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actualize the birth of Conscious freedom or to materialize that eldritch vision, the return to daylight consciousness of the twilight armies of the Elder Race—the emergence into mundane history of the Old Ones of the Night of Time...unless of course you've always thought it was something like that. Indeed as we of the winged T—Bird floated over the forested, two—lane Arizona highway in our rented van, dctouring to catch the Canyon in a sheer gauze of rain while making our angular route to Phoenix and the "Tim Beckley Annual UFO Convention"—umiles and outstretched miles across that reminiscent ribbon of blacktop beneath beaming arches of a double rainbow, L.A. behind in a rapidly—dissipating dream of departure through a smokering shroud—it felt as if one could be perfectly at peace with any tidy version of America, any hallowed parchment in an empty gallery... It all seemed perfectly permissible since this was the storybook version, these unspoiled hills and diamond skies—any retrogressive estimate, any gradeschool atavism molded again to manageable proportions and all ringed 'round with the safely—habitable, politely conformable world would suffice and survive in an atmosphere so equal to the simplicity such sentiment required; all could be sustained without subscribing to a single thing. Here in this very place if anywhere at all that ultimate vision of man's politicized peace could find its suitably pastoral correlative—here in the very place where in It was all like a typical Hitchcock movie—opening shots of a bucolic American burg clean as the angle on a T-square and background music belonging to Mister Rogers' Neighborhood—but wait, that set—up innocence is by now dead giveaway that there's something rotten, basically awful lurking just below the kodachrome surface! The now-famous Lynch would continue a brain—damaged version of such a theme as the '80s slouched toward the inevitable '90s, rendering the whole wholesome scene as a surreal commercial skimming over the happy hamlet on the camera—wing of a golden oriole, over treetops and firehouse and across leaf—rustled schoolyard dropping softly on a garden beneath the sunny shale of which, lifted just a little, we see a crawling beetle in the bright—green blades, and leveraged a little more so as to rip up some of the overgrown slipgrass we begin to see first signs of real vermin...and as the rock is peeled back like the back of a skull from a rotted corpse the whole miasmal swarm of centipedes and maggot—brood overspills in soundtrack amplification like the munching of a million mites on gristle... So one muses while taking in the pine and scented cedar of whistle—clean Flagstaff (that evening, indeed, first glimpse at the paper in the motel room...two girls attacked by unknown assailant on that very highway, where the roadsigns like abandoned Burma~shave boards warn: Prison Zone; don't pick up hitchhikers). Even as the lovely, meditative miles spooled off from that veritable ribbon of two-lane one couldn't help but consider how far it all was from the spirit of Easy Wider which it nonetheless evoked...indeed "What a long strange trip it's been"! One recalled that most famous of celluloid scenes from the '60s, in which Hopper and Fonda gleefully conspire to get Jack Nicholson's straight-Southern—lawyer stoned for the first time beneath a wooded American night—sky, and Nicholson proceeds to take Themon a trip as he loosens up and begins the celebrated soliloquy as to how those satellites are often saucers in disguise and how the spacepeople have been monitoring this planet for ages—one remembered the dream—lidded dubiety of Hopper's "Billy", and Fonda's progressive facial register of his trademark "far out..." Suppose, in our collectively stoned condition, the scene doesn't stop there but goes right straight on—in an exponentially paranoic time—ellipse—as Nicholson keeps puffing and proclaims "yes, and not only have the spacebeings been monitoring us but they've actually made themselves known to our government and have made a secret pact with the military at the highest levels, you know..." 63 T-Bird_Vs_The_Flying_saucers.htm Otherwise, you've got quite a surprise coming. fact it was most perfectly belied...