To Serve Man is a classic science fiction short story by Damon Knight, as well as one of the most frightening episodes of the American television series, The Twilight Zone. For those who do not know the story, a spaceship crewed by three metre-tall aliens sporting big heads and shiny kaftans, the Kanamits, arrives on Earth. They promise endless, free energy without pollution, the cultivation of Earth’s deserts to eliminate world hunger, and – most importantly – to share technology that will do away with warfare by rendering weapons inert.
They make their pitch at the UN, and the world lines up for this cornucopia of free lunches descending, quite literally, from the heavens. Interstellar, benevolent populism, it seems. But there is trouble in paradise.
One of the aliens accidentally leaves behind a small booklet that a cryptographer gains possession of. After months of work, the title is decrypted and reads, To Serve Man. That sounds harmless, yes?
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Meanwhile, the Kanamits are recruiting humans to visit the aliens’ home world, and multitudes line up to take up these trips of a lifetime. But, just as the head cryptographer is about to enter an alien ship to embark on one of those trips, his deputy rushes over to him to say she has worked out the contents of the book – it’s a cookbook, and people hurrying to join those tours are being rounded up as prime rib. As things unfold in America these days, it can almost feel as if the Kanamits really have arrived; that they really have promised us the universe; but that they are actually working overtime to consume us instead.
Indeed, our circumstances seem on the verge of being an episode of The Twilight Zone as well. Sadly, our responses to these current outrages can easily become a disassociative process. With each new horror, there is either the tendency for many to say, it cannot get much worse than it is now, and that self-correcting mechanisms must finally begin to kick in.
Or, more terrifyingly, we have already sailed past a point of no return as all of these excesses have become normalised, and the next excess will just be one more inevitable step downward. For example, the growing recruitment and assignment of legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel to carry out raids has now progressed from merely being violent and dangerous to actually being lethal to citizens. Active protesters are taking the brunt of such tactics, but citizens who are more or less minding their own business are being detained before reluctantly being released from illegal custody.
If it hadn’t actually occurred, the recent detention of several Oglala Sioux Native Americans for their failure to produce proof of citizenship to ICE personnel (Did ICE expect a selfie of their ancestors crossing the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago?) could have been perfect raw material for a Saturday Night Live skit. Who, earlier, would have thought that such actions were becoming the norm – and in white bread Minneapolis, in the national capital of “nice”?
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