Alien

£2.40

A birthday card featuring an alien in a pink shirt with sunglasses and a somewhat alien head, and a speech bubble with text ‘Greetings Earthling – Happy Birthday’

– Blank inside for your own message
– Printed in the UK on premium card stock
– Supplied with a white envelope

In stock

SKU: C0261 Category:

Description

Alien

Alien is a birthday card featuring a humanoid in a pink shirt with sunglasses, and text ‘Greetings Earthling – Happy Birthday’

You might think this is a mannequin with the usual accoutrements, but then who can be sure what aliens look like? What if I were to say that we are pretty sure this is the real thing?

Interestingly, the world alien has several meanings depending on the context. For example, it could mean a person belonging to a foreign country. And in times of war such a person might be referred to as an enemy alien.

And in times of distrust such as we are living through now, we might talk about foreigners and use the word with an underlying tone of distrust. Of course, when I say ‘we’ I mean the others, and not me personally. That said, I have to face my own prejudices and the stereotyping that I do, just as others do. But my sense of what is right says that I should not be antagonistic to non-natives, or immigrants. And I hope my actions and interactions over the past years until this day support that and bear that out.

It’s The Culture That Tells Us Who We Are

On the other hand, the term might refer not to a country or a region but to a culture. In those circumstances we might talk about an alien culture. In fact, living in the 21st century, we only have to look around in our own society to see elements of alien culture. It could be immigrants living lives cut off from the mainstream. Or it could be people pursuing interests that are not mainstream. In the words of the old adage, it takes all sorts to make a world.

Then there is the darker side of the meaning of the word. That’s where we get into the territory of the unfamiliar, the disturbing, or the distasteful.

And so we arrive at the context of this card, which is the extraterrestrial. Here we are talking about an other-worldly person in the plain and simple meaning of the word. That is to say, a being from another world. He or she (how can one be sure?) might be a Martian or a Venutian. In the Martian Chronicles, the human visitors we hardly able to perceive the Martians. It was as though the beings on Mars drifted straight through, out of phase with the human experience of space and time.

 

SKU: C0261

A birthday card featuring an alien in a pink shirt with sunglasses and a somewhat alien head, and a speech bubble with text 'Greetings Earthling - Happy Birthday'
Alien
£2.40