Neil DeGrasse Tyson thought The Blob was the best representation of what an alien might actually look like. He is skeptical that an intelligent being from a different planet in a different solar system would have similar features to homo sapiens. He also points out that the blob started out as colorless until it started soaking up it’s first human, then it turned red. (I love little details like that.)
The Blob was a movie that hit the theaters in 1958. It blended two genres: scifi and horror. The scifi aspect of an alien craft landing on earth was a cheap gimmick. You can do anything you want if an alien is involved, because they’re unpredictable and fictional, as far as we know.
As I remember it a rocket lands somewhere and some doofus goes to investigate. He finds something slimy on the ground and picks it up. The oversized loogie starts to hurt his hands and he can’t shake it off so he races into town to the local saw-bones for help.
The doctor can’t do anything for him and the original doofus gets absorbed. The blob keeps going and eats the doctor. The blob now has a taste for human blood and starts blobbing its way around town, eating every warm blooded creature it comes across.
Every time the blob eats someone or something it gets bigger. By the end of the movie it’s ginormous.
Had the blob not been stopped it would have eaten everything and become as large as the planet earth.
The blob was an obvious threat to the population of that podunk town. It could have done serious damage to a much larger population so the military was brought in to put it down.
Human beings are great at coming together as a team to defeat an obvious threat such as a man-eating jello mold gone rogue. It’s harder to come together when we’re told that the yacht sized jiggly beast is not a threat at all by the empty suits and news bunnies on TV.
Imagine a reboot of the movie The Blob. MSNBC would wonder about it’s motivation and tell its audience that The Blob has a right to life, as if it were a white man.
Faux News would be split. One side telling everyone the blob was a democrat plot that should be defeated by using our nuclear arsenal. The other side trying to convince us that it doesn’t exist at all. That it was swamp gas. Or an airplane. Or a reflection. Calm down everyone!
Don’t look up!
Televangelists of mega-churches, who’s wealth would rival the dreams of Avarice, (tax-free of course) would rain down fire upon those who went against the empty suits and news bunnies. “God sendeth The Blob as a test of our faith!”
The Blob exists IRL. That icky sticky, ooey gooey alien is running amock in America and it gets bigger everyday. I don’t believe it can be stopped. It will eat us all.
That was a bit dramatic, but The Blob is real. People do indeed die because of it; not always directly.
Corporations are The Blob of which I speak. More specifically, the bottom line. The profit margin. The Blob that will grow to the size of the universe if it isn’t stopped.
The bottom line in, and of itself, isn’t a problem. It’s the unfettered bottom line. The ‘whatever the market will bear’ profit margin mentality that’s dangerous.
Mark Cuban created a company he calls “Cost Plus Drugs.” He says it will limit it’s profits to 15%, which is an outrageous amount of money considering how much will be brought in, but it’s humble considering how big pharma is pillaging working class Americans, legally.
Mark Cuban’s capitalist idea will save lives.
The Blob of Cost Plus Drugs has boundaries. Why isn’t that the case for corporations in general? Why is it okay to charge so much more for groceries? Or for rent? Why are we not screaming in the streets that we need to kill The Blob? Or at least restrain The Blob.
Consider the cancer cell. If you Google what makes a cancer cell different than a normal cell, you’ll find that a cancer cell doesn’t know when to quit. (You can’t eat just one!) The cancer cell has mutated so that it never stops splitting and making more of itself until it kills that which gave it life.
Out of control growth.
Today, in 2025, the richest man that ever existed is worth half of the budget of the United States of America, a country with a population of 320 million humans. Everyone knows who that person is. Everyone knows he’s the richest man that ever existed. How is he not seen as a potential threat to humanity? Or, at the very least, a threat to America?
Empty suits and news bunnies on TV want you to think there is no danger in one person having more power than anyone else in history. They tell lies about who the guy is. They tell you that he worked hard and sacrificed and risked everything to become richer than anyone in history, because, well, you know . . . America.
Why would empty suits and news bunnies tell lies about The Blob? Because they get to be rich. They can slather themselves in gold plated healthcare. They can buy a chicken farm and have chickens lay eggs straight into their mouths. They can bathe in caviar and poop in porcelain chamber pots that were made in the Ming dynasty in China.
They can’t see The Blob. They exist far above The Blob, sitting in first class, sipping on bottomless mimosas while we struggle and budget to take a week long vacation to the gulf coast in the family gredunza stuffed full of our spouses and Thing 1s and Thing 2s.
Homo sapiens in countries that aren’t America can see The Blob. They’re forever coming together and being a pain in the ass to the Richie Riches of the world. Their empty suits and news bunnies don’t have the right to tell lies like we do in America.
We Americans are rich with rights. Our legal interpretation of those rights might be poor, but dadgummit, if you want to lie about how many guns you own, then it’s your right as a red blooded American.
I am weary of The Blob and it’s shallow excuses for risking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I’m disgusted that the Christian church refuses to stick its neck out for the poor and working class people in the world that Jesus loved and cherished, for fear it will be asked to pony up a little cash and so its own, personal Blob, made out of lies and hypocrisy won’t keep growing impossibly large.
Making jokes about the manslaughter that goes on in America everyday isn’t easy. The Blob and its headless/heartless gnoshing on our hopes and dreams makes me want to cry. I just want to wake up from the nightmare of there being no place on earth that I can sit down where someone isn’t begging me to spend money DOING something, anything, just buy buy buy!
I ask myself why health insurance exists. There is no such thing in Canada, England, France or Italy, etc etc. Are Americans too stupid to figure out how to give away health care the way Jesus would have wanted us to? What does health insurance have to do with health?
In this capitalist country we’ve been bowing down to The Blob since our forefathers brought forth upon this land a new nation. When cigarettes were linked to lung cancer The Blob bought and paid for scientists to fight against it in court.
When people were killed in car accidents The Blob fought against installing safety devices because it wasn’t worth it just to save a handful of American lives.
When The Blob consumed all the ways we get food, and our food no longer nourished us it made pretty music and advertisements filled with smiling clowns to distract us. Then The Blob bought stock in extra large caskets.
In a book by Tom Robbins called, Still Life with Woodpecker, a man is confronted by a woman who admires him for a series of bombings that he committed. She says something about how nice it is that he’s teaching people with his use of dynamite.
“Dynamite doesn’t teach, it awakens!”
I couldn’t find the exact quote, but it was something like that.
If there was a lesson in the public execution of the CEO of an institution that exists for no good reason, that might it.
He wanted us to see The Blob.
