James Hynes

I love the History Channel. It's not just my default viewing choice, the place I always end up when there's nothing particular on that I want to watch, but it's often my destination as well. Some of my faves redound to my credit--The Universe and the superb How the Earth Was Made—and some of them don't--UFO Hunters, Life After People—but suffice it to say the channel no longer deserves its old derisive nickname, the Hitler Channel. It also has a (sort of deserved) reputation as a politically conservative channel, and god knows, there are a lot of red-meat, guy-centric shows like Patton 360 or those 300-ish recreations of ancient battles or the Saturday afternnoon marathons of Band of Brothers. But there are also less chest-thumping shows like America Eats, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about potato chips, and The History of Sex, where you can hear that old leftie Peter Coyote narrate a lot of high-toned soft-core, complete with lubricious old Japanese paintings and racy carvings from Southeast Asia. So, in the interest of trying to nail down exactly what the History Channel is all about, I have compiled a rough list of the life lessons I've learned from my couch, often in the wee hours of the morning:

1. We're All Doomed

The History Channel is your one-stop shop for apocalypse porn. Mega Disasters features everything from coastal cities being wiped out by tsunamis to the instigation of a new ice age by supervolcanos to all of life on Earth being exterminated by a gamma ray burst, while the channel's various Nostradamus, Bible code, Mayan doomsday calendar, and Book of Revelation shows feature more or less the same, hyperkinetically edited clips of imminent social collapse and (I think) the same breathless narrator. All these disasters don't necessarily jibe with each other, but I think it's safe to say that a) it's a miracle we're here at all, and b) we all better have our affairs in order by December 21, 2012. Given the human propensity to universalize one's own particular situation—in this case, my 53-year-old guy's propensity to read the imminent collapse of civilization in my own fear of mortality—how could I not love this stuff?

2. Nothing We've Ever Made Will Survive Us

Or, everything rots. This I know from my latest guilty History Channel pleasure, Life After People, which presents more or less accurate science (as far as I can tell) based on a millenarian premise, to wit, that every human being on the planet is raptured at the same instant, leaving our pets, houses, and skyscrapers to fend for themselves against the wrath of Gaia. Or something like that. This show has a rather pornlike aspect as well, since no matter what the putative subject is, every episode is pretty much the same every week—the slow decay of a particular city followed at intervals of a day, a week, a year, a thousand years, etc.—and it always ends with the more or less the same money shot of a skyscraper—the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Space Needle in Seattle, those giant twin towers in Kuala Lumpur—crumbling slowly to the ground in all its pornographic CGI glory. Along the way, every other human accomplishment that I care about—mainly books and movies and music—will have crumbled to dust centuries before. But then, there'll be nobody left to read or watch or hear them except the feral descendants of my cats, so what difference does it make? Why get out of bed in the morning? I ask you.

3. People Will Believe Anything...

...no matter how little evidence there is. See #1 above, especially the Nostradamus, et al., programming. I'd bemoan the fact that How the Earth Was Made shares the same cable address as UFO Hunters, and wonder just what conceiveable demographic could possibly encompass people who watch both, if it weren't for the fact that I am that demographic. Le UFO Hunters, c'est moi. I still get a thrill out of this stuff, even as Rational, former Science Nerd Jim is screaming at the screen, "It's a fake, for chrissakes! That video doesn't prove anything!" I can only say in my defense that I get a deeper, more satisfying thrill from learning (from How the Earth Was Made) that the hills on the western shore of Loch Ness were once part of the Adirondacks. Or maybe I'm just getting the thrill off of the name "Loch Ness." Who knows?

4. Plumbing Is Civilization

There's a fair amount of snobbery involved in dismissing the History Channel, especially since it doesn't traffic (usually) in the sort of gender-race-and-class social history that is the staple of academic history these days. But I think lefties should cut them a little slack, because it's one of the few places that gives due credit to both engineering and the practical knowledge of working class people. I'm not talking about Ice Road Truckers or Ax Men, necessarily, but rather Modern Marvels, which, if I flip past, I'm immediately stuck to like a fly to fly paper. Watch a few of these, like the ones about the history of pavement, or about dredgers, or about making sausage, or about distilling, and you realize what the real basis of civilization is. Suddenly Life After People makes a lot more sense. Say, just for instance, that not everybody vanishes all at once, but only the novelists and filmmakers and musicians. Guys and gals like me, in other words. Life would be a lot less colorful and interesting, but everything would still work, and the Space Needle wouldn't fall down in a thousand years. But say it's the plumbers and electricians and civil engineers who are raptured (which is, let's face it, a lot more likely than the other way around), leaving just guys like me who can't do anything more technical than change a lightbulb. In that case, basically, let's face it, we're all fucked. Civilization would be over. We all could get by without midlist novelists, but we'd all die without plumbers. Hence, plumbing is civilization. QED.

5. Deep Down, We're All the Same

It turns out ice road truckers and lumberjacks are every bit as backbiting, manipulative, judgmental, and just plain bitchy as New Jersy housewives. Who knew?

6. The World Is a Complex, Strange, and Wonderful Place

Yes it is, in spite of all of the above. We're not in it for long, we're not very nice to each other when we're here, and none of anything we do will probably amount to much (is my midlife crisis showing?), but watch a few episodes of The Universe or How the Earth Was Made and you can't help but marvel at the sheer, strange beauty of the world we live in. I was joking above about the quality of the thrill I get from UFO Hunters versus the pleasure I get from How the Earth Was Made, but it's true: UFO Hunters is fun, but laughably credulous, whereas the History Channel's genuine science programming can really pry your mind open, in a good way. Or at least it will until the Mayan calendar runs out in 2012, and the gamma ray burst cooks the planet like a microwaved baked potato.

I got a delicious little thrill up my spine today from this, courtesy of the Guardian website. It's a British radio interview last month with Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo astronaut, and the sixth man to walk on the moon (that we know of, ho ho). In the interview, Mitchell says that he knows there is extraterrestrial life, and that they've visited us, because he's been briefed by government officials about the truth of the Roswell incident, among other things. Of course, he also says, according to this Guardian article, that his kidney cancer was cured long-distance by a Canadian named Adam Dreamhealer. Soooo, bearing that in mind, the interview's kinda thrilling to listen to, if, like me, you're a Scully with Mulder tendencies. At the very least, the breathless, jokey incredulity of the interviewer makes it worth listening to.

Okay, got that? I e-mailed the link to, well, let's just say, a friend, because why drag him into this publically? And he asked me by return e-mail what I thought: was there seriously anything to this, or is Mitchell one of those Apollo moonwalkers who's been driven round the bend by his experience? Well, on the one hand, the guy has a Ph.D from MIT and he was fucking astronaut, okay? On the other hand, Adam Dreamhealer. Which makes it, as my late, great dad used to say, six of one, half a dozen of the other. But, just for the record, I don't believe it (though I think Mitchell does), but I wish I did.

See, there are two Jims when it comes to this subject. One is the kid who spent much of his childhood in the 60s reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as every paperback on UFOs for which he could scrape together the cash, from semi-respectable ones like The Interrupted Journey and Incident at Exeter (which my mother tolerated) to really lurid ones (which I hid from Mom), such as the book that posed the question on the back cover, "Is There a Galactic High Command?" Let's call this Jim, say, Lizard Brain Jim, because that's where he still lives, and Lizard Brain Jim really really really wants Mitchell's interview to be the first trickle through the levee of cover-up and denial, culminating with benign Zeta Reticulans shaking hands (or whatever) with President Obama on the White House lawn on the afternoon of Inauguration Day. After which, over the following weeks, they will divulge the secrets of faster-than-light travel and teleportation; cure cancer and end racism, hunger, and war; reveal whether God and the Higgs boson really exist (and if they're the same thing); and show a middle-aged midlist writer how to make a living without having to take a day job. This is the Jim who, even now, still secretly devours books about UFOs, alien abduction, crop circles, and cattle mutilations with the avidity other middle-aged guys devote to internet porn. This is the Jim who never misses an episode of UFO Hunters on the History Channel, the Jim who made a road trip to Roswell once, the Jim who actually saw a UFO once (kinda) when he was a teenager and will tell you all about it with very little prompting. Okay, usually, no prompting at all.

Then, there's Forebrain Jim, who at the same tender age as he was reading Childhood's End and Flying Saucers: Serious Business was also reading every popular physics and astronomy book he could get his hands on, especially the works of Fred Hoyle and George Gamow, and who was planning on studying astronomy in college. This is the Jim who taught himself the constellations from his parents' back yard, and eventually learned how to tell the difference between the planet Venus, a meteorite, a satellite, a jetliner, and, you know, the mothership. This is the Jim who, today, still keeps up a bit with popular physics books (and who even has an ill-informed opinion about string theory), and who knows why it's really really really unlikely, even if there are intelligent ETs, that they would cross vast reaches of interstellar space to make goofy patterns in Wiltshire wheat fields, suck the blood out of cows in Colorado, and diddle middle-class white folks in their sleep. And, since they unfortunately share the same brainpan (where they coexist like Mulder and Scully, though unfortunately without secretly liking each other), at the same moment as Lizard Brain Jim is geeking out over UFO Hunters (or the History Channel's bottomless store of cheesy international Roswells: Russia's Roswell, China's Roswell, Brazil's Roswell, etc.) Forebrain Jim is rolling his eyes, sighing audibly, and often laughing out loud at the sheer, pseudoscientific silliness of the show, especially at the staggering credulity of the Hunters themselves, especially the guy in the MUFON baseball cap, who is positively eager to believe that every blinking light in the sky is an extraterrestrial roadster, that the same government that can't even lie convincingly about Iraq and Katrina could keep dead aliens at Wright-Patterson AFB secret for 60 years, and that lunchtime in the break room at Groom Lake is like the cantina scene from Star Wars.

So there you have it, my Hegelian/Reticulan dialectic. (Only one dialectic of many, of course.) Put a gun to his head, and Forebrain Jim will tell you, don't be an idiot, of course I don't believe in UFOs (even if he did see one). But bear in mind that, even with the gun to his head, Lizard Brain Jim is keeping his fingers crossed behind his back and hoping that they're really Out There, hiding behind the moon where we can't see them. Because he's thinking, just like Lady Brett in A Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"

This Just In: But wait, there's more! Bigfoot's real, too...well, maybe. At any rate, there's an article about it in yesterday's New York Times, "Two Georgians Say They Have Bigfoot's Body." And there's even a picture, I kid you not, of a dead bigfoot in somebody's basement freezer. Looks like a gorilla suit with some organ meat tossed in. Did I mention I sometimes watch Monsterquest, too?

Oh, Well: Turns out the two DNA samples collected from the Bigfoot in the Freezer are from a human being and an opossum. And the Bigfoot in the Freezer really is a gorilla suit with some leftovers. Sigh.

Messin' With Sasquatch: Turns out you don't want to piss off sasquatch hunters, either.