Baphomet Q'ung flees and flies to Moon!

On his way to the "Dark Side"

Feared Autistic-Horrorist, venerated Baalist leader, and beloved musical comedy star Baphomet Q'ung made a dramatic escape from Imperial authorities today after concluding his 203rd performance as the crafty baluchatherium rider Ned in the wildly popular stage entertainment Singspiel, Cherokee National District! More later.

The bare minimus on The Family Circus Maximus

In the process of coining new words and concepts (soydust being a favorite, along with optical wireless) and generating hip new jargon for with-it teens, we here at the Mt. Palomine Institute of Mysteries often come across fun ideas that are so obvious we assume someone else must have previously made hay with them. A few articles back we alluded to a cartoon titled Family Circus Maximus. A day later, during a break, an intern searched through the "Urther" Interknit via an illegal attachment we wired into the Peepergate and she found the above, at the site below. Credit where credit is due.

http://www.sporecloud.com/Comics/FamilyCircus.html

Our own effort (way up top) was meagerer and dryerer but slightly more idiomatically Roman in its deadpan thinking (more like the original cartoon in that way too)--there's just something about Ancient Rome (and The Family Circus) that eludes belly-laughs.

Panopticon rushes to coin great fake name of Muddled-Eastern nation

We'll just know it as Abu Ubu

Renowned citizen monkey hurls crap at Planet of Apes readers

Levander Fricke CM--author of Seven and Ape--The Luck of the Primates and My Years Beneath the Squid, and veteran National Optical Wireless commentator

I'm told that those residents of a parallel Universe planet (known as "da Urth") who may or may not be reading these postings from our own world (the one that we call Erde) oftentimes have difficulty apprehending what they would catalogue as the "social and political stance" of this peculiarity of inter-world communication known as a "blog." Steeped in dual-isms and cultural simplicities, "da Urthers" (or simply "Urthers" perhaps--many of us argue that the "da" is a mere article, not an integral part of that place's name) seem to devote far too much time to either seeking allies in hardened thought, or otherwise enumerating, chastising, or outright committing mayhem upon bogeymen. Fresh perspectives and new ideas are not hot properties; little wonder our thoughts on these pages confuse.

Every once in a while, the editor feels a need to ask a writer to bring these invisible readers up-to-date on--to stoop to the vernacular--where we're coming from. After careful analysis, Ed (the editor) has concluded that "Urthers" accept difficult truths better if they're uttered by a monkey, a member of an endangered species, a cartoon character, or any whiny impotent male like Ralph Nader. Being a chimpanzee (a "Citizen Monkey" here on Erde, and proud of it!) with fifteen minutes to spare in my packed day and with a favor to return, the honor this time has devolved (pun intended) to me.

In a coconut shell, here's where we're at in regard to both our own proclivities, and the breathtaking pageant that is your world.

• Religion is dangerous bunk. All of it. No exceptions. Religions base themselves on hearsay, unreliable texts (what text is not unreliable?), and unprovable and unverifiable suppositions. I was recently visiting "da Urth" (a largely unpleasant experience, although the banana frappes are sublime and every schoolyard contains the most marvelous recreational equipment!) and was told by a wild-eyed adherent of one particular True Faith that "proof" of their prophet's otherworldliness consisted of several 100-year-old reports of miracles and such, witnessed by other doubtlessly objective followers. That's far better hard evidence than many religious nutcases can toss up--most of them work with fragmentary and contradictory information that is thousands of years out of date. While historians proper (professional historians, not apologists for phantasms) are still trying to figure out what sort of man Napoleon was, your average hot-under-the-collar Christian can tell you exactly how their favorite son O'God folded his pants and washed his socks. Christians and Muslims too are remarkable for their ability to get right inside their prophet's head and think his thoughts for him. Every "believer," in turn, is convinced that they, along with their kindred souls, have a direct pipeline to some omniscient all-powerful deity. Religion cannot exist without the basic premises of "we are better than non-believers" and (logically inferred if not stated outright) "non-believers are, to varying degrees, lesser than us." The great and glorious deity seems to exist largely to punish unbelievers, an awkward tautology whose appreciation is beyond the range of zealots.* Religions that push for tolerance of the views of others tend to be the most sanctimonious of all and generally appeal to those among the educated classes who--desiring, as always with these types, both cake and its ingestion--can feel even better than better-than-others because they are so darned nice, warm, accepting, and loving. The only religions of any merit are those that keep to themselves and maintain a realistic sense of humility and doubt. If such exist on "da Urth" I have yet to discern one but they may be hiding about. Two last things--fairy-tale worship is not always prayer beads and chanting and on "da Urth" some social and political theorizing has taken on all the dented armor of religion. Witness the agony that is environmental activism, sacerdotal feminism, and the obscenity of racial and ethnic myth-making. Second, residents of Erde are hardly disbeliever's in a magical Universe. We just observe the miracles, note the endless inconsistencies, and humbly wonder what it's all really about. An "Urth" book that is a bestseller on Erde (which has signed no copyright accord!) is John Keel's Disneyland of the Gods. I assign it in my classes at the University and recommend it.
  
  
• Politics is lugubrious bullshit. All of it. No exceptions. Each political stance, rather than being based on meticulous observation, intense research, and responsible theorizing, is generally an inflation of personal sentiments and/or a rationalization of prejudices, and/or a thoughtless knee-jerk reaction to issues subjectively interpreted. Include within this condemnation most, if not all, social theorizing, especially, on "da Urth" within the last 30 years or so (prior to that time intellects existed there that actually sought to understand the unknown, not merely accumulate evidence to support a particular hobby-horse of an idea). While we find all "Urther" political systems childish and febrile, barely worth the effort to criticize (most so-called "red-state" politics fall into this category), we are especially appalled by the so-called "blue-state" inanities--largely because they evolved (mutated hideously would be more accurate) from often solid thinking that was once known as Liberal or Progressive, although even these terms have altered in meaning so much as to be meaningless in this environment. Currently, the "Urth" intelligentsia--formerly genuinely educated and quite sensible--are anti-intellectual, forcibly uneducated, indoctrinated and dogmatic, and prone to deep sympathies with superstitions, primitivism, and witch-burning. Their passion for bare-butted hunter-gatherers and arcane voodoo ritual is such that they have denied the very idea of progress--this alone separates them more than anything from their Left-leaning and especially Marxist ancestors, those who did not suffer backwardness gladly. We have dubbed these embryonic louts whitenecks, or the modern educated-ignorami. Conversely, and ironically, the former rednecks or current Red-Staters have developed a mildly rigorous intellectuality. Regardless, politics on "da Urth" is largely a pell-mell race backwards into different romanticized and fictional pasts--the Middle Ages or the Neolithic--or an embracing of child's-perspective paternalism or maternal-ism.

• More later--I need to groom

Cougher's hack-hack cured with Ack-Ack

" If thine planes offend thee, pluck them down!"

Dateline: Da Urth

Traditional Merkan security complexities guarantee that one tentacle seldom knows what the other is doing--members of the First Congressional Anti-Aircraft Battery prepare to shoot down today's series of Femtrail spray-flights sponsored, they assume, by either the Secret Black Government, the Hidden Intelligence Service Conspiracy, or maybe even the Department of Agriculture, even though the House probably approved the budget for the very same project regardless who's running it. Violence among the myriad "governments" of Merka is not unknown, but publicly viewable heavy weaponry, like this 50mm gun (or "crop dusting" over populated regions with Air Force tankers), was a--till recently--unusual sight. The "O'Press" covered this event as a page twelve item (directly beneath Family Circus Maximus) claiming testing of a new-fangled cell-phone tower atop the Senate Office Building, but had no explanation beyond "temperature inversion" for the numerous flaming aeroplanes seen dropping from the skies over the Nation's Capital. The Weekly World News sported this headline: Senate Uses Ack-Ack to Discourage Alien Abductions of Pages and Interns and all public concern ended there.

In a related story, rumors are abounding that the Supreme Court has acquired and refurbished a mothballed French aircraft carrier (R-93 Generale Neusaunce) and future judgements will be made on the open seas where the Constitution (the document, not "Old Ironsides") holds no sway. Air strikes can be launched from her decks to enforce various rulings, and with the added mobility the oaken mallet of the Court will no doubt be felt worldwide. Top Muslim mullahs are showing interest in this innovative military/legal concept as it allows for a highly augmented projection of the power of the fatwa and realistic implementation of the occasional extra-territorial death sentence, what with everyone now being under everyone else's legal jurisdiction these days. (Only last week, one of our staff was--in absentia--tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Abu Ubu for stamp collecting, which is specifically banned by the Koran as a worshipping of images with adhesive backings. Our coastal defenses stand ready)

Lest you forget the font of all that is Pille

Myself, flatter and flickering yet virtually here

Pressing conundrums embedded in remote geographies have uninstalled me for a brief interim from full impress upon this thing-called-a-blog, yet I am, as always, present and presently accounted for, both hereabouts and all-hearing, a single apex-topping pyramidal eyeball laminated upon the throbbing panoptica of life--all-seeing and all-knowing and delimited only by the range of shoddily-written memos and array of inane (sh)emails passing across and sometimes--like overly energized atomica particula--even through my multi-ton mahogany roll-top; informing me of the moment-to-moment status of Wotan's Vast Multiversality. My most fervant wish is that (with the remaining unclouded and un-Masonic eye gazing on retirement and a good soak in a hot bath) my twin terrors of daughters--the commendable Penny and the unpredictable Patty--will someday be the Jachin and Boaz-like pillars supporting the manifold efforts of my personal brain-childe--the illustrious and Erde-renowned Mt. Palomine Institute of Mysteries! Until that august day unveils itself though, I shall, as always, be, in your eye, the dusty mote with the mostest, Antonio Pille, Professor De-Luxe of Mysteries and the Arcane, most humbly and recedingly.

Relocated low-rider border places nation closer to pavement and solves vanishing southern boundary quandary

Problem sol-ved

Geographies are thriftily rearranged via mere cartographies, as few mortals possess reckoning of the true lay of lands and seas. If the problem persists, the Bananama Canal may be sealed off at either aperture, glutted with kerosene, and ignited, creating an impassable flaming barrier (or see a doctor). The other option offered is the construction of a land bridge to Cue-bah using materials left about from the ancient and abandoned Bering Straits Land Bridge Project* from 12,000 BC, and installation of signs misdirecting migrants there. Cue-ba is not to be confused with the more northerly "province" of "Cue-becky" which already has its own personal land bridges in the form of Angled-Kanadia proper.

The "Enema Canal" postulated in the above illustration is a mere whimsy, a moderately subtle and complex joke of no consequence.

*The Bering Straits Land Bridge Project (AKA "The Big Fill") was a complete disaster; it proved to be a gateway for only the most unsavory types of immigrants, those of whom, upon arrival in the Virginal New World, proceeded to extirpate nearly every entertainingly immense mammal of note with the exception of the Giant Grounded Sloth which can still be found peevishly ringing sales at the front end of the longest register lines at Wal-Marts. The destruction of the Mega-Fauna or The Holocene-caust--a meticulously planned genocide with its own birch-bark Buchenwalds and tee-pee Auschwitzes--was of unprecedented proportions. Current "Native Merkans" have yet to atone for this crime against nature, or even acknowledge their culpability. We at the Institute believe heavy fines should be levied and quotas imposed to rectify these old injustices--for example, it should be mandated that one out of every seven employees on reservation casinos be a Woolly Mammoth or Glyptodon.

Grand opening spoiled by mis-location and mis-communication

Institute's solution to fatwa pollution ends up in "state" of Ill-annoyed

Once again, the Mt. Palomine Institute of Mysteries' efforts to share the common sense of our magnificent and generally peaceful world, Erde, with the sub-standard nincompoops bedeviling the surface of our parallel universe echo-world, "da Urth," have come to less-than-nought. Realizing that the "Urther" Muddled-Easterner tendency to promulgate endless piles of rules and regulations was based in convoluted neurotic obsessive-compulsive behavior, we created a judgement-addict assistance organization called Fatwa-Watchers and entrusted our "Urth" agents to set up the first office in the heart of an ancient place called Kai-row, in the land of E-jipt. Instead, it ended up in a strip mall in Kai-row, Ill-annoyed which is nowhere near either pyramids or any Muddled-Easterners (aside from a thoroughly pleasant Packy-stanley fellow who runs a laundromat nearby). Oyl well!

Mt. Palomine's Perky Pair of Anthro-No-Apologists, the Pille sisters (Patty and Penny), garbed head to toe in wacky gal-hider gear required for that overheated region (I like getting stoned but not with real rocks!--quipped Patty), researched the fatwa problem earlier this year. Confessed one confused and tearful mullah, "I wake up each morning and promise myself no fatwas today; by breakfast I change that to one fatwa--I'll allow myself just one small fatwa this day, only one. By noon I've issued five or six of them on every topic from hairstyles, to what months of the year one may eat oysters. I can't stop myself, I'm out of control, and I then do up to twenty or thirty more of them. Look at me! I'm gaunt and tense, I have a crazed fanatical look in my eyes, my family and neighbors hate me because I'm always passing judgement on every little detail of their lives. I find little pleasure in the few things left that I haven't already issued fatwas against, like lukewarm drinking water and dried dates. I'm a fatwaholic and I need help, bad!"

The Pille Sisters, a bit miffed by the (by Erden standards) sub-Paleolithic (uh, their exact venom-loaded words were pre-human) attitude toward the "weaker sex" that they found in that part of "da Urth," initially made some strong recommendations that we are reluctant to pass along, us not wanting to wreck our reputations as somewhat enlightened pacifist folk. Cooler heads here at the Institute convinced them that relocating all the Muddled-Eastern men-folk to the backside of "da Urth's" moon (their compromise solution!) was not a workable plan, so after a night-long brainstorming session we came up with a comprehensive strategy that included this seemingly innocuous Fatwa-Watchers scheme.

Institute encourages "Urthers" miffed by melting to just go with the flow!

Just an aqua-mannequin--not the fin-ished product--depicting a future aqua-dad on his way to aqua-work in the new-fangled submarine corporate world*

While Erdens fret about the global warping problem that was recently detected on our lovely planet (see earlier article in May of 1957 issue), "da Urth" is also a little (and we do mean a little) concerned about sea levels rising since all the ice sitting on top of places like Greenland is melting fast. [Contrary to popular belief, the ice floating in the North Polar waters--much like the solid coolant in a scotch and soda--once melted, will not add a single millimeter to overall sea levels due to complex and abstruse laws of physics that we lack the space to explain comprehensively. That "meltage" (not a real word) will, however, cause toilet bowls, above-ground swimming pools, and tumblers full of scotch and soda to overflow].

At any rate, our mad scientists were very impressed with a Top Secret study commissioned by Pez-head-ent Boosch and the Merkan TSA (Top Secrit Agency) following the Katrina response debacle failure disaster. Knowing full well that the Merkan city of N'orleens-Jass was, to paraphrase the study's conclusion, "fooked," imaginative solutions were sought by the best brains in intelligence and we agreed the most imaginative (and cost-effective) was creating genetically mutated under-sea-worthy-men-and-women-of-color, or Blaquamen, who could not only survive but flourish in blighted urban areas doomed to be twenty feet under water. Well, why not create an entire multi-ethnic civilization of bottom-feeding boys and gilled girls who could dwell among the fishies? The benefits are multitudinous, variegated, and innumerably undelimited:

• Pollution involving the atmosphere would no longer be a concern to anyone, not that it is anyway
• Oil prices (and oil) will become irrelevant as aqua-persons, or people-of-water (as they will inevitably be called by the lexically-obsessed), learn to ride fuel-efficient dolphins and porpoises
• Proper sanitation and water supplies become non-issues as humans, like fish, would be able to simultaneously use their immediate surroundings as both reservoirs and pissoirs
• Traffic jams in major cities will become a thing of the past when humans abandon major cities and the past
• Urthy-crunchies can "birth" their infants in all-natural salt water just as Mommy Nature intended and that should make them happy; perhaps they can learn to lay eggs again which is a concept so drenched in naturalness that it makes even us all wriggly with excitement
• Christians will be in a perpetual state of baptism and that should make them deliriously happy
• Annoying vegans, lacking major sources of anal-retentive fruits and vegetables, will face extinction unless they develop a taste for kelp
• Tremendous savings to taxpayers as they no longer need to spend money on sun tan lotion, lawnmowers, or toasters
• Costly EMF producing cell phones can be replaced with genetically engineered (and all-natural) sonar and ultrasonics
• Terrorism would be squelched since most bombs can't explode if they become moist and most religious fanatics--like wicked witches--don't like to get wet anyway
• Sushi would be as fresh as it can get (an additional incentive for yuppies reluctant to be turned into guppies)
• The national weight problem would be solved as the buoyancy of salt water will support additional heft and humans can naturally evolve into more pleasing walrus-like shapes
• Whales could be genetically altered to become land mammals again--sent safely out of harm's way
• Spongebob wouldn't be just a popular cartoon but a way of life
• Fishermen will be in their element
• No more mosquito problem

*We could simply cut-to-the-chase and mutate corporate types into sharks, sponges, monk-fish and various nautical invertebrates--ditto with politicians and religious leaders

Baby Chanute gives UN heads up on plan for man

To Serve Man--self-absorbed, somewhat tyrannical toddler to set goals, provide much-needed structure and guidance, for human kind

...and in a more consistent fashion than ever witnessed before--representatives from world's nations applaud sound-bite packed speech for thirty-seven minutes--Baby Chanute sums up feelings about environmental crisis with resounding "Bad Kitty!" and brief tantrum. Bad Kitty! bumper stickers and t-shirts appear almost instantaneously in all major cities.

Chanute to chat with Persian "cat" with no hat

Obtuse advocate of "Medievalism with cell phones" will discuss controversial nuclear ("boom-boom") program and duckies fatwa with drooling diplomat counterpart

Baby Chanute will follow his Middle East wacko chat with a North African tour and talks with Sudanese government--then it's off to Venezuela to clear up a few matters there ("make poopies"), and back to DC for a meeting with Pez-head-ent Boosch, in this toddler's-eye whirlwind global search for the "ma-ma uf aw duckies." Baby Chanute promises to be the world diplomat (and possibly leader) people have longed for in these troubled times, one who speaks to various heads of state and their followers on their own terms and in their own psychological "languages" of infantilism, self-absorption, provincialism, hyperbole, and temper-tantrums. Responding to news this week that an Egyptian mullah had issued a fatwa against the New Zealand brown kiwi*, Baby Chanute emphatically stated, "Kee-wee, kee-wee, (giggle)...FUZZY!" and then abruptly started sobbing fitfully until he was provided with a comforting Spongebob balloon by his "nanny," Ms. Patricia Pille.

*We're just joshing here and we apologize as irresponsible comments like this make Islam and other Great Religions and One True Faiths look sort of silly and that's hardly our intent within the reverential pages of Professor Pille's Planetary Panopticon. We have nothing but total respect, and often admiration, for every world-cultural paleolithic notion, half-arsed idea, groundless superstition, xenophobic tendency, and pathological reality tunnel. Truth is the fatwa we're good-naturedly funnin' with was issued against 4-thousand-year-old Egyptian sculpture and not flightless birds (that would be ridiculous!) and this ban on images created thousands of years ago by the same unwashed heathen infidels who built the Great Pyramid is totally understandable as the intention is to simply prevent idolatrous worship and plenty of modern Egyptian hipsters and beatniks have been giving Isis and Toth (and maybe even the Great Pyramid) the eye lately. Hopefully, as a result of this new injunction, we'll soon be witnessing enraged mobs smashing priceless antiquities to bits, a mere taste of the sensible cleansing operation that will no doubt be directed at the Louvre someday, with the assistance of neo-conservative and PC multi-culturally sensitive Americans.

Egyptians--like burgeoning numbers of Americans--are increasingly looking to religious leaders (and Cosmopolitan Magazine) for guidance as they all generally can't think for themselves and need to be told what to do. No judgement meant here, it's just a commonly known fact about the global glut of differently free-will abled. "Red-state" political and religious leaders enjoy issuing their own "fatwas" too with a recent one directed against the legally elected leader of a South American country! Fortunately, many reasonable individuals have indicated that if too many fatwas (of any denomination) are issued (thereby causing fatwa inflation--a loaf of bread will cost a wheelbarrow full of fatwas!) they'll strongly encourage their respective religious leaders to join Fatwa-watchers]

Baby Chanute alters course of this great Juggernaut of the Interknit

Well, fudge man, if only Baby Chanute reads this thing, and Baby Chanute can't even read anyway (he just drools and gurgles a lot), then we can write whatever the heck we want, can't we? We don't even have to put up pictures or nothing. Eventually this might even devolve into a normal-arsed dumb-fudge Blog. Maybe we'll just cut-and-paste from other Blogs or literature in the public domain. How about a serialized version of a novel by Anatole France (who has, unbeknownst to the millions of non-readers, already made an appearance on these pages--c'mon kids, Where's Anatole?)

Phony-baloney cirruses raise ruckus in citrus districts

Feminine hygiene sprays in our atmosphere? It happens all the time but suddenly, on this particular day, everybody in San Jose noticed and called NASA! Why NASA? Isn't NASA in charge of outer space spraying? Look closely at the newspaper clipping; it's from a news rag in San Jose, Mercury, a planet that doesn't even have an atmosphere let alone a way for its citizens to reach the Ames Research Center by cell phone!

Paranoid hop-headed kooks and fellow-travelers claim hundreds of unmarked USAF 767 tankers loaded up to their shower caps with Summer's Eve, Fresh Breeze, and the more affordable Bob's Tunnel Flush, have been dousing dithering bumpkinry upside and downside across the flummoxed face of our fair homeland for years now. Are Femtrails the "gummint's" way of telling us we're all pussies, and we stink to boot? Well, we here at Professor Pille's Planetary Panopticon are not a-scared of high-altitude fragrance-spewing flights one tiddle. Why heck, we've owned unfixed male cats and if unfixed male cats regularly flew over major population centers that would constitute a real health crisis. Upcoming--an illuminating Panopticon investigative report on this Zyklon Bee's-Nest of a hot potato of a quandry in a nutshell.

Inherit the Spin

"You see, Clarence, there's no Constitutional guarantee of a right to say hurtful things to people and even if there was it would be wrong and we could therefore ignore it. That's the way the founding fathers would have meant it to be if they'd been women and they did things the right way back then anyway. If you disagree, which you have no right to do, then you're a sexist, racist pig and I can say that, even though you may find it hurtful, because I'm right and you're wrong and that's the way it works, in my mind at least"

In a reference few in this historically amnesiacal society will get, William Jennings Bryan patiently explains the importance of speech codes and special hate crime laws to an attentive Clarence Darrow as a heavily medicated and ADD differently-abled Harry Morgan (the Wizard in The Wizard of M*A*S*H) tries to avoid dozing off. [Inherit the Spin (1996)--released during the height of the Cold War-of-the-Sexes, the (in) "Bed" (with the enemy) Scare, "Black" listing (of accused and suspected Euro-centrics), and rampant McDworkyism]

Darrow: So you believe everything written down here in this Andrea Dworkin book is the literal truth?

Bryan: I place my complete trust in the revealed Word of the Goddess as contained in Holy Feminist Scripture

Darrow: ...and when she writes...let me find it here..."all sex is rape," you believe this statement unquestioningly?

Bryan [bemused, eyes twinkling, directing response to crowd]: I am more interested in the rape of truth than in the truth of rape!

[supportive hoots, sniggers, and fuck yehs from courtroom packed with militant feminist onlookers/jury/judges/executioners and one solitary overweight black gay guy who's preoccupied with his knitting and yells out off-handedly now and then and with somewhat alarming force: REBOP! ]

Harry Morgan [startled by ruckus and an especially thunderous REBOP!]: I'm sorry, I'm really stoned and I had the volume turned up way too high on my Ipod. Should we adjourn for lunch or something? I'm totally jonesing for some vegan and a smoothie!

A week ago I wrote about a wonderful book in an Amazon Review (you know, those big musical productions featuring bloodthirsty showgirls exposing just one bare breast, like Janet Jackson meets the Rockettes) describing it as stone dead and completely irrelevant. Huh? The book was Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective--a collection of idiotic reviews from the past that slammed music by greats like Beethoven and Brahms. Slonimsky put the book together in the 1950s, back when senile critics were still getting wedgies over new and innovative music. I declared the book dead because, as amusing as it is, it has absolutely no modern relevant context. Simply, nobody gives a rat's ass about defending new and challenging music any more. Nobody's even writing new and challenging music. As rad as it gets is some feminist composer doing up an Ode to My Vagina and you can bet money that nothing about the music will be controversial. I did hear of another composer--and this is a true story--who composed a string quartet that simulated his personal auditory experiences with tinitus. He'll probably follow it up with a symphonic poem inspired by his erectile dysfunction problem--Ein Hardonleben would be a fine title. Cutting edge stuff, say wot? Well, we've sure come a long way since the Tristan Chord, Twelve Tone music, and The Rite of Spring, haven't we?

The film Inherit the Wind, another great dopey thing, is also long deceased and of no use to nobody no how. The fanatical Christians in the movie, the ones who want to string up the poor high school teacher who dared to teach Darwinism, come across equally well as early prototypes of both the modern Left and Right. In fact the resemblance of the brainless enraged mobs in this movie to crowds of male-bashing, anti-porn feminists from about ten years back is stunning. The Clarence Darrow character (fictionalized as Henry Drummond) argues passionately for something that few today would (honestly*) agree with--the right to think for oneself and be an individual. Today you can't even critique another culture that echos the narrow-minded 1920s yahoos who appear in this film, which is most other cultures, nearly all Third World cultures, and increasingly, our own. Drummond doesn't even have Libertarian appeal in this film, he's an old fashioned Lefty promoting a humanist agenda and not just no restrictions so people can do what the fuck they want and make the big bucks. His plea has a spiritual edge to it that Libertarian arguments have always lacked.

Sadly, the movie is barely comprehensible now (Individualism? Where do I sign up?! What should I wear? What kind of music do individualists listen to anyway?) and within a few decades it'll probably be seen as totally subversive (and be banned) or completely alien (and be ignored).

* Oh, everybody's for freedom as long as it's within tightly narrow and carefully regulated guidelines

Baby Chanute only reader of Panopticon

Baby Chanute drools on pages and seeks out duckies

(While the editorial staff searches for reasons to continue producing whimsies, novelties, and non-standard opinions)