Messages From The Lizard People

Five months ago, a space of time which today seems almost paleontological, I found myself explaining the Lizard People to my boss, Mr. Larry Webster. I was driving Larry's newly-acquired '94 Mustang Cobra in some rather dicey weather, chatting with him about various personages in the automotive world, and I said something like, "Well, he's one of the Lizard People."

"The what?" So I had to break it down for him. Wikipedia will tell you that the Lizard People are part of a very serious conspiracy theory, but Wikipedia has SJW-policed itself into utter irrelevance lately; witness their entry for Boogaloo. Nobody (alright, almost nobody) thinks that interstellar reptiles have taken human form among our country's leaders. Rather, the Lizard People theory is a hyperbolic way to express something which we all know to be true, namely: virtually everyone in our country's "one percent" is at least a sociopath and possibly a psychopath.

They don't think like we do --- not even close. The majority of them were blessed with some haystack-needle combination of personal circumstance and professional luck. People who were born on third base, think they hit a triple, then manage to steal home because the catcher has a heart attack. To avoid facing the unpleasant (to them) fact of their lottery-winner existence, they eagerly consume (and produce) countless utterly generic diatribes on meritocratic-sounding skills like "leadership", "vision", "success", and similar topics. Carly Fiorina, known in most circles as the woman who single-handedly destroyed Hewlett-Packard, has written three bestselling motivational books. Chew on that for a minute. This woman literally ran an American institution into the ground, causing tens of thousands of people to lose their jobs and destroying billions of dollars in shareholder value --- and she thinks she's a tremendous success. That's psychopathic behavior.

Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the kind of fellow who grinds through medical school, starts his own practice, and rewards himself with a McLaren Senna GTR at the age of fifty. I'm not talking about Steve Wozniak or even Steve Jobs. I'm not talking about Larry's boss, McKeel Hagerty, who took a neighborhood insurance agency and built a billion-dollar company through meticulous attention to detail. I'm talking about all those people who earn six or seven figures in ill-defined, completely unproductive jobs. The marketing gurus, the "Silicon Valley wizards" who have never shipped a memorable product, pretty much every MD and above in the finance business (except, ahem, this one chick I know). The people who sit on eight corporate boards and nobody knows why. The CEOs who shipped jobs overseas to make a quarterly earnings call look good, the people at Boeing who managed to trash the world's best brand in a matter of years. The Lizard People.

Real Lizard People are a lot easier to discern than their sci-fi counterparts. Witness, if you will, the above video.

The video isn't what the lizards think; it's what they expect you to think. So if you want to know how highly the lizards esteem normal human beings, just click "Play" while considering the fact that, as The Last Psychiatrist used to say... if you're watching it, it's for you.

The Lizard People aren't quite sure what to do about this pandemic. They expect to profit from it, of course; their assets will rise in price faster than the cost-of-living increases they'll have to give their employees, and many of them have capitalized on the pinch hitting the middle class at the moment. They expect to profit from it politically --- the majority of billionaires now lean left, as opposed to twenty years ago when they leaned right, and they see this crisis as their sole remaining chance at preventing a "Trumpslide" in 2020.

Our opinion-forming class --- media, celebrities, academics --- serve as a sort of clergy to the Lizard People so it's no surprise to see them assisting in the creation of completely insecure (make that insincere---JB) tripe like the commercials collected above. It's also worthwhile to note that our modern corporate "team norms" enforce a uniformity which would have shocked any cleric in the Middle Ages. We no longer permit even the mild expression of dissenting opinion in most corporate jobs --- what you say is far less important than how you say it. No wonder the commercials are all the same; they come from people who have been forcibly pounded into compliance with a very restrictive set of possible beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, we have CNN Brian openly sobbing for his "life before the pandemic". Note that Brian earns well over a million dollars a year in a job where he doesn't have to wear "PPE" or mop floors. Note that he will continue to earn that kind of money as long as he is willing to read the Lizard People line to a camera. For what, precisely, is he sobbing?

I'll tell you: he is sobbing for the lack of international travel, the lack of three-Michelin-star restaurants, the lack of cocktail parties in Manhattan co-ops. He is sobbing because the corporate jet is grounded. He is sobbing because he can't go to Vail. In other words, Brian is crying because his life now looks more like the average American life did before the pandemic. How many of you went overseas last year? How many of you have been on a corporate jet? How many of you regularly spend more than $200 a plate on dinner? He's openly sobbing for the loss of that. Meanwhile, many of my readers are out of work entirely, while others are taking serious risks in the medical or other "essential" fields.

The fact that Brian isn't the least bit self-conscious about this privileged breakdown should tell you how lizard-like he is. He has no idea what's happening outside his penthouse. Nor, I suspect, do most of the Lizard People. Which is why none of them want to "reopen the economy". They're all collecting their checks and the people who serve them are "essential". This attitude, I believe, will very shortly come back to to haunt some, or all, of them.

I could be wrong about all of this. It should be pointed out that after I delivered my careful and nuanced explanation of Lizard-People-As-Metaphor to Larry, he scrunched his brow for a moment, then replied, "Nah, I don't believe that. Most people are pretty great, if you give them a chance." I watched his eyes for the telltale flick of a nictitating membrane, but they were clear and bright. What I wouldn't give to wake up tomorrow with that kind of positive attitude. Which raises a valid point: Can the Lizard People really harm you if you simply don't believe they exist?