I was recently googling images of viruses (I mean, isn’t this what you do during a pandemic?) and came across the physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, who during his extensive research developed an artistry with biological photography. He photographed slides of viruses and bacteria under the microscope in an attempt to understand their structure and, in the process, captured their extraordinary, even psychedelic beauty. This picture is one of them.

I remember an L.A. Times article from over 20 years ago in which a journalist asked a fairly broad section of film professors and film critics what were their top three American movies. Not their favorites, of course, but what films did they think typified American culture?

I glossed over “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Hoosiers” because, I mean…come on. The film that stood out to me was “Alien”. I can’t remember who chose it, but I do remember why.

A small, American research crew working for a commercial operation is returning to Earth from a mission in space. They are deterred when they pick up a transmission from a nearby moon. Traveling in an hermetically-sealed spacecraft, they land on the moon to determine the source of the signal.

The executive officer Kane and Navigator Lambert head out in protective space gear to investigate an abandoned alien ship. Kane discovers a chamber of hundreds of large, egg-like objects. When he touches one, a creature emerges. It breaks through his helmet and attaches itself to his face.

Unconscious, Kane is carried back into the spaceship with the alien creature still attached to his face. The acting senior officer, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), refuses to let him aboard, citing quarantine regulations, but she is overridden by crew member Ash, whom we later discover is an android who has been given different instructions.

An attempt to remove the creature from Kane’s face is aborted when they discover the alien blood is an extremely corrosive acid. Later, the creature detaches on his own, apparently dead, and Kane awakens back to consciousness.

The crew is eating a meal with the revived but out-of-it Kane, seemingly all getting along, telling jokes, playing games, until the quiet Kane appears to be very sick. Visible movement of something growing inside Kane’s body eventually ends in a horrific looking creature violently erupting out of his stomach, killing him and escaping somewhere into the bowels of the ship.

Turns out, the android Ash was sent on the mission to ensure the alien creature’s survival, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew. An all-out blood bath ensues with just enough crew members left alive for the sequels.

I included the synopsis because the details are relevant. Any conscious American watching this film can easily see who or what is the threat, but allow me to spell it out in vague terms: its death. Death in all forms: physical, societal and environmental. Science Fiction does help relieve us of our Earth-centric solipsism, but this plot in particular reveals something important about growing up in America.

From hand sanitizer to antibiotics; microwaves to chemotherapy – we are taught that the more aggressive is our approach to even the tiniest germ, the healthier we will be. The microbe is the enemy. If we go out of our way to kill the offending pathogen, even with violence, we will somehow out run death. If we don’t, then we just need to be more aggressive and fight harder next time.

Death is the prevailing subject on every American’s mind, mostly because we lack a healthy relationship with it. It is simply not something you talk about. It isn’t that other cultures sit around talking about death at the dinner table, but there are some, particularly indigenous cultures, who understand the intimate relationship between who you are now and where you shall return.

As a subject that will not be mentioned, it grows like a festering monster inside the American subconscious, waiting for its chance to feed. The moment we are caught unprepared in a moment of weakness, it will strike.

Americans love science when they feel it protects them from death, but a scientist who behaves like the android Ash is reviled if his curiosity leads to the death of thousands of people (like the theory of the virus being leaked from a lab in Wu-han).

The American ideological fear of invasion (or death) is pervasive, even though it has evolved from deep within human DNA. Humans have a long-standing tradition of invading and oppressing other humans- as well as other species, for that matter. The resulting fear is born out of a trauma-response, which is understandable.

Villages were often raped and pillaged by marauders; years of hard work stolen or destroyed; religious beliefs considered heretical were not only condemned but led to state-sanctioned murder; starvation and disease lurked behind every unpredictable weather pattern.

We could argue this ideology exists within both oppressor and oppressed alike. We do not need to explain further the reasoning of the oppressed but we can instead look at the mentality of the oppressor. Fear of death is the reason behind an obsession with hand guns; with racial profiling and racist violence in all forms; with sexual violence; with violence in general; with genocide; with an unnatural critique of “otherness”; and last but not least: with a debilitating concern with a virus, which ultimately reveals a fear of the natural world.

First off, let’s try to understand the biology of a virus. Viruses cannot survive and replicate without a living host (emphasis on ‘living’). It is not in their best interest to kill a host – that’s considered a bad investment. 0.2% of the U.S. population have died because the coronavirus overwhelms their immunity threshold, not because the virus was intending to kill. Its also not in the best interest of those in power to intentionally kill their constituency with a vaccine, which some anti-vaxxers have suggested (though they may inadvertently kill or injure in the process of vaccination).

Biologists estimate that around 380 trillion viruses are living inside each of us right now, coexisting relatively peacefully. Pretty remarkable – to think that trillions of organisms exist within our human ecosystems, contributing to our evolution and DNA, and we are oblivious. Some are harmful, some helpful. Each one unique, like Eshel Ben-Jacob’s art slides.

Viruses outweigh humans in biomass by 0.14 of a gigaton, so it’s not like we can avoid them or even destroy them. Even without traveling to distant planets, we are continually reminded that we aren’t the only powerful species in the Cosmos. For some reason, we don’t like that reminder.

One of America’s colonization strategies is to indoctrinate a fear of the unknown – even wage war in its defense. This is true amongst vaccinated and non-vaccinated alike; it comes from the same source. It is the fear that someone, or some thing, some group, or some organization or power, is out to get you and those you love.

Fear of the unknown, or the different, or even paranoia, can be 100 times more virulent and more dangerous than any virus or vaccine. Of course it’s important to take care of our human ecosystems, but waging war has only made us sicker as a species – not healthier. Vaccine or no vaccine – what it boils down to is who or what we perceive to be a threat to our survival. Often times, that threat only exists within our own minds.

So many of us whittle our lives away constantly focusing on some perceived threat. We can call it trauma, since that’s what it is. We can call it the trauma of being forced into denying our right to live as we choose. The trauma of coercion. This is most definitely a Saturn square Uranus signature (I will write my next blog post about this transit, since this is a dominant theme of 2021).

When Marc Caro, the French director, took on the Alien sequel “Resurrection”, I was fascinated with one notable difference: Ripley is resurrected as a human/alien hybrid. Did merging her human DNA with the species she waged war upon make her a conformist/evolutionist? Did she lose something or gain something?