Men in Black and Marbles

The news has been hot about President Trump yelling at President Zelenskyy in the White House recently. One tidbit stood out:

Volodymyr Zelenskyy was wearing black slacks, boots, and a black sweatshirt with an embroidered Ukrainian trident...."You're all decked out today," Donald Trump remarked mockingly.

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/did-zelenskyys-outfit-at-the-white-house-tick-off-donald-trump-heres-what-he-was-wearing-as-the-president-took-a-sarcastic-dig-at-him/ar-AA1A3xQS?ocid=BingNewsSerp

Zelensky was all in black, including a sweatshirt, for a very formal kind of meeting. What is the symbolism he was going for? To some people, "men in black" are pirates (who might be good guys underneath), as we see in The Princess Bride movie.

To others, "men in black" are super cool defenders of the universe from the really bad creatures out there.

But, as the movie and its rap song spell out for us, "Men In Black" equals "M.I.B."

Here come the Men In Black

It's the MIB's, uh, here come the MIB's

Here come the Men In Black, Men In Black

They won't let you remember*

Nah nah nah.

The good guys dress in black, remember that

Just in case we ever face to face and make contact

The title held by me, MIB

https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/3529257/Will+Smith

I was intrigued to find in my huge, old dictionary that "mib" means "mig" in the sense of a marble used for playing marbles. See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mib.

Do you remember how, at the very end of the first Men in Black movie, the earth and our universe are portrayed as being inside a marble that an alien hand is playing marbles with? I don't think that was a lucky vocabulary coincidence. Is that final movie scene saying that the men in black are being "played with" just as much as everyone else? If so, who is playing everyone else? The technology we see and know about is like the visible tip of an iceberg, and I have felt myself "nudged" to do or say things in the past few years that I wouldn't have otherwise thought of doing or saying.

Of course, a "Mig" is also a USSR-era fighter jet.

So, when Trump makes a big deal out of Zelenskyy showing up dressed as a "mib"....what is really going on? There's so much that is unclear in international politics right now.

* If mind reading and altering technology has been being researched and patented since the mid-1970s (see https://patents.google.com/patent/US3951134A/en) then there has likely been progress on helping induce forgetfulness in targeted ways. Perhaps the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was only partially science fiction.