Mars Attacks!

In 1996, a cult sci-fi comedy came out to mixed feedback. It was a tim burton flick and was deliciously dumb, yet it had a few clever moments of black satire.

Mars Attacks depicted random martians coming down to earth, of course to the U.S. being that it's the center of the planet, ostensibly to make peace and they would broadcast peace messages through a universal translator machine with maxims like "we come in peace" and "do not fear us we want love".

Desperate to make a good impression the president sends his chief of staff to meet them in front of an audience at a landing site in Nevada. All the hippies in the country show up and upon hearing the martians say " we only want peace between our people", they release a dove which is promptly zapped by the martians as a prelude to incinerating everyone present.

The martians fly back up above the earth and the president of the U.S. decides that it must be a cultural misunderstanding that caused the violence and he agrees to allow the martians to address parliament, at which point the martian leader pulls out a speech with one hand and a taser with the other and proceeds to incinerate all of congress.

Throughout all these escapades the president refuses to fight or display aggression because he believes their platitudes of peace and desire for harmony, even though they keep proving him wrong up until he's speared by a martian. None of the americans want to believe that the message of peace is just a cover.

We all want to live in a world of harmony, where everything functions and there's no disease, poverty or hunger, and war has been eradicated. But sometimes it's worth reading between and under the lines to preserve the state of a nation and it's people. History is fluid however patterns will forever abound, and it behooves us to maintain an awareness of this when we'd rather be flattered and tickled by warm and cozy pronouncements and agreements. Looking the gift horse in the mouth won't do it, we need to determine who's giving the horse a voice.