One guy was saying that microbial life was possible, “but no no one really expected the Viking cameras to send back a picture of a cactus growing next to the spacecraft”.

Of course, I missed the preliminary part of that statement and made a fool of myself by storming into the bosses office in order to hear the rest of the report…

I watched Team America once in a very happy state of consciousness. I don’t think I could construe *anything* from that. Except extreme laughing my happy ass off.

first, in those days, TV-SF was scarce, and everyone was really excited about this new show, and really looking forward to it.

Then we get hit with all this Pharaonic Egyptian iconography on the show, the fighter pilots’ helmets, the Israeli insignia on their spacecraft. I remember wondering myself: why this odd juxtaposition of disparate symbols?

Third, my own personal situation was very odd. I was far from home, away from my own tribe, a stranger in a strange land, newly transplanted to rural Eastern Tennessee. All the people I knew there and hung out with were my girl’s college age friends, a great group of kids into bluegrass music and Blue Ridge Appalachian culture, but still about a decade younger than I was and light years apart from my own Cuban urban hippy Viet Vet rock and roll sailing astronomer background. My new young friends treated me with great affection, but they didn’t have a clue who I was and where I was coming from, and they were as alien to me as Hottentots or Eskimos.

Then, while we’re all defenseless, watching this much-anticipated show, and totally shitfaced on the local herb, they interrupt the broadcast and show us Egypt and Israel signing a treaty under the benign smiling patronage of our born-again President. I was totally unprepared for, and completely blindsided by, this Revelation.

The three great monotheistic religions of the world coming together in all their Kumbaya glory. Was all that Apocalyptic end-of-days prophecy actually coming true before my eyes? Was Jimmy Carter the AntiChrist himself?

I freaked.

Amazing what we come up with when we are stoned. Totally convinced of another reality.

I was exceedingly stoned on some very righteous Smoky Mountain Green at the time, and immediately went into a fit of paranoia that took me months of sobriety to get past. For a minute, I thought the whole program had been filmed just as part of some elaborate propaganda scenario orchestrated by Jimmy Carter to sell us the treaty.

I never watched the show again, or its more recent retread. But I did start to get into the prequel “Caprica”,
until they yanked it off TV just as I was starting to get hooked on it. I had had enough.

I kid you not.