Flash-y, ha) and built to last forever. I experimented with generating HTML from Word or Open Office, but those contained unacceptable artifacts which messed up formatting or punctuation on my screen. A few years ago, I almost broke down and learned Wordpress, which itself is pretty archaic at this point. But my primitive HTML was really all I needed to make this page. Anyway, here's to HTML; I will reserve one of those tequila shots at Rowdy for this amazing and persistent code.