BlueZer0.net

So, once again dispersing the BZ staff/rabble, I decided it was time for me to take the reins and see whether the lyrics contained a relevant and recoverable message that would account for Decanus’s choice to use them as a means of communication.

The specific part of the text we’re working with is:

Today's Tom Sawyer
He gets high on you.
And the space he invades
He gets by on you.

What you say about his company
Is what you say about society,
Catch the witness, catch the wit,
Catch the spirit, catch the spit.

I chose to work with just this fragment for several reasons, chief among them being that this was the only part decipherable through the Shadowtronic/phonic device. It is my firm belief that Decanus purposely distorted the rest of the text in order to highlight this section.

The first two lines, taken together, indicate that Decanus understands the financial bind he is in. He, obviously, is represented by the modern day warrior Tom Sawyer, and “He gets high on you.” That is, he was taken up high into outer space, and the tab is on us, because we have to pay to get him back.

The next two lines, "And the space he invades, / He gets by on you," are interesting because there is an oblique reference to the Midway video game Space Invaders™. Programmed by Tomohiro Nishikado in 1978, Space Invaders was at the height of its popularity in 1981, the year Rush released the record Moving Pictures, which features the song “Tom Sawyer” as its opening track and lead single. There is no way the group could have missed the significance of this phraseology or its garbled syntagmatic relation to the video game, and neither could Decanus, a.k.a Roland Thompson, former guitarist of supergroup Johnny Hoghead and the Dead Livers. So, the reference to Space Invaders is a veiled reference to Biaviian invaders who have abducted him, which contains in it the latent desire to shoot down those invaders. Is Decanus telling us to prepare with ground-to-air missiles or machine guns? On our budget, we simply can’t.

Our munitions budget. Help!

The next two lines, “No his mind is not for rent / To any god or government” seems to be a statement of resistance. Decanus is telling us that he refuses to allow them to invade (used knowingly) his mind, or to accept the content of their brainwashing attempts. The aliens themselves must, to a human, seem like gods given their superior intelligence, abilities, and technology. The aliens and their irresistable force might also be compared to the might and seemingly unalterable will of a fascist government (a resonance that will assume greater importance later in our analysis) -- but he still resists.

He is “always hopeful” that he’ll be rescued or ransomed, but “discontent” not only because he doesn’t want to be an interstellar janitor, but also because he is worried about the ineptitude of his earthbound BZ crew, some of whom were arrested last night for urinating into a mailbox.

“He knows changes aren’t permanent, / But change is,” tells us that his underlying assumption is that he won’t be in this position for long. He might be ransomed, or more likely will have, for instance, the opportunity to climb up the interstellar ladder of employment, and move from janitorial work maybe into mechanical work. Something with better pay, and profit sharing. So, this change from CEO to janitor isn’t permanent, but things will continue to evolve.

The final quatrain (technically, it’s a pair of couplets), however, is where the thrust of the message lies. “What you say about his company / Is what you say about society” can be interpreted two ways. First, that his company BlueZer0, is representative of society, and that whatever comments you make about it therefore refer also to society at large. This is just plain wrong. The second, more fruitful interpretation is that his company is the aliens who keep him company, and among whom he must now work for like $4.35/hr Canadian, with only a half hour lunch break. In this case the meaning changes: whatever you can say about the aliens refers also to society. This is important because the things we can say about them, when applied to society, are disturbingly similar to the picture of society presented to us by a Shadowian philosophy of secret government rule and alien penetration. The aliens and the government both abduct people; they both force people to work for slave wages to pay off a debt that is too large ever to be paid; both operate secretly and independently of any true monitoring or mode of redress; and both have goofy symbols that dumb asses use to prove something about themselves. To wit:

The seal of that one jerk-off that no one with a brain cell or an IQ point can stand.

The seal of the people responsible for Decanus’s abduction. Though they certainly are pricks, they are still less objectionable than the other guy. If the votes were actually counted in the elections of 2000 and 2004, they probably would have proved more popular, too.

Decanus, then, is confirming for us what we already know -- that the government is in it with the aliens (“they’re building landing strips for gay martians”), and that society at large is utterly under their control. We now have definitive proof.

The final couplet is the key to the mystery of Decanus’s abduction. While the line “Catch the witness, catch the wit” seems cryptic in the context of a rock song, it is pretty straight forward when examined in the context of alien abduction. It says, in no uncertain terms, that if we catch the witness to Decanus’s abduction, then we will catch the wit; that is, understand the situation better, and the logic behind it. There are two major points of significance here. First, there was a witness to the abduction. Someone must have been lurking in the parking lot, or skulking around the hallways of 4030 when the abduction happened. The other major point is that there seems to be more to this abduction than we have direct knowledge of. Was there a problem with The Shadow’s translation of the Alienese letter? We will be checking over it closely. If we can catch the true spirit of the letter, we shall “catch the spit.” What this means, no one can know.

Whatever the significance of “the spit,” we have much work ahead of us. We will launch an effort to generate our own translation of the Alienese letter to try to catch the true meaning of it. Check back for updates!