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Introduction
This is Ape City, from the original Planet of The Apes.
I don't know if it was called Ape City within the context of the movie, by the apes who actually lived there. It wouldn't
make much sense, on a whole planet that was full of apes, that just this one city for whatever reason they decided to call
Ape City, and what a coincidence that the one human who ever landed there just happened to be in that one city.
It would be like having a city on earth called "Human City" when humans don't even think of themselves as being human
first: They think of themselves as belonging to a religion or a race or a nation or a tribe, long before they think of themselves
as human. Now before any freaks reading this jump all over me for that, of course I know that humans know they're
human, and accept their humanity, intellectually. What they don't do, generally speaking, is think of themselves as human
beings who should feel any responsibility to other people based solely on their own humanity.
They do feel responsibility to humans who are like them, who are their race or religion or whatever. As long as there's
someone that they can exclude, or be against, or to say "We're not like them."
It would be different, of course, if there were talking apes or lizard people trying to enslave us or eat us or whatever,
because then we could say that we're not like the talking apes or lizard people, we're better then them because we're all
human. And then we would forget that, before we had to fight and hate them, we all just fought and hated each other.
Anyway, maybe then we would have a city called Human City, but only to distinguish it from all the cities that weren't
human cities. Which is what makes it so weird that this one was called Ape City.
Part I: Apehenge
I was thinking about Ape City today and how all the buildings were made out of these huge slabs of rock and how the windows
and doors were all these weird, oblong shapes. It was just weird, like why would apes haul these huge slabs of granite or
marble and cut them in these weird shapes, when it would have been much easier for them to move lots of much smaller stones
together, and it would have been much more believable if the apes lived in treehouses like the Swiss Family Robinson and not
in these weird rough-hewn houses that look like The Flintstones.
What made them think it was a good idea to stack all these enormous stones on top of one another, especially since they
didn't have cement or anything? The effort to make even just one house had to be monstrous, especially since they had no big
trucks or winches or anything to move them but apes and horses. And yet they built a whole city that way.
Which, come to think of it, is also what the Flintstones did, but at least they had big talking dinosaurs to help them.
And then of course I got to thinking that maybe the Flintstones are the ones that built Stonehenge. It just seems natural.
Conclusion
All this made sense when I thought about it, anyway.
(From the Mailbag, April 20, 2006)
I really liked your article about the ape city but I didn't understand all the stuf about how we don't all really
think we're human? wtf is up with that dude? **big mac
Well, Big Mac (can I call you BM for short?).....it's like this....
Conservative talk show hosts go on the air and talk and talk and talk about the liberals and how bad they are
and how it's so much better not to be a liberal, or like militant Black Panther-types go around talking about how bad white
people are, or preachers who go on and on about homosexuals and how they're all going to hell. They define themselves and
identify themselves by what they're against, and who they're better than.
It's just how it is.
People don't identify themselves as being Irish, or black, or Christian, or Muslim, and then talk about how much
they have in common with everyone else. They say "I'm a Christian, and you're all going to hell" or "I'm a Muslim and I'm
gonna blow you up".
No one says "I'm human" because they don't need to. There's nothing else to be. But if there were apes who wanted
to kill us all and hunted us on horseback, no one would care how gay you were or what color your skin was. They would just
fight the apes.
And why would the apes call their city "Ape City" if, as far as they knew, there was no other kind of city? Every
city was ape city.
I hope that clears it up for you.
(From the Mailbag, April 21, 2006)
Sometimes when I read what you write, I laugh but then forget about it, and then there are
days that things stick in my brain, like a song you can’t get rid of, and I turn them over and over and look at them
from every angle, either because they make a lot of sense or because they make no sense at all. Today was one of those days,
when I was looking up pictures of Stonehenge on Wikipedia to see how much they look like the Flintstones. I think it was the way you just
casually mentioned it at the end and not expound endlessly on the topic, like when you said that Gilligan killed JFK.
Love Deb
Thanks, Deb. I'm glad to hear that I've been a positive influence on you and that you're not just wasting your
time with the rock and roll.
I think it should be obvious that the Flintstones made Stonehenge, so much that I wonder why no one thought of
it before. I did a pretty thorough search of the internet and couldn't find another site on the subject, which surprised me.
I'm not saying that the Flintstones lived there, just that some primitive Flintstones-like people (who had some
derivation of the word "Rock" or "Stone" in their name) probably used it as a summer home. I wonder if archaeologists have
uncovered tiny fossilized birds and lizards that they used for needles on their record players and can openers
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