A few months ago, my Martian supervisor sent me here to gather notes on human animals. I randomly chose the United States as my research base. I’ve had a good time for me here on Earth–human animals can be quite hospitable–but lately I’ve become too confused to tell any coherent story based on my field notes. Therefore, I’m publishing my field notes here at Dangerous Intersection with the hope that some of you Earthlings might help me out.   It seems that my disorientation with human animals intensified after I began watching television.

I am aware that there is a big election coming up, but even though it’s more than a year away, the people on your television can’t stop speculating about who might win; they keep speculating but they won’t discuss the issues, and it keeps happening.

Apparently, the people who run the television stations don’t like most of the Republicans, so they spent weeks running stories about how a man who doesn’t want to run might run.  In the above news show, they showed that man looking like a soldier.  Apparently, in America, one needs to act like he or she likes wars in order to be elected.  But after Mr. Christie made it really clear that he didn’t want to try to be president, the TV show needed to get people excited about another story, and that’s what really has me confused.

A “Christian” man who believes in invisible people and people who are alive even after they died called another man crazy for believing in the same sorts of things.   The TV show called it “Breaking News,” and they talked about it

all afternoon today.   They said it over and over and over and over.  The news apparently kept “breaking.”  The “Christian” man kept smirking and saying that the Mormon man named Romney was part of a “cult,” because he believed in strange things.

Both these men sound crazy to me, because I haven’t seen any evidence of any of the things these men claim to be true as part of their “religions.”  You equipped me with the finest scientific monitoring equipment, and I’m never seen evidence for invisible people, or virgins having babies, or people suddenly able to speak new languages, or angels.   Yet most of the people here talk as though these things make sense.

After they talked and talked, they took a “commercial,” where the TV station allows people to try to sell things.   The commercial that most puzzled me was the one telling people to burn lots of a dirty fuel called “coal.”  And get this:  The commercial called it “clean coal,” even though there is no such thing.

The TV stations also keep talking about “Michael Jackson,” even though he has been dead for years.   Perhaps they think he is one of those invisible people.   I’ll need to keep working hard to gather data, so that I can get to the bottom of this.

I’ll keep working at this, and I will try to write a coherent report someday, but for now, I’m finding human animals quite disorienting.