Believe it or not, that question did not spring from James Lileks‘ imagination. His latest “Athwart” column in National Review notes that USA Today highlighted a recent National Geographic survey that found President Obama trumped Mitt Romney 65-35 in the alien invasion department.
Treating the news with the seriousness it deserved, Lileks searched for an explanation. Among those offered for your consideration:
Because Dreams from My Father has an aching passage, heartfelt and beautifully written, where the young Obama dates an alien girl from the Orion system and thinks there will be some understanding between them because her green skin marked her as an outsider. “The other boys called her Pickle,” he wrote, “but to me her skin was the color of the leaves and grass in the summer sun.”
It later turned out that she was a composite of a blonde girl from Beverly Hills and a can of green paint he had walked past when someone was touching up the trim on her porch. But the general idea of knowing what it’s like to be from another star system is the important lesson to take away; he’s certainly more empathetic than Romney, who would attempt to move jobs to Orion.
