By Eric Wilson

One of my favorite screwball theories about why we haven’t been visited by aliens (or why the general public has no knowledge of them), is that Earth is the Beattyville, Kentucky of the Universe.

Beatyville, Kentucky, along with countless other towns across America, has been systematically stripped of value, leaving a husk of dilapidated buildings, high crime, rampant opioid addiction, alcoholism, and an overall sense of hopelessness and despair.

This is also my genetic neck-of-the-woods. The Kentucky Wilsons and Virginia Lees are my paternal kin, even though by the time I came along it was determined that I would be “citified folk,” so my memories of rural Kentucky are fragmented at best.

Back to the Hillbilly Earth theory.

Aliens only stop here when their intergalactic junker breaks down, or when they’ve foolishly run out of space gas — so every once in a long while, one of them gets stranded.

Here’s what I’m thinking… I’m pretty sure they left us Roger Stone.

Every time I think the moment is right to pen my Roger Stone pillory, I pause. Of all the weirdos we’ve seen gathered under the Trump family banner, Roger Stone has to be the fucking weirdest.

It’s as if a libertarian half-man, half-emu raided the wardrobe of an impeccably dressed Bond villain.

You can’t get much more alien than that, I mean not without a full-sized tattoo of Richard Nixon on your back.

He’s either an alien, or he was abducted by aliens and they risked returning to Earth just to give him back.

I tire of people touting Stone’s craftiness. He’s a fucking idiot. When the FBI raided his house and his property in Florida early Friday morning, and he was subsequently released on a quarter-million dollar bond, what did Roger do? Did he do what most sane people would do and listen to his lawyers? No, not this fucking genius. Stone beamed to cameras, gave the Nixon peace sign salute, and promptly gushed to the press about how happy he was that people were talking about him again. All while getting booed.

Jesus, what a fucking tool.

I’m also suggesting that it’s dumbfucks like him, that are keeping me from my dream of escaping this rock on an alien mother ship filled with pot brownies and a lifetime supply of the tastiest green chile beef jerky in the universe.

They never come here though…

There are probably alien “Stranded on Hell-Planet Sol-3” horror stories shared all across the galaxy; in all likelihood, used to terrify their young.

E.T. is probably still bitching at his supervisor that left him in California. One of the nicest aliens ever, still almost died on Earth. I am telling you, this is not a place anyone wants to visit.

So when I watch our marmalade president fuck up the simplest of things, or say the dumbest shit, or just in general seem like he ain’t from around here, I am reminded of the B-movie sci-fi classic, They Live. Except of course, in the film the aliens impersonating the wealthy and powerful are actually quite intelligent. Or at least, reasonably so.

That’s not our Donny! Nope, Trump is definitely not a highly-intelligent alien; he’s not even a human of average intelligence.

He’s the kid at the family get-together that always has his finger in his nose, and won’t stop standing in front of the TV.

His ridiculous horizon line of privilege aside (it stretches from birth to presidency with nothing but consequence-free failure in-between), what bothers me most about Trump is that he’s a fucking idiot, too. If he were the only idiot this would be an entirely different story (he’d be impeached, tried and imprisoned at this point), but he’s not.

He is an idiot sailing high on a sea of idiots.

He pleasure-cruised himself to the presidency (which frustrates me on an almost daily basis) but it is his stupidity, his ever-present dimly-unaware gaze; that is the know-nothing stare all-too-common from throngs of humanity. That’s what keeps me up at night.

I see that look every time I watch a Trump supporter bleat fear-driven nonsense on the news.

The D minus stare.

I don’t know if a species can get a D minus and still survive.

(I’m going to have to look up how to write D-. Is there a hyphen? I have either forgotten, or possibly never knew. Apparently I deserve one too. D minuses for everyone!)

A quick, somewhat-relevant aside: I was asked today by Literate Ape editor David Himmel to submit my five favorite American Shithole pieces of 2018 [4,8,16,29,3] to be considered for The Peter Lisagor Award — and I have to tell you, it is a terrible thing to ask a writer to pick cherries. To me, all my clumsy creations are hideously disfigured monstrosities, and it’s bad enough I paraded them in front of you in the first place.

“Hey judges, come look at my ugly kids.”

“Here’s the most presentable one, with the least shit on it. Say something nice to the judges, American Shithole #3 — Partisans of Liberty.”

“I hate billionaires.”

It took a herculean effort on my part not to spend my typical American Shithole writing day, re-reading every one of them. Even after quickly making my selections, I felt the near-OCD pull to go back and edit them all. I probably will this weekend. Still, I thank you David, for the support.

Back to our abysmal marks as a species thus far:

How are we going to progress to a Type II civilization — exploring and colonizing the solar system and the stars beyond, while harnessing the power of the sun — with a D-fucking-minus? We aren’t even Type I on the Kardashev scale yet.

I have no idea what the grading system for a species is, but I am pretty sure the flat-earthers and other imbeciles, fundamentalists of all denominations, and most-importantly, greedy billionaires, are going to keep us from receiving our diploma.

They’re killing the curve.

And we have definitely gotten a D-fucking-minus for our first 200,000 years. For fuck’s sake, we are teetering on the precipice of a global, ecological disaster the likes of which humankind has never seen — and that’s even if we don’t blow it all up, to boot. We are on the eve of reckoning after spending the last 200 years (a blip) systematically destroying the planet, where Mother Earth herself will likely decide our fate. Or, perhaps our fate may already have been decided.

We may have passed or failed our extinction event already, without even knowing. Some survival tipping-point we have long-since crossed while we were busy drawing meaningless lines in the sand.

If this is the upper-echelon for species performance in the known universe, I would be genuinely surprised.

Honestly, I would feel a lot better if it turned out we were the dumbest kids in the galaxy — or at least the unluckiest ones, sadly duped into slavery by some intergalactic species of douchebag space-republicans.