“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices…to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill…and suspicion can destroy…and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own—for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.“
– Epilogue to “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, ” 1959
A Typical Day
“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,”* one of The Twilight Zone’s more memorable episodes, evoked Americans’ Cold War paranoia and manipulability. It also says a lot about where much of America is today.
The drama begins on a typical summer day on a stereotypical suburban street. Kids play. Neighbors chat. An ice cream vendor plies his treats.
Suddenly, an eerie object briefly passes overhead. Phone and power failures then sweep through the block. The neighbors gather as a group to speculate on what’s going on.
One boy claims that, in the science fiction tales he’s read, such a power outage presages an alien invasion. He adds that advance teams infiltrate communities by pretending to be human. At first, the adults scoff.
But before long, trusting friends turn suspicious and start turning on each other. They point fingers at an insomniac who stares at the late night sky, a ham radio operator who’s the most respected fellow on the street, the kid carried away by those sci-fi stories and anyone else who can be accused of anything out of the ordinary.
Near the episode’s end, a man shoots his neighbor dead. The rest scurry about like chickens without heads, seeking someone to assault.
The final scene shows two aliens viewing the bedlam from a hillside. They remark on how easy it is to plant doubt among humans, let it poison a neighborhood, do the same across the globe and thus conquer the Earth.
And Today
Which brings us to 2021. And the question of which is more bizarre:
A boy’s fantasies sparking a deadly spasm of paranoia…or 17 percent of Americans believing the QAnon conspiracy theory that a “group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” another 37 percent unsure about whether that statement is false and many millions certain that only Donald Trump can save us from that hydra-headed cabal?
A community becoming convinced that neighbors are otherworldly invaders…or 70 percent of Republicans buying the lie that Joe Biden stole the election?
A race of aliens exploiting our worst tendencies to turn us against each other…or a single Russian-backed demagogue being able to do so?
People’s paranoia driving them to kill each other…or the Republican Party very rationally deciding that destroying democracy through voter suppression beats losing elections to the Democrats, even justifying this by painting opponents, urbanites, minorities and immigrants as the alien, un-American Other?
The two situations are not precisely the same. On Maple Street, everyone becomes everyone else’s enemy. On the other hand, today our national neighborhood is bitterly divided in two.
But similarities still abound.
And Tomorrow
I’m not predicting that our current state of affairs will end badly. Biden’s leadership, a resurgent economy, a positive post-pandemic reality, lots of hard work by Democrats and principled Republicans and yes, maybe even a measure of human decency, may yet prevail.
Most of all, we’ll have a say in how we emerge from this strange stage in our history. We’ll all help shape the ever-evolving plot.
But we’re in a place where things could go either way.
Welcome to our Twilight Zone.
*This Season One episode can be viewed via Netflix.
**Hat tip to friend and University of Virginia history professor Brian Balogh. He acquainted me with “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which has been a focus of a session of his highly creative Viewing America, 1940 – 1980 course.
Wow! This is an excellent , thought- provoking mirrorto hold up to our current society. I find myself changing in a different direction in reaction to all of it. I live in a relatively small town in the Bay Area near San Francisco. It is majority white, and yet we are in the middle of a diverse, highly educated urban area. In the last month, we had an incident of white adult males, in a vehicle, yelling racial hate speech at some black kids, who ran in to our local grocery store seeking protection. All of the people involved were residents of our community.
On Saturday morning, I drove past our middle school which is just up the street from my home. There were, in the parking lot, several trucks parked with white men together, outside of their vehicles, and they had a huge American Flag on a giant pole, like the ones used on January 6 during the insurrection. I called the non-emergency number of our police, telling the woman who answered what I saw, and that I was an older, white woman driving past, but I felt intimidated by them. I asked her if they would send a police car to just talk to them, finding out who they were and why they were gathered in the school lot, on a Saturday, when there were no kids around. She told me that if they were just having a “ meetup”, they had the right to do that, but that she would speak to her supervisor about it. I feel that I now have become paranoid in a way I never was in my life. It is much scarier to me that fellow Americans are following fantastic lies causing them to not just call the police, like I did, but to drive to our Capital to kill people based on those lies.
Thanks very much for the heartfelt post, Kathy. I certainly share your concerns.