Smoothing out things: AN ALIEN CONSPIRACY.

Some efforts to smooth out things have been around for a while, like filling in POT HOLES, which is a spring rite, and filling in facial WRINKLES, which has become a rite of passage. There’s also AUTO-TUNE to smooth out the voices of pop singers, manipulating their pitch and nudging them toward the desired note.  Yeah, yeah, you say, we know all that. But do you know the larger context? These smoothing efforts are part of an ALIEN CONSPIRACY! Some outer space nation wants to norm us so that we will no longer be able to tell the difference between humans and robot body snatchers when the invasion starts!

Cher looks invaded already, as does Liza Minelli. Mick Jagger’s cratered face, on the other hand, has so far defied alien efforts to smooth out his wrinkles and make him look normal.  Ditto with Clint Eastwood of empty chair fame. He is past norming. His telomeres are way too short. Telomeres, in case you haven’t heard, are the shields that keep your cells from aging.

You see this is the latest trend (or the latest tool of ALIEN CONSPIRATORS): equal telomeres for everyone! Check out the NY Times of 21 April. They’ve started measuring them, and pretty soon your local hair salon will peddle telomere extensions. It could be the end of dying, meaning you’ll never inherit your parents’ nest egg.

On the positive side, you’ll never have to suffer through another election campaign, because what’s the use of voting after all politicians have been normed. The ALIEN CONSPIRATORS will standardize them to telegenic men and women spouting platitudes in the language of your choice. They’ve got Justin Trudeau in the bag already: dazzling white teeth, pablum in French and English. Harper is still struggling with the alien forces, withholding smiles except of the most tight-lipped kind. The aliens almost got him last Christmas (remember when he sat at the piano and sang nicey-nicey Beatle songs?), but he escaped in the nick of time and reverted to his old dour accountant self.

Speaking of Justin Trudeau and nice. Looking for the root causes of the Boston bombing, he came up with a cogent reason. It happened because SOMEONE FELT EXCLUDED (Globe & Mail, 18 April).  The ALIEN CONSPIRATORS will take care of that. They’ll make everyone feel included and connected at all times. Why do you think they created Facebook? The aliens will have you surrounded with FRIENDS. You’ll be horribly stuck in the sink hole of on-line friendship. You won’t be able to go on with your life.  You’ll be mired in a mass of cute cat and dog pics and smothered by the sweetness of babies. You won’t see the ALIENS for all your FRIENDS.

Another human quality the ALIEN CONSPIRATORS want to eliminate is the joy of bullying, although it will only work if bullies start reading books. Apparently the CONSPIRATORS have swamped the publishing world with anti-bully books. They’ve even persuaded publishers to start their own anti-bullying campaigns and gotten their full cooperation. After all, it gives the publishers a chance to look good AND promote their products. I guess the quality of hucksterism will stay put. The aliens will have to deal with that.

Another way of taking the snark out of bullies and norming us all into bland and benevolent beings are CHIPLETS, now developed in Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Center (NY Times, 21 April). They’ll provide supple, sensitive skin for our hands and make us sensitive all over.

Once the CHIPLET programme has kicked in, we’re done. We’ll all be indistinguishable nicey-nice.  And the ALIEN CONSPIRATORS will take over for good.

What I like about the Petraeus Affair.

Monday was Remembrance Day. Not coincidentally, there were a lot of military faces in the media, average age creeping up to 90. So, you know what’s really heartening about the Petraeus affair? Two women, 40 and under, are at the centre of it. Yup. Youngish. Women. With toned arms. And hair you could lose your hand in (quoting Junot Diaz here). Yet those types don’t often make it to the top of the military news. Even Entertainment news, traditionally reserved for the young and bodacious, has been invaded by old-timers. You don’t think so? Read my post of 30 August on Geriatric Movies.

The dental implant smile is everywhere, oldsters looking into the cameras, beagle-eyed, sadly painful, nutcracker-style.

IN POLITICS Castro,86, half-dead and scoffing at death rumours. Baroness Thatcher,85, brain-dead, but reanimated in a bio pic by Meryl Streep. And Mao, fully dead but still staring down on the Forbidden City from IMAX-sized posters.

IN RELIGION, the Pope,85, recently declared that IT IS BEAUTIFUL TO BE OLD:telegraph.co.uk. He and the Dalai Lama, a youthful 77, rule their congregations de facto, while Ayatollah Khomeini is only present in the spirit and in glowering images, shaggy brows disapproving of all fun.

IN MUSIC, the average age of oldsters drops to the 70s. OK, Leonard Cohen is an elegant old codger and still has poetry in his heart. But can we get over Mick (“I got nasty habits”) Jagger and Wrinkled Richards? And what’s with Ancient Babyface Paul McCartney, rumoured to be dead since ’69 and surfacing alive once again after a terrifying experience. His helicopter became DISORIENTATED, as hecklerspray.com tells us. So, please, please, can we move on to tech-house music now? The synthesizers always look good.

IN LITERATURE, kudos to Alice Munro. She’s the exception to the old-timer rule. Refused to be considered for the Giller Prize, remembered that there is a next generation.

No kudos for octogenarian Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities, best-seller of yore and master of overstuffed prose today. What can I say about his latest book, BACK TO BLOOD? Let me quote the master himself: AahhhuhwaaaAHHHHHock! I second the Globe & Mail reviewer: Toss Wolfe’s mimetic nonsense on the bonfire.

And then there is Herman Wouk, another former best-selling author. Reviewer Michael Posner coyly admits he thought Wouk was dead, but he’s 97 and alive. So, OK, I’ll go with Posner on that one. Respect your elders and concede: At that age WOUK SHOULD BE SALUTED FOR GETTING OUT OF BED, let alone writing a novel.

The merciful thing about authors: You don’t have to look at their faces. Skip the author photo on the back cover of their books. Don’t go there, and you’ll be fine on the aesthetic front. As for literary taste, consult your inner lit.crit.