Extraterrestrial Conservatives

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

In May 1979, with moods darker than an overcast London sky, high unemployment and a collapsing welfare state compelled British voters to turn to the conservative Tory Party in order to brighten their economic horizons. Gaining a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons elevated its leader, Margaret Thatcher, to Prime Minister. A position she held for eleven years.

Like her forceful American counterpart Ronald Reagan, she aroused the indignation of her nation’s nihilistic Left by delivering speeches that identified the obvious moral dangers facing Western Civilization:

“The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.”

Thatcher’s success pushed the British Labour Party to the brink of political suicide. In 1986, Labour’s platform identified mankind’s mortal enemy as fissionable material. It called for universal nuclear disarmament, a no-first-use nuclear policy for NATO, a demand to make Europe a non-nuclear zone (wasn’t Russia part of Europe even back then?) and insisted on the removal of all U.S. nuclear weapons from Britain.

With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thanks to Reagan and Thatcher’s unwavering political and military pressure, nihilism was free to flourish once more in a world no longer threatened by a visceral enemy it never acknowledged.

International Islamic jihad now rises from its millennial slumber to continue its quest for Koranic global hegemony. And, as before, nihilists stumble blindly forward through the smoke, rubble and carnage of jihad, oblivious to the acrid reality around them.

Will conservative Tories come to the West’s rescue once more? In a recent speech before a crowd at Tynemouth, in Northeast England, Tory leader David Cameron electrified his listeners and media hangers-on by pledging, if made Prime Minister, to deal with a force far darker than jihad; the menace from beyond space, extraterrestrials:

“I have no idea if there is intelligent life out there. But I think we should be as open as possible, so I would be quite happy to give you a guarantee that if I became Prime Minister I would always be entirely open and frank about these things…it is certainly not something that any government should seek to hide from anyone.”

Republicans, crushed by America’s rejection of George W. Bush and John McCain’s oxymoronic “compassionate conservatism” in favor of Obama’s nebulous “change,” will no doubt take notice.

Even NASA, that once proud agency who’s technological prowess allowed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to imprint their boot treads in fine lunar dust, now deploy robotic rovers to scourer the Martian surface in search of science’s Holy Grail – extraterrestrial microbial life.

One wonders what would happen if NASA focused its innovative, remote-sensing, microbe-sniffing rovers to trudge the barren wastes of Pakistan’s Pashtun region for one of mankind’s more deadly macro organisms – Osama bin Ladin? But the troubled agency would no doubt suffer deep congressional cuts in funding for embarking on such a relevant, down-to-Earth mission.

The search for intelligent life among the stars is one of many frivolous diversions that captures the Western World’s child-like imagination and appeals to voters and politicians alike. But serious times call for serious, thoughtful people right here on planet Earth. Saving a crumbling Western Civilization from its plotting, murderous enemies should focus our collective consciousness. For confused and demoralized conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, the grueling search for intelligent life should begin a little closer to home.

--Mr. Curmudgeon