GreasyGuide: Charlotte

Born in the NC, now reppin’ The NYC

One of the Sci-Fi Channel’s most watched programs is “The Twilight Zone”. Like Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners”, the Rod Serling classic enjoys its highest ratings when run in a marathon format. The G-man is a devoted fan of the series, and two of my favorite episodes are “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, where a young William Shatner looses it after seeing a Joan Rivers look-a-like on the wing of a plane, and “The Howling Man”, where an unsuspecting guest at a religious sanctuary ends up releasing an imprisoned Satan upon the world. Serling, in my opinion, was one of the greatest writers and creators in television history.

On New Year’s Day, the popular channel ran its Twilight Zone marathon. As I sat in front of my television, in complete awe of how Serling used his creative genius to address many social and cultural issues, I began to realize the episode I was watching was chillingly similar to a current event in American politics: the meteoric rise of Senator Barack Obama. The episode was entitled “To Serve Man”, and it featured an alien, Kanamit, that came to Earth to convince humans that a far better life, a far better place, awaited them based on the futuristic content of a book called To Serve Man. All they had to do was place their faith in him and not fear the unknown. The alien, who seemingly appeared out of nowhere, began to win them over through powerful speeches, immediately solving all the problems of the world, and his heartfelt pledge to serve man. Ultimately, despite his strange and unearthly appearance, the inhabitants of Earth become loyal followers and board hordes of spaceships for the so-called The Promised Land. It is at this point when the awful and terrifying truth is revealed. A man, who was extremely skeptical of the claims being made by the alien, breaks the book’s code and frantically tries to warn the people boarding that the title of the book, To Serve Man, is actually…..a cookbook!

To Serve Man may have originally aired some 40 plus years ago, but the message it conveyed rings true to this very day. Historic events, such as slavery, the Holocaust and the massacre at Jamestown, have proved that danger, terror, death and destruction will surely reign if people blindly devote themselves to a person or cause without deliberate and immediate scrutiny. Moreover, society must be exceedingly wary of those who virtually appear out of nowhere, captivate the masses, and profess that their sole purpose is…..to serve man.