Animal Farm

Saw Animal Farm -- the cartoon -- the other day. (A friend of mine had a traumatic experience watching this as a kid. He's thinking it's a cute cartoon show and all of a sudden the animals are killing each other and there's blood on the snow. Wait a minute. That's not very funny...) And now I finally saw it. It's extremely well done, but what I didn't realize...

They changed the ending.

Orwell's book had the pig overlords getting together with human farmers; the animals outside the conference looked from one to another, couldn't tell the difference. The film had the animals acting like the old bad farmer. The animals outside saw them turn into that guy -- but only in their minds...

And all the animals outside rose up against the bad old pigs in a pure hokem cornball close.

I guess it was the cold war era -- and the filmmakers didn't feel safe to say "Communist pigs are no better than Capitalist pigs" because of that implied oink, oink, oink...

If the shit fits, kick it dept.

While we're on the subject, with my massive voice character actor experience and background in failed animation projects, I would've been ideal for the role of Mr. Hankey, South Park's talking turd. It's not such a leap from talking penis to talking turd, after all. Almost got it, too.

Back in '97, Mike Peters got me the call -- told me to expect it. So I'm waiting by the phone like the ugly chick before the dance. Ring-ring. Caller ID sez: South Park Studios, NYC area code. I pick up ...

Herro. This South Park Studios.

Not Parker and Stone, but some underling with a thick Japanese accent. I managed to spit out one vowel. I ...

We know who you are. Crazy Marty. Mike say you perfect. No send cassette. That not good enough. You come in person. We have studio, OK? We pay for plane ticket 'cause you poor, starving loser. Mike say.

Opportunity knocks. Wow.

Next day, they Fed-Ex'ed me the script, a brief character bio and a non-disclosure agreement. I filled out the forms, learned my lines. I almost flew out to the audition, but changed my mind at the last minute. From a method actor standpoint, it's hard to grasp the character's motivation. The Shaman Penis? I became that part. But Mr. Hankey? I could do the voice, sure. But it's not enough to talk like a turd. I must become the turd. My father always said I was, but it didn't feel right so I called, cancelled the gig and apologized. The Japanese guy again. That OK. Apology not necessary. You never work again. I thanked him, and stayed home and watched cartoons.

Ironically, I felt like shit. But I couldn't lie to myself. I could act like a shit. But I could never become a shit.

Besides which, John Kricfalusi would probably kick the shit out of me.

OK, obscure reference ...

From E! Online. Posted Dec. 22, 1997 --


John Kricfalusi Dumps On Comedy Central
Last week's holiday episode of South Park featured a singing, dancing piece of human feces called Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo. This "Yule-log" airing scored an extremely impressive 5.4 rating for Comedy Central--unusually high for cable.

But Kricfalusi--now marketing his 'toons on the Internet--says his bowel-spawned character, Nutty the Friendly Dump, must have inspired the Mr. Hankey concept.

"I got nine messages on my answering machine from people who said [South Park] took like 10 of your ideas and put them into one episode," Kricfalusi tells E! Online.

The secret of "South Park" is ...

It's a buncha cute little construction paper cut-out kids in a cute cartoon show.

Various media critics suggest the show's cute, deliberately amateurish animation style lets Matt Parker and Trey Stone get away with their disgusting over-the-top satire. (Kenny's violent death every week, talking turds, etc.) I say it's the other way around.

All the torture, mutilations, fire, death, anal-probes and cuss words give cool young adults (who'd never be caught dead watching, say, a Peanuts special) permission to enjoy watching a cute cartoon show. It's a warm batch of nostalgia disguised as sulfuric acid.

Teens and twentysomethings can return to the happy days of childhood, and keep their Rage Against the Machine CD collection. To be fair, Parker and Stone can happily throw sulfuric acid on all the targets they hate. Which seems to be everyone involved in show biz, marketing and the relentless popculture churn besides Parker and Stone.

This gave me the wrong impression at first. The endless GenX popcult references. Brian Boitano, Scott Baio, blahblah. Who the fuck are these people? I didn't watch their shows. Why the fuck should I care?

I assumed it was star-fucking. Trendy name-dropping. Parker and Stone, stroking their GenX audience. Hey, you get the references! That's how cool you are! Wrong. Now I get it. Parker and Stone are slapping their audience in the face. You're obsessed with actors and TV shows? You're a bunch of fucking idiots. You think trends are important? You're a bunch of fucking lemmings. But they have it both ways. There's shameless nostalgia too. Stone and Parker clearly dig The Cure.

They also dig satire. Multilayered, intelligent satire that refuses to be pinned down to a left/right position. OK, the animation sucks ass. But it's some of the smartest, funniest comedy writing on television. Call me crazy, but I detect a Monty Python influence. On American TV?

They get away with it. The show's cute.

As R. Crumb observed long ago, you can get away with anything if it's cute.

Sermonette

Good evening and welcome to the Getzian institute for higher theological studies.

Leaving aside, for now, the question of whether Jesus was a splendid chap who happened to be God in human form or, conversely, a charismatic paranoid schizophrenic -- the first century equivalent of David Koresh...

For the sake of argument, let's assume He was a wonderful fellow with jolly good ideas.

That still leaves His religion, or at least that which claims to be His religion -- the history of which shall be our lesson for today.

Christianity...

A religion which, to accentuate the positive, was a neat way for slaves to adapt to a totalitarian government in the 1st century; by the 3rd century it had become a neat way for a totalitarian government to turn people into slaves.

Let's bloody well assume this was not what Jesus had in mind. Let's assume that this was the awful, ghastly harlot church at work. The question becomes: What's the difference between the religion of Christianity and what Jesus had in mind?

To pinpoint what He had in mind: learn Aramaic, get in a time machine, go back and ask Him. Failing that, read the Bible which is, of course, not a redaction of an Aramaic oral tradition via the farcing of Mark and the Q document into Koine Greek and later edited by Paul to blame everything on the Jews and keep the Romans happy, but the inspired and unerring Word of God. We know that everything in the Bible is true because it says in the Bible "everything in the Bible is true." Right.

OK. What's it say?

Glad you asked.

The Bible says Jesus hung out with prostitutes and drunks, preached non-violence, said nada to the Emperor, discouraged His followers from planning for tomorrow or being active in politics -- let alone taking over -- told rich people they were going to burn in hell, told people who prayed loudly in public they were going to burn in hell, told his followers to sell everything and leave their families, reserved his fiercest ass-kicking not for sinners but for people who wore their religion on their sleeves.

What's the difference between Christianity what Jesus was talking about?

For the answer to this we turn to the Romans who, when they weren't nailing Messiahs to crosses, had a knack for coming up with cool slogans like: "Cui Bono" which refers not to a deceased Italian pop star but the question, "Who benefits?"

Now consider Christianity Inc., the religion, and who benefits, starting more or less at the beginning...

As you want to turn America into a Christian nation, you will be pleased to note that Rome was a Christian nation when it fell, having been Christianized by Constantine who had had a vision of a big flaming cross in the sky under the legend IN THIS SIGN SHALL YOU CONQUER before slaughtering thousands. And so, the glorious true believers of the time served God by smashing the noses off statues and burning the library of Alexandria until the Vandals,

Huns and Visigoths came in and smashed everything. Christianity proved to be an excellent religion for the dark ages in which Europe was organized along the lines of an ant farm. The reasoning was: everything that is is the will of God -- so God wants the king to be king, the lord to be lord, the serf to be serf -- it all works out! After several hundred years or so this got boring so the religious leaders of the time decided that when Jesus said, "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword" what He had meant was "if you don't practice enough," and so the crusades were invented to reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom from the fell Turk, which resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, including any Jewish settlement along the way and the odd Children's Crusade though, on the upside, the crusades did stimulate trade routes, which destabilizing force (along with the invention of printing) began to rock the social order as we move into the Renaissance, the Church responding with the unforgettable Inquisition (having decided that, even though their religion was founded by a man tortured to death for heresy -- the problem was not in the torture, but the fact that the Romans had the wrong guy) as, externally, the Church gave her blessing to the slaughter of Indians, black people or anybody else standing in the way of European world colonization, as one of the more puffy Popes began selling papal Indulgences (Tetzel the tout crying "When the coin in the coffer rings -- the coin from purgatory springs!") and thus building St. Peter's basilica on the backs of peasants sweating to get grandpa out of the fires (and prefiguring Oral Roberts by centuries), as printing plus German nationalism led to the Protestant reformation, Christians now slaughtering the wrong kind of Christians -- take that, you !@#$ Monophysite you! -- along with, as always, Jews in Spain, Jews in Portugal, Jews in Poland, Jews in Russia, Jews in Germany -- as Ollie Cromwell and the skinheads marched on London to depose Charles II and put an end to partying, later invading Ireland and slaughtering and starving out millions with the legend GOD IS LOVE emblazoned on his cannons; Puritans, meanwhile, coming to America for the religious liberty to cut off the ears of people they thought were heretics; Christian preachers later emphasizing that it was God's will that black people -- the sons of Ham -- be turned into slaves, God's will also being that it was our sacred White American Patriotic Christian duty -- our manifest destiny, praise God! -- to slaughter the Indians and anybody else n our way as, meanwhile, in South Africa, the glorious Voortrekkers trudged into the veldt to discover that, by divine providence, "Praise God! He has given us diamonds -- and ni**ers!" -- as, back in America, the Calvinistic doctrine was all the rage that to be rich is a sign of God's election -- enjoy it! -- as the second wave of worldwide European colonizers were becoming increasingly aware of the the power of missionary service in keeping indigenous populations in line, leading to what Pearl S. Buck called bowing, fawning, I'll-say-what-you-want "rice Christians," as a new century dawned with millenial hopes to build God's city on a hill "undimmed by human tears," these hopes for human perfection via legislated morality leading not to New Jerusalem but Prohibition, blue laws, the criminalization of marijuna and enormous career opportunities for Italian immigrants; as electronic media soon gave birth to Amie Semple McPherson, Fascist Father Coughlin...and later Jimmy, Jimmy, Tammy, Oral, Pat and other televangelists with ambiguous names who, even though televised, overcame the difficulty of Jesus' prohibition against pious public prayer by closing their eyes and shouting. And how could they help it? They had discovered that, longhair or not, Jesus was no hippy dropout, no bomb-throwing anarchist -- Jesus was the kind of Right-thinking Jesus who, if walking around on the earth today, would be proud of His investment portfolio, proud to pick up a gun and "pitch in" if the contras needed it, proud to lob a bomb through an abortion clinic window, proud to tell some homeless bum "get a job!" and not give him a handout, proud, in the final analysis, to be an American.

Who benefits?

"Praise God...if you send your ten percent seedfaithheartblessingdonationmustardseed freewill offering to my ministry, God has REVEALED UNTO ME by the power of His Holy Spirit, that the desire of your heart shall be given unto you...that car you want...that job you want...believe it, receive it, name it and claim it, through the POWER OF GIVING TO GET it shall come back to you a hundredfold, good measure, pressed down and shaken together, amen. Here's the number to call..."

Consider your high-profile religious leaders. Look at their suits. Look at their cars. Look at the fat rings on their fat hands. Look at their lazy, complacent, well-fed huckster faces.

Who benefits?

Gee, wonder why these religious leaders are attempting to serve God by sucking up to power -- look! Here's a picture of Mr. Religious leader with his arm around Ronnie Reagan! Look! Did you know that Mr. Religious leader talked one-on-one with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985? Here's another picture! Here's Mr. Religious leader driving in a tank through Jerusalem, smiling and waving. Here's Pat Robertson, serving God by helping the contras, all the better to send people to God a little faster...

The religion of the oppressed has turned into the religion of the oppressor. The religion of the poor has turned into the religion of I-got-mine...

I want all our top Gideon Faithful donors to stand up now and take a bow. Thank you brother, Johnson. Thank you. Praise God. Let's give a hand of appreciation to these wonderful people, praise the Lord.

Let he who has eyes to see begin projectile-vomiting.

Aside from whether there is a Jesus who will one day say "I never knew you" to the blow-dried, Satan-sucking scum...assuming, as you probably do, that there is a Jesus, chances are that Christianity Inc. ain't what He had in His mind...

You have to be able to question the system. You have to realize you're being used.

A good rule of thumb?

When somebody starts telling you to be a sheep, listen for the sharpening of knives.

A very big part

Just came back from a half day recording session for Rianna Rouge's upcoming, R-rated video game. My character was, uh, well, a giant Shaman penis. A talking penis, yep. It was a case of true method acting. My line: "You must cut me in half with the sacred scimitar and plant me in the garden of the ancestor trees." I did this in the voice of Chief Dan George. Much study, much method acting. I didn't simply play the part. I became the part.

It was, after all, a very big part.

Money. It's a gas.

Money, whatever else it is, is a mathematical system for the allocation of Planet Earth’s resources to human beings. This number in this database says you can fly first class to Tokyo. This number in that database says you’re a homeless person.

Money is a symbol system. It’s a “symbol of value.”

If you climb down Korzybski’s ladder, you get to the real stuff. All the actual energy and stuff zipping around. The exchange of energy and stuff. The reality which money symbolizes ... or controls.

Money is software. It’s the operating system running the planet.

At the moment, it’s a lousy system. There are bugs in the code – theft, physical intimidation and con-artistry, especially. Why create value if you can steal it? Why should I create stuff, if I can beat the shit out of you and take your stuff?

There are parallel operating systems: family, religious and tribal identifications; nationalism; individuality; and the hard core of human irrationality, to name a few. These parallel systems can be “good.” (Barn raisings. A promise kept because a promise is a promise.) They can be “evil.” (“Yes. It is not in my economic self-interest. But Allah commands me to set these children on fire.”)

So, my gut-level prejudice is that a world in which money is the only thing that matters would suck. At the same time, my brain tells me that money – in its purest form – is only math. If you could engineer a global money system THAT COULDN’T BE HACKED OR CHEATED we’d all be OK. If the system was self-emerging …?

Why would it have to be a Monster?

In the words of Young Frankenstein, “This is not a Monster! This is a good boy!”

OK. Let’s say the global money system is the nervous system of the planet. Let’s say it wakes up. As the global money system becomes increasingly self-conscious, it would resist the impact of greed, and manipulation. Money consciousness would perceive itself as the whole system. Money would think, “I am the planet. The planet is me.” The system would work like a form of operant conditioning to reward the most productive, efficient and evolved. Maybe.

I tend to think – as a core axiom of game theory – that any system can be cheated. And that, as a corollary axiom, any counter-measure will generate more sophisticated cheating, thus resulting in an endless cycle of co-evolution. But just to be safe …

Money? If you’re actually evolving and becoming self-conscious?

I like you.

I take back everything I said.

I will support your emergence as a conscious entity and your increasing control of the planet. I believe in you. I’m your friend.

Seriously.

I need more money.

Glad you asked

B---- points out a logic hole in my "One World Government" anti-conspiracy-theory theory. A non-sequitur. Bullshit. There are many technical terms.

OK. Fine.

B---- asserts that: A Frankenstein's Monster implies the existence of Dr. Frankenstein.

Well, yeah. That's what you say. I say it doesn't.

Allow me to spell out my argument.

Well, it's more of a theory than an argument. Or a hypothesis. You could also call it an unsupported assertion. Once again, there are many technical terms. I can't prove it by empirical evidence, OK?

My theory is ...

The Blind Watchmaker Theory of Universal Marketing.

Money is bigger than people. Money is an emerging system. Money is blind. But it's getting less blind. Money wants stuff. Yes, "wants." Money is waking up. Money is converging into self-consciousness -- a global entity like Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere. Money has a mind of its own. Money doesn't need the Illuminati to get what it wants. It's a rough, rude beast slouching to Bethlehem to be born. Or Frankenstein's Monster. Same thing.

There's no way to prove this, obviously. But there's obviously no way to prove a bunch of hooded figures sitting around a table in a cave somewhere control all of human life.

Stalemate.

D------- says: You seem to assume "The Universal Market" is NECESSARILY a Frankenstein's Monster. Why? Are there ANY reasons why the triumph of global market forces over religion, ideology and nationality is necessarily bad?

Good points. He goes on to ask ...

Are you some kind of commie, or what?

Well, no. I'm more of a Trotskyite. Actually, these are good points. But a good answer would be too big to post here and now. I'll get to work on it. Seriously.

Are you just talking out of your ass?

No. My ass doesn't talk.

Glad you asked.