I had the family gather around this afternoon, as I have them do every afternoon, and we tuned in to Father Charles Coughlin's radio program. For those of you who lack the opposable digits necessary to operate the radio-machine, Father Coughling is a radio show personality who speaks the truth that is being supressed in the Jew-owned media. Perhaps you are unaware that an international cabal of Jewish bankers and industrialists have conspired to take covertly take control of this country? Well, perhaps you ought to familiarize yourselves with a piece of literature known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, detailing the implementation of Zionist dominance. If you have ever purchased a Model T from the Ford company, then you likely already own a copy, whether you realize it or not. Escaping the global grasp of the Jewish banking conglomerate is no easy task, but I think there's no denying we need rid ourselves of the Federal Reserve, and its influence over the American economy. And it certainly would not hurt to send every last one of these hook-nosed money-grubbers back to Europe on a leaky boat.

UPDATE: Holy shit! I just heard on the fucking radio that the fucking Earth was being invaded by fucking Martians! Holy fuck! What the fuck are we supposed to do? Fuck!

COMMENTS

The Late Murel: I heard that they were not only Martians but they were wearing skullcaps. I think I'll see what that bottle of rat poison tastes like.

I urge you all to throw your support behind the Kingfish in the upcoming presidential primaries. I'd say this Louisiana boy could well give that wretched internationalist FDR a run for his money. I'd rather hate to see that lily-livered, New England, old money carpet-bagger take the reigns of this country during time of crisis. I'm sure Europe will do fine to dispatch of this Hitler character without our aid. Surely if they can't be appeased it would be merely a trifling matter to put down the Axis powers with the sheer omniscience of the French military presence. The notion of German armies being able to force their way through that magnificent feet of strategy and engineering, the Maginot Line, is quite simply laughable. Ha-ha-ha-ha! That's the sound of me laughing. This is nothing we need be bothered with. That England-loving fool Roosevelt would do well to keep his mind out of foreign affairs, the world would surely be better for it.

For you ignoramouses out there who haven't familiared yourselves with the Kingfish, the Louisiana governor is a man of unprecedented character and integrity, fully befitting a Louisiana politician. This is exactly the type of man we need in the White House. At last we'd have a man in Washington willing to give the rich industrialists what's-for. Oh, what's wrong Mr. Roosevelt? Feeling a might uncomfortable with the hot breath of iminent defeat blowing softly at the nape of your neck? Ah, there's never been a grander time in all of history to be an American!

COMMENTS

Murel Bailey: I hear tell old Huey ain't Long where it counts.

Poosh: k...

Mad Alchemist: "I hear tell old Huey ain't Long where it counts."

I can only assume you are referring to physical height, and I assure you you are quite wrong on this count, good sir. The man must be at least a good 6'2".

The time has come to prepare a room at Bedlam for a distinguished visitor in the person of our own President Jefferson. Not for those things that Citizens of Breeding and Acumen of the Mind would see fit to send him away where doctors might, with the leech and the rod, temper his crumbling sanity - his general sloth concerning matters of hygeine &cetera; nor, indeed, his uncivilized tendencies to greet visitors at the White House in his pyjamas; nor, indeed, any of his better known peculiarities come to mind as the reason we should bind him and pull him, even as he flings spittle and stink, from the Capitol precincts. No, by his deeds we know him; and we know him now as the kind of man to imagine himself a wolf when the moon is full, a man we should imprison to protect not only ourselves but himself.

What did Mister Jefferson think when he gave our good money to France for a regular Land of Nod of desolate wastes? Did he think the Constitution entitled him to speculate in land, when his actions show him unfit to pursue such a career? Did he think we can extend our soldiery ad infinitum into a hellish, swampish muck of Louisiana wasteland when he can barely govern the United States with what he has available?

This execrable "purchase" proves the deranged and feverish state of the President's mind, and reminds us of why the Federalists will prevail in the next elections - and the Republicans can march to the boneyard of failed and extinct political factions brought to ruin by leaders who would do better to lead in the hospitals for the insane.

COMMENTS

Mad Alchemist: Certainly the Democrat-Republican party carries an almost laughable political presence. I don't think it would be presumptious of me to proclaim that the Federalists have established a permanent dominance over the American political scene, surely for centuries to come.

Speaking of rampant alcoholism, I had an encounter with an Irishman this afternoon. What a nightmarish lot that race is! If we didn't have a need for bloody wage-monkeys to operate the machines of industry I'd be all for driving the lot of them back across the Atlantic, let the King be arsed to worry about them. By the Good Lord's name, I've never been witness to such horrific mannerisms!

COMMENTS

Sipidation: Did you know that 40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year? I think we need to do something about that. The bathroom needs to be officially declared a quagmire.

Mad Alchemist: Personally, I've come to refer to my own latrine as "the pooping parol." Though I suppose it can be a bit of quagmire in there when I'm done with it, if you understand my reasoning, good sir.

Have you seen any Democrats lately?

Since The Volstead Amendment passed and all the saloons will be shut down - and America, finally, will be free - permanently! - from the cursed drunkard's cup, it occurs to me that the Democratic Party will no longer have any place to hold their conventions. I predict that this reprehensible party will cease to exist altogether before the end of the 1920s. Perhaps even sooner all its members will simply expire or emigrate to regions that have not yet enacted Prohibition.

A sound policy for a brighter future! Well done.

Some of you might have heard rumors about the events in Congress recently, when a patriot - overcome by righteous indignation - took a hickory cane and administered a long-overdue education to the Right Honorable Sen. Sumner from Massachussetts.

And long have we waited to see this administered, for the man - I hesitate to call him that, and recoil at the further honorific of "Senator" - spent far too much time oiling his hair, combing his side-whiskers, and admiring himself in the mirror far in excess of what the quality of his looks allow. When not convincing himself that the ladies swoon in mere daydreams of a word or a look from him, Sen. Sumner spent his time venting out volcanic spews of all kinds of vileness about his betters in the South. He began with a breach of civility, rode with it from the Atlantic seaboard across the breadth of the continent, discovered water at the far side, and, oblivious to decency and reason, continued to ride. With the knowledge that a merciful Creator interests Himself in our doings and, in time, sets all things right, how could we doubt that the drubbing Handsome Charles the Senator provided might return to him, with considerable interest acrued?

Well, we now hear that Monsieur Sumner (surely he bought that name at a discount somewhere in Paris, that he might show it to the benighted back home) has, for whatever reason, taken abed for the indefinite future. This might have something to do with the fragments of a broken cane found around his writing desk, and the stains of an odd ink - strangely reddish-black rather than the black we normally use in documents and correspondence. Something clearly seems to have happened. Gossip suggests that where we found Senator Charles Sumner hard and unyielding before, something has softened him up considerably. And the owner of the broken cane - a stalwart Mister P. Brooks - has been found.

For those of you concerned about these events, contributions to replace this broken hickory cane - a family heirloom, from all reports - may be sent to Mister Preston Brooks, c/o The Southern Senators Benevolent Society for Civility in Government. Remember that if a man keep not a civil toungue in his head, it sometimes behooves gentlemen to beat the Devil from his back, and nothing does the job like hickory.

COMMENTS

Mad Alchemist: You Southerners are nothing but a group of insolent pea-wits! Perhaps spending so much time with your precious negroes has made savages out of the lot of you. Oh, how I long for the day our Cavalries set upon your land and go about the business of setting fire to your cities and befouling your womenfolk.

Murel Bailey: Curse not the splinter in thy neighbor's woodpile while ignoring the beam in thine own.

This morning I picked up a copy of the newspaper (5 cents! Do I look like Rockerfeller to these people?), and behold! There was an illustration of Joseph Pulitzer in a dress (A dress! Can you imagine something so ludicrous?), and he was converseing with none other than William Randolph Hearst (Also in a dress! Hilarious!), and both were fighting over this pillar of blocks that read "WAR". The illustration suggested that Pulitzer was saying "Say, young feller, vatch the tome. I'm de tome. You gant buy id. I'm a goot ting put don't push me, see!" And Hearst, it's suggesting, was saying "Say, this my war. I bought and paid for it and if you don't stop bothering me about it I'll have you put off the Earth, see!" Hilarious! I thought I was about to evacuate my bowels with jovial uproar! Ah, what satire!

COMMENTS

Sipidation: Here is a question with the random sayings. Did you mean to have the "Confound it! I seem to have broken the Print-O-Graph." phrase make the all the text on your entire page have a strike through it? I was just wondering because I just saw it for the first time and wasn't sure if that was on purpose.

Mad Alchemist: Yes, that was because I broke the Print-O-Graph. I believe things are in working order now.

It seems Little Sally has fallen ill with the cholera. A wretched condition, no doubt. Perhaps you'll recall back to last Autumn, when we lost Timothy to the crotchett (or some such dreadfulness, I can't really be buggered to remember). If we did not have 23 other children, the wife and I would be quite worried of our later years and how we might provide for ourselves. I suppose we can only leave things in the hands of Time and God now. In any reguard, we had to shoot a perfectly good ox today, because he was exhibiting sympathies to the Crown. Damn, bloody Monarch.

The Russians fed intelligence to Saddam in the build-up to the war with Iraq. Yay for allies!

If you haven't read John Dies at the End, a novel available free online, written by my hero, David Wong, of Pointless Waste of Time, I highly recommend doing so. It's sort of hard to describe, but it's basically a supernatural horror story with a (twisted) sense of humor.

The reason I bring it up is because I was reading through it the other day and this great passage caught my attention

My mind didn't clear. It had been clear before. It muddled, suddenly ablaze with rioting factions of insecurities and dreams, a cacophonous battleground of conflicting moral codes and spiritual beliefs. I was, in other words, back to normal.

It's better in context, but still, I just thought that was an absolutely great line. Maybe just because that's exactly how my mind feels all the time. I think that's why I'm so obsessed with David Wong's writing though, because he puts into words things that I have felt, sometimes it seems like my whole life, but could never articulate them. Plus, he's funny as hell.

In keeping with recent precedent of Angry Stick-figure Man cartoons being vomit-inducingly disgusting, I have a new one now available, and I also just recieved a submission from Jason Kallini.

Also, I got an e-mail from a reader asking me to link to this. I'm pretty sure he's asking a bunch of different right-leaning bloggers to link to it, because halfway down the e-mail it starts over, but this time addressing another right-leaning blogger, but oh well. I'm just happy people are visiting my blog and not hating me. If he thinks this link is going to bring much traffic though, then the joke's on him, since about 90% of the commenters commenting on this blog are actually me and Murel using fake names.

I've been extremely busy over spring break, playing video games, so you'll all have to forgive the slowness of the coming Angry Stick-figure Man cartoon I promised, but unless I die before then you should see it within a week from now.

Until then, I'm still interested in posting any AS(F)M cartoons by readers of this blog. Last time Murel and Sipidation were the only people to submit them who weren't secretly me.

I got that book today that I won in that Pointless Waste of Time contest. It was even signed by John Cheese himself. I have bragging rights for life now. And hopefully this will get Murel to finally let go of that dreadful David Lee Roth business.

Duck season.

Oh, man, good old Lee has become a real trainwreck, folks. First he posts this thread proclaiming the humor in the death of a deaf woman who was hit by a train she couldn't hear. Personally, knowing Lee, I would normally have thought nothing of that. I've said myself, tragedy is the best comedy, and I personally think making and laughing at jokes about the worst parts of life, the world, and human nature is a pretty useful way for me to cope with the world, personally. I try to be tactful in the presence of those who may be offended, but as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to humor the only thing that's truly off limits is one's own mother. So, to an extent I sympathize, even if I didn't find this specific situation particularly funny. But then, Lee gets linked to by some folks within the LiveJournal deaf community, and everybody is talking about what a total asshole he is. Apparently some people are still surprised by this, even though I could have told you that about him even back when I was a devout fan of his blog. But what I think is funny about this is Lee's attempts at explaining himself, which are available here, here, and here. Lee, of course, goes once again into the "everyone is a hypocrite for not liking me" mode that we've all become so familiar with.

I honestly think I know what the appeal has always been in asshole humor like Lee's. For me, at least, and I presume it's the same for others, we tend to get sick and tired of self-righteous folk who get on their high horse about whatever cause de jour. People saying "you should care about this," or "I'm a better person than you because I care about that." And I think Lee tends to deservedly nail the worst of the perpetrators in this reguard, such as leftists, and religious fundamentalists, and the political corectness police, and America-bashers all over the world. People like me, and I'd bet most AfD readers, are sick to death of hearing how we just don't care enough about suffering, and racism, and injustice, and inequality, largely because we've cared about such things our whole lives, and people who go on TV to show how much more they care than we do really aren't making any more sacrifices than we are. I, for one, was sick of people using my own conscience and good nature as something to cudgel me over the head with so that I could support their cause, or to make me feel shitty for believing the things I do. The fact that every person insisting that you care has some sort of religious or political agenda they want you to adopt is not helping.

Where Lee went wrong was not in his bashing of Bush and Republicans, or his bashing of Creationism, or his position on Terri Schiavo, it was in the fact that he, himself, became self-righteous about it. The thing we came to Right-Thinking to escape was now being heaped all over us everytime we went. Oh my God, you don't understand the scientifc method! Oh my God, you don't believe in federalism! Lee's twisted humor in the past was fun to read because it was immoral, and rotten, and deep down we knew how awful it was, and we knew Lee knew it too. Nowadays, the man is perpetually indignant about everything, and he's speant, what? like the last year and a half explaining himself, and justifying himself, and trying to prove himself, and all the while perpetuating this high-minded notion that he was the only one among us with any moral consistancy and intellectual honesty. And, there we go again, being preached down to. Just like we've always been preached down to by Hollywood liberals, just like we've always been preached down to by right-wing televangelists, just like we've always been preached down to by the old uncles at family get togethers. And don't get me wrong, some of the readers who disagreed with Lee were preaching down to him just as bad, but they're not the ones standing around shocked now that the rest of us who really didn't care all that much about those issues (at least not to the degree they were blown out to on those forums) to begin with all got pissed and left. Lee's immorality was a hoot for people back when he didn't try to act he like he was their moral superior, and just seemed to be having a good time with his own debauchery. Now it seems like he's the only one laughing at his own jokes, and spends most of his time having to explain why they're funny. The pissed off deaf people aren't the only ones who could stand to lighten up a bit.

UPDATE: "Am I so out of touch...? No, it's the children who are wrong!" -- Seymour Skinner

Back during World War II, entertainers pulled for their country and for the Allies in ways ranging from getting into uniform themselves or making movies that actually depicted the Home Team as good guys (yes, this was a different era). Even cartoon characters got into the act, with Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny abusing cartoon Nazis for our edification. Donald Duck pitched for Victory when he wasn't a pitchman for taxes.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, while I was bored out of my mind trying with imperfect success to remove the stank from a huge pile of laundry I tainted a stack of index cards with some cheesy toons where Angry Stick-Figure Man pitches victory in the War on Terror. Why, after all, should ASFM do any less than hyperannuated mutants like Popeye?

Anyway, let these toons inspire us to Victory. Or let them inspire us to take the ballpoint pens away before they draw again. What does it say when a man in his forties wastes time doing fan art?

Another actual conversation

Grandma: Who put the sun up in the sky?
Li'l Brudder: Gravity?
Grandma: You believe in evolution?!

In my anthropology class there was a class discussion following a video we watched on the forced assimilation of Native Americans that seemed to go in the general direction of anti-Americanism (though I should note that the professor never really egged this on, and while I'm fairly sure she has to be a lefty, I have yet to see her push politics in the class). I was kind of not paying attention at the time and drawing this weird jogger who me and Li'l Brudder saw in the park, and made fun of, in my notebook during this time. Anyway, I started thinking about what was said after class (Going off topic a little bit, isn't it neat how left-wing college kids will always go on in class about some big moral revelation the rest of us had when we were 8 years old, and assert themselves with the moral authority as if they were guiding the rest of us to the Promise Land? Isn't that just adorable? Bleh!), and some of it started grating at my nerves. One pinko dork with really bad skin (normally I would never make fun of someone for being dorky and having bad skin, especially remembering my own high school days, but when you to start acting like a pretentious, smug little prick in my classrooms, then I am more than willing to resort to cheap ad hominem) started going on about McCarthyism (I would like to take this moment to point out that, even though McCarthy was quite sincerely a bit of a nutjob, he was also largely vindicated in his accusations by the VENONA reports released after his death, which revealed from intercepted Soviet communications a great deal of pro-communist elements within our own government). Then this hot girl who I tend to stare at during class started adding to that, and started complaining about how "communism" has become such a "bad word" in our society, and how we don't see it as just another legitimate political perspective that some earnest people believe in. Now, I've mentioned before that I've talked to bona fide commies who were perfectly nice. But, by that same token, I'm sure there are Klansmen out there who are the most upstanding of gentlemen. Yet nobody ever questions the stigma attached to Naziism, or the KKK, or racists in general in our society. Most of us all recognize that arbitrary physical distinctions are pretty dumb things to base our worldviews on, but in my own opinion so are arbitrary class distinctions (I consider myself wealthier in things that actually matter to me than people who have monetary means far beyond my own. You can maybe qualify net worth in dollars, but you can't quantify net happiness.). Communism has a substantially more brutal track record than Naziism, or the KKK, or any military dictatorship, or even Medieval religious fundametalism. Why does it make you a scare-mongering witch-hunter to attach the same stigma to communism as is attached to these other groups (let us not forget, the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities activities was originally founded to look into the Nazis and the Klan) by both the Right and the Left? Which brings us to another interesting trend. Nobody I know of on the Right reguards Pinochet or Marcos as anything less than a monster, yet we see many on Left who have no problem lionizing dictators like Fidel Castro, and when it comes to the Middle East, even far-right religious radicals like Yasser Arafat. You can't tell me there isn't a double standard among the left in judging ugly ideologies. No righty I know of holds anything but contempt for Eric Rudolph or Fred Phelps (and most righties I know of even loath the far less radical Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who are more or less harmless, even if they can be somewhat hateful). Communism is an ugly political model of hatred, based on conflict (Look how often the term "class war" comes up in communist literature, and tell me that isn't a hate-based ideology. Or, I'm sorry, is it "politically correct" to hate, so long as you hate based on material possession?). Communism also tends to usually entail an ideological Vanguard that is prone to descent into murderous frustration when there is resistance to the absolute adoption of communism over the whole of society (And how else can you even have communism, without it being absolute throughout society? After all, the rich can otherwise up and leave and stay confined to their own segment of society.). It is inherently brutal and repressive, no matter how those who conceived of it envisioned it would be. I do believe in moral relativism to a certain extent, but I have no problem casting condemnation on ugly and twisted ideologies, and communism is every bit the ugly, twisted ideology that Naziism was, that Aryan Nationalism is, that racism in genreal is, and that militant religious fundamentalism is (though many lefties seem to have trouble distinguishing between non-violent Christian fundamentalism, even non-hateful sects, and the brutal Islamic fundamentalism being practiced in the Middle East). This is what I utterly despise about left-wing ideology. I've seen their own open and blatant bigotry towards Christians, Southerners, "rednecks," and Red States. There is no way what I've seen spew forth on the message boards of my own friends even is anything less than bigotry and hatred. This carries on under the facade of progressive thinking and open-mindedness, and that's why I think contemporary liberalism is such a perversion.

There probably should have been some seperation of paragraphs in there, but we all know by now that I am prone to stream-of-consciouness ADD rants. Which also accounts for my constant over-use of parantheses.

I took a half semester course on Internet something-or-other, and while the material is generally extremely easy, it was a self-paced course, which in MA world means no doing any work until the last week of class. I hate doing homework to begin with, especially the kind of thoughtless busy work I'm doing for this class, so I tend to spend as little time doing homework as possible (I'm generally pretty decent at B.S.ing my profs, but reguardless, homework as always been my most hated aspect of school). I was had been hoping to get back on Dean's List this semester (I came oh so close last semester, and I still don't understand how 3 A's and a C does not equate to a 3.5 GPA), so hopefully I'm not going to let this embarassingly easy class be what undoes me. I just did a bunch of the homework assignments I neglected in the last hour or two, they're really not hard, but I still have a bunch left and the last day of class is tomorrow. I'm pretty sure I can get enough done to pull off an A or B, but... waahhh!! I don't want to! I feel sleepy. Work is stupid.

Why does it seem like I am consistantly my own worst enemy, no matter what the issue? Why do I do this crap to myself, and why can't I stop?

I've won that contest! Well, I came in fifth place, but that means I still get the free book same as first place.

Here is the first of the promised Angry Stick-figure Man cartoons (this one's not for the childrens though, okay?). Thanks for voting for me, and enjoy.

At least two, I promise, if I win this contest

We have five copies here, ready to give away, for free, to the John Cheese fans who most deserve them. These are special COLLECTOR'S EDITION versions of the book 300 Pages of Crap with the back cover that was BANNED BY CAFE PRESS, and each edition has been signed by John Cheese himself... using HIS DICK. I'm not kidding about that; each book comes with a signed Affidavit and photographic evidence that John signed the books using an ink pen strapped to his erection using electrician's tape.

For those who haven't heard, this is a compilation of John Cheese articles along with some additional stuff about how the site came about and an Afterword by me.

So how do you win?

You must submit an essay in this thread expressing why you feel you deserve one of these five special copies of the book. The essay must be less than 10 words long.

They stopped taking submissions the other day, and John Cheese picked out his favorites of the submissions, and now they're having readers vote on which of those is the best. One of my own submissions (I think I had three overall) made it, and so far it is in 8th place out of the 23 chosen submissions. If I can make it into the top 5 I will win a free book (unless I tie for fifth place, which means John Cheese chooses which 5th place entry wins). If I win that book I will throw of the shackles of my own laziness and pen (or possibly MS Paint) at least two new Angry Stick-figure Man cartoons. I'm not sure whether or not you have to register at the forums to vote (I registered just so that I could enter the contest), but I am a hemorrhaging money to school at the moment and if I were to be able to get my hands on this free piece of awesomeness (which I am currently so close to) I would feel sincerely indebted. Pretty please?

Oh yeah, it's kind of important that I mention my screen name in the contest is Born Toulouse-Lautrec. Vote here.

The scaremongers have gone too far this time - trying to scare us out of our hot tubs. Hot tubs were here at the founding of this nation (I think) and they're what make us great (I guess)! Clearly some kind of bash-America-using-hot-tubs-as-a-proxy is going on here.

Or maybe we just need to clean the damn things every once in a while, particularly after hippies get in them and leave a ring.

For anyone who is not a geek, that title is a play on the theme song for Firefly, and yes I am going to talk about Firefly and Serenity again. I was reading a libertarian review of Serenity on Reason, which quotes Joss Whedon from this article as saying of Mal, the show/movie's main hero

"I'm not trying to make a polemic and it's definitely not a partisan film in the sense that Mal is, if not a Republican, certainly a libertarian, he's certainly a less-government kinda guy. He's the opposite of me in many ways,"

We've talked about Whedon's politics on this blog before, so we pretty much know he's a liberal progressive type, and he held that Kerry for president party, with several members of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast in attendence (including Nathan Fillion, who plays Mal on Firefly), but we've also talked about how Firefly is pretty unapolegitically libertarian, certainly moreso than anything else I've ever seen on TV. I figured Whedon's co-producer, Tim Minear, was the source of the show's libertarianism. However, I find it extremely interesting that Whedon, while not holding those particular beliefs, apparently was able an willing to create a hero out of a character who did hold such views. While I've expressed my love of Whedon here before, this is something I find especially admirable in him. I remember a Literature prof. talking about how fiction generally contains a character who is the voice of the writer, and how the hero or some wiser character generally advances the author's own view, and I remember thinking why do writers have to do that? After all, in fiction where you are free to fabricate events to suit your purpose, how much can that really validate your beliefs? And if you are a really good writer, why don't you take a more creative route rather than just casting yourself in a role? I think it is a great credit to Whedon that he can do this, he can create a (mostly) righteous character with a worldview so different from his own, and have that character make sense and be admired by most of the audience.

I think some of this has to do with a realization by Whedon that liberal progressives don't make for particularly fun action heroes. Whedon has himself expressed that one of the reasons he has Mal shoot three different unarmed men throughout the course of Serenity was as revenge for George Lucas making Greedo shoot first in the Star Wars special editions. I was recently reading this review of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (which is extremely funny and well-worth reading, not to mention that it brings attention to a lot of the flawed morality we are asked to accept in many Hollywood movies) and I think it makes this point really well. Spielberg, as it points out, has had an aversion to showing guns being used productively in his films, post-Indiana Jones, and so in The Lost World we see a bunch of "heroes" armed only with their own (rather dull) wits survive, while trained, armed mercenaries are killed off left and right (which, as that article points out, is largely the fault of the actions of the "heroes," who apparently find the caging of dinosaurs more objectionable than the loss of human life). The "good guys" are never allowed to use any weapons, something which is taken to an extreme when we see a 14 year old girl take out a 250 pound dinosaur with the power of gymnastics. I can enjoy crappy fiction, and I'm pretty slow to be judgmental of movies, especially movies that have lots of people getting eaten by dinosaurs in them, but this is the moment at which during my first viewing it finally got through to me that I was watching an abomination of a turd of a war crime of an afront to God of a movie. At the time, of course, I failed to realize that this was because of Spielberg's aversion to guns, or any other practical means of dealing with rampaging death-beasts. Whedon, on the other hand, while admitting that he doesn't like guns himself on the commentary track to the "Objects in Space" episode of Firefly, he then comes right out and says that in this kind of show you have to have guns. This isn't on the DVD, but sometimes when the show was on the air it would supposedly start off with a narrated intro by Shepherd setting up the universe that the story takes place in, saying "A ship would bring you work, a gun would help you keep it." Hell, I'm sure anybody who has seen the pilot of Firefly remembers the scene where Mal has the Mexican stand-off with Patience, and Patience is taking cover behind a horse, so Mal just shoots the horse. That is the type of hero we want to see. Sure, we all love horsey's, but we want to see a hero who, when put in a tight spot, will do what's practical and makes sense in context. The same guy who wrote that Lost World review wrote this Captain Planet review, and while I admit most wouldn't expect much from a children's cartoon to begin with (though there definitely have been some great quality children's cartoons in the past, like The Tick, Eek the Cat, and pretty much anything by Pixar, and maybe there would be more if we actually did expect them to be good), it's embarassing how arbitrary and impractical the methods employed on the show were, not to mention the absurdity of every scenario portrayed (and they expect kids to take that knowledge and apply it in the real world? Or, oops, I think they just wanted to get kids to grow up to vote Democrat and welcome the UN as the future goverment of our country, and whether or not they come away with any practical sense was irrelevant at best, and more than likely undesired). Firefly and Serenity are great because instead of seeing the good guys as omniscient beacon's of righteousness, we are instead given conflicted characters forced to weigh bad decisions against each other. In Serenity Mal shoots and kills an innocent man so save him from being tortured and eaten alive. In that context we see Mal's shooting the man as merciful, but a few scenes later he is challenged by his first-mate, Zoe, that he could have saved the man's life by bringing him with them if he had only dropped their payroll. We see from Mal's reaction that that hadn't even occurred to him, and he instantly starts trying to justify his actions. The movie never makes the moral decision on behalf of the viewer, and trusts the viewer's own judgement. In so much of Hollywood fare, like the aforementioned Captain Planet and The Lost World the viewer is taken by the hand and guided to what their moral perspective should be according to the filmmakers, even when (as the above-linked review points out) that view is obviously morally wrong when one applies a little bit of sense to it. For another great example of this, check out The Case for the Empire, which does a great job of pointing out the shitiness of the moral themes George Lucas lays out. And even if the morality is on occassion sensible (which seems pretty much impossible when trying to make an action story where the heroes are mush-headed one-worlders), if we wanted Saints we'd go to church. However, for our action heroes we want badasses. This isn't to say someone who doesn't worry about right and wrong, but rather someone who doesn't worry about "being mean" or hurting feelings.

In the comments to a previous post Murel brought up the following point about comic books

I refuse to admit how I know this, but at some point beginning in the early seventies the major publishers got embarassed by their rich-guy superheroes as lefty-lefty Baby Boomer writers started taking over the shop.

And they did things like retroactively revise how millionaire playboys got their money or simply work it into plots that they would stop (or never have) made Cold War era munitions and all of them seemed somehow to have ended up making money with environmental research, an iffy enough proposition unless they were leeching off federal subsidies (if you could make billions and billions with it in the private sector, where are the eco-billionaires who have taken advantage of the fact in the real world?).

Also, any superhero who had been on record fighting commies was either given a change of heart for his McCarthyite ways, or turned into psycho fascist drug addict serial killers, or revised out of ever having done anything that might have annoyed Saint Josef Stalin or San Fidel Castro.

In rare instances, they just took the money away from millionaires and made them turn into hippies.

From my limited knowledge of comic books I'm inclined to agree with Murel's point. Is there anybody, left or right, who actually thinks this kind of crap makes for good fiction? I think it's obvious to most people that guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have no fucking clue what it was about the movies they made their names on that people love. George Lucas, now all old and stuffy, feels guilty about Han Solo shooting a bounty hunter who he knows was after him, because Han originally shot before the bounty hunter made his move. But that gritiness in the attitude of the movies was also reflected in the environment of the movies, I mean just compare and contrast the WWI-esque trench warfare of The Empire Strikes Back with the cartoon duck-lizards throwing electric fart-orbs at the comedy-relief-bots in Phantom Menace, or the video game-esque conveyer belt scene in Attack of the Clones, or the Wookies swinging on vines into battle in Revenge of the Sith. Hell, you could even go back to the latter half of Return of the Jedi, to see that Lucas had no clue what it was he got right. There's something less tangible about it too. For example, when Luke had is hand cut off in Empire it was like "holy shit!" But whenever a character was dismembered or decapitated in the prequel trilogy it was just like "um, so what?" There's something about it that I can't put my finger on (maybe because by that point it was established that appendages can be replaced in that universe), but I think we can all tell when it isn't there. This also applies to characters' deaths. When Neo and Trinity die and the end of Matrix Revolutions (oops, did I spoil that for anyone? trust me, it doesn't matter), I really coulnd't have given a shit. Hell, I loved the character of Yoda, and even named my first cat after him despite her being a female cat, but it still didn't bother me when he died, or when Obi Wan died. But after seeing Serenity, and losing a few beloved characters, I speant the whole weekend moping and questioning the meaning of life. How in the hell does the loss of a fictional character do that to you? I think it is the more personal element. In Star Wars and the Matrix you have a bunch of do-gooders with big ideals fighting big wars, in Firefly you have some mostly regular folks worrying about tangible problems, even if that is set against the epic sci-fi backdrop.

Oh, and I know that neo-Nazis, and greedy capitalists, and militaristic Army generals with war-boners all make great villains, but they don't make great villains every fucking time! These cliches have been done to death. Besides, the creepiest villains are not those who are villains for the sake of villainy, but rather villains who see themselves as righteous, and the latter are far more common in the real world. It's great to see a villain like The Operative in Serenity, who is a utopian and fully recognizes the evil of his own deeds, but who goes on to rationalize them. I mean, how scary is it to see a villain committing actions you think of as horrific, but who you can't help but like?

I think our fiction writers need to trim down the "Oh. Batman is an environmentalist," and "Oh. It is good to be nice to animals. Now I understand," type moments, as I think we all had no problem comprehending those kind of simple-minded and obvious moral themes since we were bitty little kids (even before Captain Planet came along). We need to see more "Holy shit! Mal just shot an innocent man! And an innocent horse!" moments and "Holy shit! Mal is going to let Jayne get sucked out the airlock!" moments, or "Holy shit! I can't believe they killed off [major Firefly character] so callously!" moments. More "holy shits!", less "oh, that's nice" please.

Could it be that this means Hollywood is wrong about this?

Okay, so I was wondering the other day what exactly Wayne Enterprises produces, so I decided to look it up on Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt that annoyed me

Wayne Enterprises became a green company under the control of Patrick and Laura Wayne and has been environmentally conscious from that time forward. Even when environmentalism wasn't a fad or a necessity, Wayne Enterprises followed those ideals. At the turn of the 20th century, Wayne Enterprises was the city in many ways and even now they employ the largest part of the city's considerable work-force.

Okay, that is just retarded. It's a made up company for Chrissakes! That's like me acting morally superior because of the success of my Send Happy Thoughts to Africa Campaign (by the way, fuck all you people who didn't send happy thoughts). Why do people insist on proselytizing with fiction as their foundation on which to base their moralizing?* This reminds of the hilarious Captain Planet essay that Aaron found, which points out how the Planeteers ride around in a hovercraft fueled by some kind of solar technology, but apparently refuse to share that technology with the rest of the planet. I mean, back to Wayne Enterprises, during the industrial ages folks largely didn't realize they were even doing serious damage to the envoironment. What the hell?

Oh, and incidentally, apparently Wayne Enterprises produces everything on the fucking planet. Including chemicals (apparently Gaia-friendly chemicals, like oil).

*Note, I am not a hypocrite for apparently applauding Frank Miller here, because 1.) I was simply admiring how frank he was about wanting his comic to be propaganda, and 2.) I quoted Miller talking about how he was trying to incorporate real world enemies into his comics (as opposed to Captain Planet, which contained villains who liked to pollute for pollution's own sake), whereas Wayne Enterprises here is being attributed with impossible foresight for the sake of making them seem all goody-goody-gumdrops.