Last Night, As I Was Falling Asleep...

I watched Alan Alda on PBS learning how to be a Neanderthal. No wait. He just looked at Neanderthal artifacts. But he got to go to France to do that. And he spoke some Bullwinkle French with an archeologist, whom he called an archeologiste in a bad French accent. I noticied the subtitling I always keep on my t.v. corrected his false cognate. "Vous etes un archeologiste?" Alan had queried the old man who kept his Neanderthal museum in a cottagey, rather Smurf-like house set in a garden worthy of Monet. And the subtitling politely got rid of the article and replaced the non-word with the correct archeologue. This is PBS after all. I thought that was very nice of the subtitling people. Alan never even had to have his ego buffeted. It's like Woody Allen with Soon Yi. I fantasized about having Alan Alda trapped in a room somewhere and trying to wear him down and get him to admit that Woody is a dirty old man even if he made some great films. Even Scientology probably couldn't do this. Alan was learning how to be an early human. I think. Or maybe it was a hominid. He was learning how to be an early human in upstate New York. Doesn't that sound like fun? He was outside with all these students, young white guys who really seemed to have no cognizance of the fact that he was Alan Alda or that such a creature existed, somewhere in upstate New York and the healthy-looking white boys from good families were down on their haunches in a semicircle facing the professor. And he was showing them how to make Clovis points. Some sort of arrowhead anyway. The whole point of PBS is to forget everything after you've watched it. If you remember the details you should be watching a better channel anyway, like the DOCUMENTARY channel. And Alan Alda was messing up his arrowhead but loving it anyway, because he was Alan Alda on PBS explaining the grand verities of human progress and human culture to appreciative PBS people who felt a strong appreciation of Alan Alda being a hominid or early human for them, because they don't really feel strong enough to argue with PBS, evolutionary scientists or religious figureheads about anything, really. And they certainly don't feel strong enough to pretend they are early humans in their apartments or houses. Well, maybe during a divorce. So once or twice in their PBS lives. Generally, it's just hard enough to pay the mortgage and they end up giving an annual donation of 100, 50 or 25 dollars to PBS so they feel slightly more pure, as though they had gone to a church whose God may or may not truly exist, but is wonderful enough to pay for Alan Alda to explain how horrible Neanderthal, hominid and early human life truly was, how horrible, and how grand and mysterious and promising. Because it led to us. And we are clearly so horrible, grand, mysterious and promising. Just like Alan Alda. All his life.