Extraterrestrial Segregationists

By Richard Zoglin

In Day of Absence, Douglas Turner Ward's one-act play of 1965, a Southern town wakes up one morning to find that all its black people have disappeared. The result is so chaotic -- garbage piling up, houses left uncleaned, meals uncooked -- that the whites plead for the blacks to come back. Thirty years later, racial satire has taken a bleaker turn. In Space Traders -- one of three episodes of Cosmic Slop, an HBO anthology series from Reginald and Warrington Hudlin (who wrote and directed the film House Party) -- aliens arrive on earth with a modest proposal for the U.S. government: We'll give you unlimited energy and enough gold to pay off the national debt; all you have to do is give us your blacks. This time the white folks think it's a pretty good deal.

The Hudlins have described Cosmic Slop as a "multicultural Twilight Zone"; but the description promises both too much and too little. In one of the three half-hour episodes (which are running throughout the month), the statue of a saint comes to life, forcing a barrio priest to grapple with issues of religion and faith. In another, a ghetto layabout and his abused girlfriend are visited by a mysterious messenger who delivers a rifle along with a note telling them to "wait for instructions." Despite the supernatural overtones, the stories are too dramatically murky to have passed muster on Rod Serling's old series.

Yet Space Traders is something else -- a satire of racial division and alienation that is more biting and impassioned than any of Serling's morality plays. The President calls a strategy session in which aides debate the aliens' proposal as if it were a new national health plan. One adviser points out that, without blacks, the welfare rolls would drop 40%. Another cautions that African Americans were key to the President's narrow election victory. Humane considerations, anyone? "Do you really think," says one aide, "the aliens will treat them worse than we have?"

A national referendum on the matter is scheduled; talk shows debate the issue, and Casey Kasem even hosts a "Just say no" TV fund raiser. Meanwhile, the President's sole black adviser (Robert Guillaume) overcomes his don't-rock-the-boat philosophy to rally opposition to the trade. Yet he finds that black activists are divided and posturing -- they greet his pleas for pragmatism with choruses of Amazing Grace. He does better with white business leaders ("What do you think I've been doing on these corporate boards all these years?"), who agree to finance an ad campaign against the deal once they realize they could lose their best customers for liquor, cigarettes and athletic shoes.

There are so many smart ideas here that the cheesy special effects and sometimes laggard direction are only minor distractions. Space Traders might not have been right for Rod Serling, but Jonathan Swift would have loved it.