Aliens Are Responsible For COVID-19– A Post-Factual World That We Should All Embrace

Rocky Pollitt, a young man of intelligence, ability, and some talent believed that aliens were behind COVID-19.  Not Wuhan rogue laboratories, African monkeys, or Shanghai poultry markets, but an invasion from an advanced civilization from a constellation many light years away which introduced a lethal recombinant DNA variant into an ordinary flu virus and for good measure transformed the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines into virulent pathogens.

Unless you obey our order, you will be destroyed, its emissaries said, either by the virus itself or the vaccines which we have controlled; and so it was that the anti-vaxxer movement took hold – not as a revolt against big government, or for fears of autism and genetic deformity, but because of an alien command.

Those who were most responsive to the aliens’ injunction either had prior experience or a good historical memory. Over sixty years ago aliens had ‘enriched’ America’s drinking water supply with fluoride, a substance which weakens individual will, degrades enterprise and purposeful action, and which permitted easy alien access to government and private security systems and assured an easy take over of the planet.  

So having lived under an alien autocracy for decades, this new dictate was no surprise.  “Wait for our way”, the emissaries informed, “and you will be forever immune from earthly ills”. 

Rocky had grown up aware of this alien presence and had always known that Earth in all its putrefaction turned out this way because of ‘other’ influences.  He had been brought up as a good Western conservative, believer in free enterprise, speech, and worship; and had been so convinced of the rock-solid, immutable rightness of the principles of the Founding Fathers, and was sorry to see this noble heritage ruined by alien forces.

Wait for our vaccine", alien emissaries said.  "It will do you good". 

“Think of the baby”, said Rocky’s wife who began her subtle, insistent, and ultimately successful attempts to bring her husband down to earth. Aliens there might be, she said, but life must go on; and in those simple homilies were writ today’s dilemma. 

Rocky tried to understand the new world order, the one in which superior alien intelligences were supreme, where the authority of Jesus was no longer ‘it’, and where dutiful human responses were vague. 

Marital affairs, the sexual dynamics between men and women, seemed immune to alien influence.  There were still diapers and Gerber’s to buy and the rent to be paid.  “No, God, No!” shouted Rocky looking skyward, but the house was not yet paid for, the land in arrears and the child still growing.

COVID has not been a simple affair, and reactions to it complex

So  it is perhaps unfair to single out Rocky for his 'alternateness'. His was the perfect storm – a radically conservative American angry that the election of 2020 had been stolen, a believer in conspiracy theories, the reality of aliens among us, and an idealist. Armageddon was on its way, not on the watch of fundamentalist Christians, but on that of powers from Alpha Centauri.

In both cases the end of the world signified the best of all possible human outcomes, life ever after.  What would the alien afterlife be like? Rocky wondered. Who knew, but superior intelligences from outer space were likely to expand our puny spiritual notions.

“Get vaccinated”, Rocky’s wife pleaded; but he, still believing that alien homunculi would be injected into his bloodstream, demurred and refused.

It is hard enough for a fundamentalist Christian to live in the modern world with he Devil loose on the territory. At the very least he has Jesus to protect him.  Jesus of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the avenging angel sent by God to rid the world of Satan; Jesus the Holy Spirit guide to a better world, a redeemer, a savior.  But Rocky had no such assurances.  No intermediaries between him and alien supremacy.   He had no intercessors, no one to plead his case. He understood and granted alien supremacy, but could not ask any intercession from it.

Most Christians have moral impasses – moments of decisive truth – but  these moments are between them and their God.  Because Rocky introduced aliens into the equation -  three dimensional moral chess – it was no surprise that he  was befuddled. Not only did he have to consider the moral consequences of absenting himself from earthly codes, but wondered what and how the bits of alien-introduced DNA were influencing his choices.

America is a great country, accepting as it is of alternate views of reality.  Rocky was given space to sort out his peculiar cosmology, given room to vaccinate or not, and encouraged to follow his spirit.  Public health was put on hold but anyone of Rocky’s ilk knew that such venal concerns were of marginal importance. 

The pandemic passed, Rocky and his family were spared, and thanks to alien politics another generation of Pollitts were born and survived, and no one seemed to notice that they were all as nutty as fruitcakes