Canto Twenty-Six – On the Moon Gundahl
Farbick and Starbright sat together on the bench outside the fat Galtorrian’s office in the moon base where the Tellerons were now prisoners. Biznap was inside arguing vehemently about something. The two lizard-men, apparently the only lizard-men on the entire moon, were arguing from a position of strength and superiority, though Farbick could plainly see that the Telleron landing party out-numbered them, seemed smarter than them, and definitely had better and more capable technology.
“Do you think Commander Biznap will secure our freedom?” Starbright asked guilelessly. Her large green eyes were shimmering with tremulous female uncertainty. She was attractive in ways no other female had ever seemed to Farbick before.
“He’s the best officer and negotiator we have in Xiar’s entire fleet,” Farbick answered, “so, no… probably not. We are not very competent when it comes to things like this.”
“We are doomed? Will they eat us?”
“Well, Biznap couldn’t bargain his way out of a paper sack,” said Farbick. “Especially in view of the fact that we can’t really let these cannibal lizards get their claws on high tech devices like cloaking fields, invisibility cloaks, and skortch rays… certainly not star drives for space ships. But a paper sack is made of paper, after all. We could punch our way out.”
“What do you mean?”
“These lizard men are not very smart. They are not very well armed, as long as they don’t acquire and learn how to use our weapons. They seem tough on the outside, but I think we could beat them in a fight.”
Starbright looked at him skeptically. “You think so?”
“We need to take the initiative. I’m sure if the three of us, as Tellerons, worked together and eliminated the little warrior-guy, the fat one would surrender easily. He doesn’t appear to be the kind who fights his own battles.”
“You are very brave and haves been through lots of difficult situations, but I’m a poor, frail female with skills I learned in the egg, but no practical experience. I would end up causing you and brave Commander Biznap to die needlessly. It would be a terrible thing.”
“We are not going to give up and be beaten so easily,” said Farbick. “If I learned one thing in my time as a captive among Earther primates, it is that every individual has inner resources that they may not even know they have. Together we are more formidable than we have ever let ourselves believe.”
“You really think so?”
Farbick looked at her lovely round face and earnest expression. He thought about the kissing thing. He had seen Alden and Gracie Morrell do it. He had seen Harmony Castille and Commander Biznap do it. It was a strange Earther thing, but if he turned his face just a little to the right, he could…
“What are you… mmmph… doing?” She looked shocked.
“It is an Earther custom, expressing respect and admiration.”
“Oh… it is?”
“And love.”
Her eyes lit up at the Earther human concept that had seemingly been the only thing to thwart the invasion of Earth. He could see she was intrigued. Old reruns of I Love Lucy and Bewitched were part of every Telleron tadpole’s how-to-be-like-an-Earther training, programmed directly into their developing brains while in their amniotic egg-sacks. Tellerons were gestated in eggs and programmed with learning programs until they were the equivalent of an Earther eight-year-old, at which point they were all saturated with the kissing thing poured directly into embryonic brains, and ready to be born.
“Like Darren and Samantha? In Bewitched?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She leaned in and repeated the gesture. She improved on it. It lasted a very long time and Farbick felt that she liked it nearly as much as he did. They could make tadpoles together… even if he did have inferior Fmoogish blood in his veins.
At that moment they were interrupted by Commander Biznap.
“Good news! I have secured our release, Farbick!”
“What did you promise them?” asked Farbick.
“That we would strip the entire available tech out of the wing and leave it here, along with Starbright to teach them how to use it all.”
“And how do we get Starbright back?”
“Oh, uh… we don’t. When they are finished learning how to use the technology, they will eat her.”
*****
Starbright
Catch a Falling Star 
Who Do You Listen To?
There was a time when you could turn on the TV news and listen to what you were fairly confident was actually news. Walter Cronkite on CBS always seemed to really “Tell it like it is.” He never seemed to put a spin on anything. No one doubted anything he said when he reported space missions from NASA or the assassination of JFK. You never had to wonder, “What is Cronkite’s real agenda?” His agenda was always to tell me the news of the day.
The question of politics and ideas was always one of, “Which flavor tastes best in my own personal opinion?” Because I was weirdly and excessively smart as a kid, I often listened to some of the smartest people accessible to a black-and-white RCA television set.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal were both identifiably smarter than me. I loved to listen to them argue. They were equally matched. They respected each other’s intellect, but they hated each other with a passion. Buckley was a Fascist-leaning conservative ball of hatred with a giant ego. Vidal was a self-contradictory Commie-pinko bastard child of liberal chaos with an equally giant ego. I never agreed with either of them on anything, but their debates taught me so much about life and politics that I became a dyed-in-the-wool moderate because of them. They were the key evidence backing up the theory that you needed two sides in the political argument to hammer out good ideas of solid worth. And, though I didn’t trust either side of the argument fully, I always trusted that both were basing their ideas on facts.
When I was young I identified as a Republican like my father, and thought George Will was a reasonable opinion-leader. After all, a man who loves baseball can’t be a bad guy.
Then along came Richard Nixon and the faith-shaking lies of Watergate. The media began to be cast as the villain as they continued to show the violence and horrors of Vietnam on TV and tell us about campus unrest and the terrible outcomes of things like the Kent State Massacre. The President suggested routinely that the media was not using facts as much as it was using opinions to turn people away from the Nixon administration’s answer to the problems of life in the USA. I tried to continue believing in the Republican president right up until he resigned and flew away in that helicopter with his metaphorical tail between his legs (I am trying to suggest he was a cowardly dog, not that I want to make a lewd joke about poor Dick Nixon… or is that Little Dick Nixon, the man who let me down?)
And then along comes Ronald Reagan, the man acting as a “Great President” because he was a veteran actor and knew how to play the part. And with him came Fox News.
Roger Ailes, a former adviser to Nixon, got together with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a man who would commit any crime necessary to sell more newspapers, and created a news channel that would pump out conservative-leaning propaganda that would leave Joseph Goebbels envious. I make it a rule to only listen to them and their views on anything when I feel the need to get one-foot-hopping, fire-spitting mad about something. So, since, I am a relatively happy person in spite of a long, hard life, you can understand why I almost never watch Fox News. They are truly skilled at making me mad and unhappy. And I suspect they do the same for everyone. They deal in outrage more than well-thought-out ideas.
News media came under a cloud that obscured the border between facts and partisan opinions. And conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the shouty-pouty angry news. So, I began to wonder where to turn for a well-reasoned and possibly more liberal discussion of what was politically and ethically real. I found it in the most surprising of places.
I turned to the “Excuse me, this is the news” crews on Comedy Central where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were busy remaking news reporting as a form of comedy entertainment. It is hard work to take real news and turn it into go-for-the-chuckles statements of fact that make you go, “Hmm, that’s right, isn’t it?” Stewart and Colbert consistently examine how other news organizations hurl, vomit forth, and spin the news, and by so doing, they help you examine the sources, get at the truth, and find the dissonance in the songs everyone else is singing. And these are very smart men. As I said, the intellectual work they do is very difficult, harder than merely telling it like it is. I know because I have tried to do the same myself. And is it really “fake news”? It seems to me like it is carefully filtered news, with the poisons of propaganda either surgically removed, or neutralized with antidotes of reason and understanding.
So, Mickey listens to comedians to get his news. Is that where you expected this article to end up? If not, where do you get your news?
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