September 10, 2009

Fifty years later, we're in the 'Twilight Zone' again

Betty Winston Bayé
The Courier-Journal

The year is 1959. A man, smoldering cigarette in hand, is hunched over his Royal manual typewriter. He's deep in thought when his creative process is interrupted by the loudly ringing telephone on his desk. It's the bosses in New York asking, "So where is it? Where's that new script, Serling?" The bosses are pressing for the next installment of a new CBS television series that's proven to be a huge hit. Rod Serling's sci-fi imaginings leave them squirming in their seats and sometimes covering their eyes, but "Twilight Zone" fans can't get enough of being terrorized by their fears. Serling, the late, great screenwriter, always delivered, but very carefully. In a new anthology, Twilight Zone , which features 19 modern writers celebrating the 50th anniversary of the classic series, Carol Serling said that her husband tried to steer clear of censors and 'fraidy cat sponsors by "commenting allegorically on universal themes," such as "prejudice, politics, nuclear fears, bigotry, the Holocaust, conformity, war, racism." Advertisement

As I imagine a day in Rod Serling's life, the writer has an aha moment. The script is practically writing itself. It's set 50 years into the future. America has elected its first black president. Ah, yes, with this script Serling revisits a recurring theme of his - mass hysteria. I learned in the midst of writing this column that Serling actually did pen a "Twilight Zone" script titled, "I Am the Night - Color Me Black." It's the tale of a Southern town that hangs a black man for killing a bigot, a crime for which he may or may not be guilty. No matter, on the day of the hanging, the sky goes black, and a preacher says that the black sky is because of all the hatred in the world. In the closing narration, Serling, as he did each week, offered a prologue to the story - "A sickness known as hate; not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ, but a sickness nonetheless. Highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone. Look for it in a mirror. Look for it, before the light goes out altogether."

Rod Serling, in a fantasy that explored America's and the world's predicament 50 years ago, predicted what seems to be going on today after America has elected its first African-American president. This event seems to have driven a legion of soft-minded people straight into the twilight zone. Their behavior isn't dictated by logic, but by their fears - and not, it should be said, without plenty of assistance from people who are enriching themselves by stoking fears of a black president, a president who they claim isn't even legitimate because, they say, he wasn't born in the U.S.A. A black president who, according to them, is promoting health care reform that - rather than reining in costs and extending health care coverage to an estimated 47 million Americans currently without it - is actually a dastardly plot to kill old people. Advertisement

Not only that, but the so-called Independent Women's Forum, one of the sponsoring groups of the anti-Obama tea party rallies like the one recently held in Louisville, through e-mails and television ads is warning that "More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama's nationalized health care onslaught. Real people might not make it if President Obama inflicts his nationalized health care on America."

This is the twilight zone, people.

We're in the twilight zone when, for example, First Lady Michelle Obama wears a pair of shorts while vacationing and she's criticized for degrading the Oval Office. It's the twilight zone when the appointment of the first Hispanic woman to the U.S. Supreme Court is cast as a conspiracy to corrupt the high court with, oh my goodness, the dreaded human characteristic known as empathy.

We're in the twilight zone when the long and, in fact, largely unremarkable tradition of presidents and first ladies speaking directly to schoolchildren to encourage them to cherish education, or maybe to just say no to drugs, or to help keep America beautiful, is twisted into yet another sinister plot against real Americans. With no knowledge of what would be in the President's speech, the conspiracists cooked up a notion that sent shivers down the spines of parents inhabiting the twilight zone. The President, they said, didn't intend an inspirational message, but one fashioned to indoctrinate schoolchildren with socialist, Marxist, communist, anti-American - whatever - ideas. If quizzed, many of the parents who bought into this mess and required their children to boycott the President's speech couldn't explain socialism, Marxism or communism if their lives (or their children's lives) depended on it.

This is twilight zone behavior. It's behavior that likely would have given Rod Serling and that great community of sci-fi writers in heaven fodder for dozens of new scripts. Again, in my imagination, Rod Serling and his colleagues are observing America's current political scene and are saying to one another, "I'm good, but even I would have had a hard time selling a script like this." And to an intrepid reporter who asks why, Serling, speaking for the group and in his best narration voice, intones:

"Because nobody would believe it. Maybe not even in the 'Twilight Zone.'"

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist whose column appears on Thursdays. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.