I find myself once again in happy accordance with Michael Brendan Dougherty: “I want a theory on the drones that I can adopt without feeling like a mark.”
Nobody wants to be a low-brow stooge, especially before Christmas when you’re obligated to make small talk over the cloved ham, green-bean casserole, and a fruitcake harder than peppermint disks your aunt has had out since John Lennon and Yoko released their Yuletide ear-grater. And over actual unidentified flying objects? Forget the E.T. talk; you’re better off arguing that grandma really did get run over by a reindeer if you want a third ‘nog mug.
So what are the suspected drones that first appeared in the New Jersey skyline, but have since ingressed further inland, advancing as far as central Pennsylvania? And why are they intermittently flashing red and green lights?
Did Santa Claus and Jeff Bezos join forces, testing aerial delivery elves before Christmas Eve? That’s probably too whimsical of a wish for Big Tech to fulfill. Plus, the FAANG concerns would rather sink their silicon teeth into children’s attention nodes than perpetuate a Christianized myth like Old St. Nick.
The consensus seems to be that the scudding skycraft are, in fact and form, drones. But in the Oakeshottian dichotomy of knowledge, the question is epistemologically halved: “traditional” understanding opposed to “technical” grasp. We know the outer form of mysterious flyers, but not the why. As in, why is the firmament of the eastern seaboard crawling with mechanical scopes?
Conjecture abounds. Major writers are relaying explanations from “trusted sources,” who could be, for all we know, a cabal of little green men with a half-decent PR shop. Diarist Rod Dreher has been told they’re a Chinese demo, hot dogging Sino-tech before our helpless eyes. Columnist Walter Kirn floats the notion that they’re a snare for the incoming president, who didn’t make Deep State’s nice list this year. A State Department analyst with the totally real name Marik von Rennenkampff, who certainly didn’t crib his cognomen from a fourth-tier character in The Radetzky March, asserts that the hovering anomalies are nothing new—that inscrutable surveillance bots have been observing sensitive military sites on U.S. soil for decades. Let not your heart be troubled!
“Please, please, please for the love of Hunter’s crack pipe, don’t panic” appears to be the official line being pushed by the government. White House spokespuppet John Kirby pantomimed “The Naked Gun,” begging curious onlookers to divert their peepers elsewhere. “We have not identified anything anomalous or any national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the Northeast,” he said in a statement likely pieced together with phrases an intern drew from ChatGPT.
Anomalous, of course, is in the eyes of the beholder. Dozens of flitting whirligigs come landward in unison, dancing in the evening dusk with more precision and coordination than the Rockettes, which are reportedly undetectable by rudimentary radar and invisible to thermal imaging. To the average eye, that’s more than a bit rummy. But for a grey-suited federal agent? Maybe it really is some classified op.
Either way, the President of the United States is phlegmatic. Donald Tru… Shoot! Our whipsmart editor just informed me that some withering zombie named Joe Biden is actually still America’s head honcho. Who knew!
Biden told a reporter scrum that the so-far unexplained heli-zoomers are “nothing nefarious apparently, but they’re checking it all out.” Who the “they” are the President doesn’t deign to explain—maybe Agents Mulder and Scully are getting to the bottom of our star crawlers in their dogged investigations of Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia. Regardless, Biden has assured us it’s all on the level: “There’s a lot of drones authorized up there. I think one started it and they all—everybody wanted to get in the deal.” An airy entente, eh? The federal government has some kind of deal for Camden’s cloud acres that drone producers of mysterious providence all want a take on? Say what you want about the tenet of cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos but at least it’s an ethos, man.
Biden’s assurance the strobing hovertrons putting the public’s back up are actually just some public-private partnership is a cold comfort, even for an unseasonably chilly December. But what does he care? After his humiliating July dropout, Biden’s been the lamest ducks, waddling across the South Lawn, quacking occasionally at the media, swanning aimlessly around the Oval Office. Donald Trump, on the obverse hand, is practically acting president. And he has a penchant for straight shooting that rivals Clint Barton. Yet even Trump was uncharacteristically obscure when acknowledging the Jersey dronenomenon, hinting at a deliberate coverup: “Our military knows, and our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense. Something strange is going on. For some reason they don’t want to tell the people.”
This blame shift and obfuscation from the guy who admitted on national television that he ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline? Something’s afoot, and it ain’t Vixen clopping on the roof. Trump’s normally free lips may be cinched by warnings of high-tier classification. Biden can barely manage to read off predetermined conclusions from a palm card aides push in front of his foggy eyes. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats who do know the origin, purpose, and overall objective of the drone swarm in our northeastern skies are keeping Americans in the dark, hoping we clueless dolts are too busy staring at our Amazon tracking pages, hoping last-minute buys are dumped on our doorstep before the great consumptive orgy that marks the birth of our Lord and Savior.
Happy Christmas to all and to all us benighted!
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