PART II of “THE THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM”
—Michael Ceraolo, S. Euclid, OH
In the forty Earth years
after the publication of Wells' book
there had arisen a few new media
with the ability to deliver stories
to many more people much more quickly
One of these new media
was the showing of moving pictures
(only recently with dialogue added;
such pictures for many years
had live or recorded musical accompaniment
and thus were never truly silent
as the Terrans usually termed them),
but
the people had to leave their homes
and go to gathering places called theaters
in order to view such showings
(eventually Earthlings would develop
the ability to deliver such pictures
directly into people's homes,
and
still later develop the ability
to deliver such pictures directly
to people's portable electronic devices.
We will encounter such transmissions
in the third part of this history)
Another of the new media,
and
the one that concerns us in this part of the poem,
was what the Terrans called radio:
sounds traveling at the speed of light
via waves captured by a receiver,
then
converted back into sounds heard by the listener.
These waves could be broadcast
to hundreds,
thousands,
even millions
of receivers at the same time,
with
the added fact that more than one person
could listen to a receiver
"What is heard on the air is transitory,
as fleeting as time itself,
and it therefore seems real"
and thus
"the radio has to some extent
destroyed for the listener
his capacity to distinguish
between real and imaginary events"
And
this would be brought home to us
by a broadcast on the night
of October 30, 1938
(as Terrans reckoned time)
That was the date when the concept of
"fakery in allegiance to truth"
would have,
if not its greatest exposure,
its greatest effect up to that time
A man named Orson Welles
(what was it about Earthlings
with some variation of the name Wells?)
and his Mercury Theater on the Air
broadcast a radio play,
an adaptation of Wells' novel
that had us this time invading
the United States instead of England,
and
structuring the show as a series
of fake news broadcasts interrupting
the purported “real” programming
And
those fake news broadcasts were complete
with idiot-in-the-street interviews
and the opinions of alleged experts
Just like the first Wells, the second Welles
had us winning at the outset,
and
not even the stirring speech by the actor
portraying the fake high government official
("confront this destructive adversary with
a nation united,
courageous,
and consecrated
to the preservation of human supremacy
in this earth")
could inspire the humans
to do what the germs eventually did
But
we had already solved the germ problem;
in fact,
there were even some of us Terran-side
at the time of the broadcast,
a fact
unbeknownst to the Earthlings
What interested us more than the broadcast itself
was the reaction of the Earthlings who heard it;
though
the reports of widespread panic
supposedly caused by hearing it
were greatly overblown,
for many reasons,
by the then-dominant print media,
it showed us two things:
first,
many humans have deeply ingrained in them
"the need to spread the news",
often
even before confirming it is news;
and second,
"the overwhelming majority of the American people
do not have even and elementary knowledge of science"
We would put those two things to use
in the decades-long end game
leading to the third time. . .
_________________
Today's LittleNip:
You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
—Carol Ann Duffy
_________________
Something different today: the second half of Michael Ceraolo’s long poem. The first part was posted on Medusa on 11/18/17 (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). Thanks, Michael!
—Medusa
Celebrate poetry!
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