Con Games: Sky-Fi With <em>The Event</em>

"Look, up in the sky. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's......"

Sorry, Superman. It is actually The Event, the latest television happening on NBC. I'm not spoiling the plot by telling you the jet plane aimed at the President of the United States disappeared into the sky before it could wipe out the Obamian POTUS, his lovely wife, and their adorable child. In Part Deux we learned the plane had mysteriously landed just outside Yuma, Arizona, put there by a group of aliens who have mysteriously come to earth to live among us with 99 percent of our DNA.

We have thus been infiltrated and infected by an enemy who lives unknown and unseen among us, not unlike Communists during the Red Scare of the 1950s, and/or Socialists enamored of Obamacare in the new century. There is a more-than-even chance the Event aliens have been sleeping with actual 100 percent humans, though that remains to be seen. Like the late, once-great Heroes on the same network, wherein human genetic anomalies were always looking up in anticipation of The Big One, The Event gets traction because it neatly weaves televised entertainment with conspiracy theory.

In these shows, people look up to the sky only because very bad things are about to happen down here on the ground.

Why our fresh obsession with aliens and the undead and devils and exorcism? These stories are not exactly ripped from the headlines, as in Law and Order. There are no aliens. The undead are just dead. And if devils and exorcists didn't exist we would have to make them up.

Conspiracy theory, so fundamental to the American body politic, has become the universal metaphor for a world that no longer spins within our control. It's not just that there are aliens and vampires but that they have a plan for domination. It was 103 degrees Monday in Los Angeles, California, the hottest day on record in that city, so that people were cowering behind lamp posts to find any semblance of shade. The conspiracy begins!

Whether the poker-faced aliens in The Event or the vampires In Twilight and True Blood, nothing we see in America is as it seems. Why? Because the non-human (aliens, vampires, communists, liberals) have taken hold of our country. They have infected us with an alien form of DNA, first perverting and then destroying our way of life. And it's all part of a plot hatched at the highest reaches of government to do away with this land that we love.

We are therefore threatened. We are under attack by lifeforms that we no longer recognize as our own. The aliens have come down from the sky to get us. The undead have risen from the ground to take a bite of George Washington's apple with teeth sharpened for the task.

No one is safe and we are no longer sound. And keep this in mind, my fellow countrymen: election day is November 2. Keep your head down.