Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. And now here is some breaking news… Ariel Sharon is still not dead. Comatose Sharon’s influence still felt
Makes one wish that Chevy Chase was still around doing some good comedy. If you don’t know much about US relations with Fascist leader Franco, well they were much the same as with Israel’s Sharon. See wikipedia’s account on Don Francisco Franco The US government supported this fascist for decades.
Tom Warren feigns being a folksy, bearded, hippy ranger-ranch type, and is the perfect Pentagon GreenGo pimp to be in charge of the public’s manipulation by the military to put Fort Carson expansion into place in Pinion Canyon.
He heads up DECAM and talks ‘environment’ a lot, while pushing for the Pentagon’s toxicity to be implemented into the local area.
‘Aw Heck’ he seems to exude smilingly, ‘We’re going to become the best Wild Life refuge in The Land!’
Sure the Pentagon will be, Tommy. They always are for sure. I’m sure that the wildlife are doing just great out at Chernobyl, too. And out where all the Depleted Uranium has been dropped in The Balkans and Middle East. And the wildlife certainly must love the Pentagon’s Agent Orange spread all over in SE Asia, since it keeps the human predator population down.
You’re right, Tommy, the Colorado birds and deer need the Pentagon to take it all over! And be sure to help us be efficient in energy use for folk out there on base, Comandante Tommy.
What an act, and what an actor! We pay the tax dollars, and they then buy the comedy routine by military GreenGo propaganda pimps, like this guy, Tommy Warren. What suckers the American taxpaying public certainly are to do this!
I had a chance to meet this snake in person last week, and talk about a corn ball. He offered to waive the fees if any of us wanted to be sucked into the inside of his ‘sustainability’ act that was playing inside the Crowne Plaza Hotel that week. We preferred to protest planned Pinion Canyon expansion by the military outside in the street instead.
Go Army! Be all you can pretend to be! How silly some of this corporatized pretend Green stuff coming out actually is. After he gets done here, Maybe Tom Warren can apply for the PR pimp position out in Amarillo for the Pantex atomic bomb factory there? He would be perfect talking about how irradiation keeps the beef all sanitary and what not. The Pentagon, land for many uses… blah, blah, blah.
For more about Tom’s work to keep suburbia from encroaching on Fort Carson (poor Fort Carson!) and bird habitat read about Comandante Tom’s contributions here… Save the rare birds, sez Tom Warren. by making your local military establishment grander!
For Tom Warren’s military connection see name #11 on Fort Carson military list here. What a con artist this guy is pretending to be part of the civilian community! This seems to be the new thing where police and Pentagon people come to community meetings out of uniform and play like concerned civilian community types.
Every year or so I search online to see what cartoonist Bill Watterson might have decided to do since putting Calvin and Hobbes to bed in 1995. I showed less diligence with another favorite social satirist whom I’m thrilled to discover has returned to the spotlight. He appeared reclusive, it turns out he’s been mouthing off to great effect on Daily Kos! I can’t describe my giddy thrill to see A. Whitney Brown and his insightful Big Picture again.
In the 1980s, A. Whitney Brown was the brilliant SNL Weekend Update contributor, the archetype for David Spade, waspish and unapproachably sharp. But Brown’s deadpan sarcasm and contrarian wit elevated the public discourse above the comedy, akin to Lenny Bruce or George Carlin, and spoke to the TV audience as if the truth mattered behind the current event.
Brown published a book based on his SNL segment, THE BIG PICTURE, which remains one of my favorite recommendations. As a used-bookstore owner, I know it sold well because there are a lot of copies still floating around. But like Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts, or Allen Smith’s Life in a Putty Knife Factory, or Fran Lebowitz’s Metropolitan Life for that matter, the popularity of comedy books does not usually survive into succeeding decades. Whenever I see that a copy might have reached our 50¢ table, I snag it to take home. Today I’m going to revisit that stash and make sure to redistribute it with the good news.
You can catch Brown on YouTube, explaining why he still supports the troops. He’s been involved with Air America Radio, the Daily Show -of course, and his own projects at myeverything.com and more.
THE BIG PICTURE still has to my mind the most lucid explanation of the economic crime that is the National Deficit. Unless Brown can get his title back in print, I hope he releases it to the Gutenberg Project, to reach everyone again. Here’s a start:
We live in a nation of 25 million illiterates. I read that in USA Today. That’s a scary thought, one out of ten adult Americans can’t even read USA Today. What are they all going to do in life? They can’t all write for it. Maybe they can dictate the editorials.
—-A. Whitney Brown, The Big Picture
Why are we promoting dorks like Texas Ranger and Conan O’Brian as centers of attention on television? Is this Hollywood’s idea of the accessible every-man? Somebody’s got to be laughing their head off behind the scene.
Clearly the standard for leading men is otherwise high. Consider that the Oceans 11 frat pack have no peers to cast in competing blockbusters. There have always been Ralph Kramdens and Ed Nortons, re King of Queens et al, or flat out queens and eunuchs, but where does medialand come off casting Chuck Norris as any kind of Tommy Lee Jones ranger? Norris looks as absurd as the stereotype he pioneered, the white man in Eastern man’s pajamas, where they don’t tuck 45-Magnums under their judo belts.
And where does Conan O’Brian embody anything more than the wiseacre comedy writer’s idiot kid brother (Eddie Haskell minus Dennis the Menace), who was visiting the set but had to step into frame because everyone even remotely qualified was throwing up. We all know how competitive comedy is, comics don’t grow on trees but they crowd the stand-up circuit.
Acts like Chuck and Conan are onscreen to insult us. Like miserable quiz-show contestants, they give every-man a sense he’s not the dumbest, dumbest-looking loser in TV-viewer-land. The beer ads don’t have to be so clever by comparison.
M and I just read Harrison Bergeron together two nights ago. I remembered the story from high school, where we also read Slaughterhouse Five to my father’s consternation. I like to think it was just the language he objected to.
My favorite essay of KV’s at In These Times was about governance guesswork.
Kurt Vonnegut could say it all and I don’t think he was through.
I just came across an excerpt someone posted from Jailbird:
“What could be so repulsive after all, during the Great Depression, especially, and with yet another war for natural wealth and markets coming, in a young man’s belief that each person could work as well as he or she was able, and should be rewarded, sick or well, young or old, brave or frightened, talented or imbecilic, according to his or her simple needs? How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again–if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet’s wealth, disband their national armies and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people–everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.”
And this from an interview with Joel Bleifuss in 2003:
I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”
To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is “The Mask of Sanity ” by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
We live in wonderland times. Many might have heard about deep ecology and might even be supporters of it. But what about shallow ecology? Well it turns out that both terms were founded by the same man, Arne Naess, and despite the greater familiarity with the term ‘deep ecology’, there are many more advocates of ‘environmentalism’ that are into shallow ecology, than deep.
And to be even more comprehensive, we are also into having a plethora of what should be called shallowest ecology advocates. These are kind of like the plethora of anti Iraq War peace folk we have, who are noteven really shallow peace in their views, but shallowest peace. People like Hillary and Wesley (Clark) for examples. But who are the shallowest ecology advocates amongst us? In Colorado Springs, we might say that Richard Skorman is, the former vice mayor of the city.
I did not attend, but word has it that Poor Richard’s owned by Skorman, actually last week invited a Dupont exec up to us as ‘green’ and envormental friendly! To attend, one would have had to plump down some $10 I believe? to hear such nonsense espoused. Did anybody actually go? Please write if you did. As Steve Martin once said, ‘comedy is never pretty’ and this event must of been truly ugly. Wish I had made it for the laughs, if nothing else.
I did attend another shallowest ecology event, though, that was the free talk last night at Colorado College by Matthew Simmons, who I discovered afterward, was energy advisor to Bush at one time. Heck, ignorant me. I thought of him as just being an author who wrote some about Peak Oil Theory, not as exec and Bushie. And that’s why I attended the talk.
Simnmons gave a pretty good brief overview of Peak Oil theory to an audience of quite a few doubters. A radicalizing topic when the subject is actually understood, but that was what wierd about the meeting; there was no sense of energy, no sense of rage, no sense of realization that the world is facing a catastrophe in the near future. It was a shallow ecologist preaching to an audience full of more than a few far shallowest ecology people.
Peak Oil theory posits that cheap and available world oil is peaking at this point, and the world is going to face an increasingly tight cut off of energy resource flow in the years ahead. This will happen while we are all currently having our needs poorly met, through a capitalist production and distribution economy based on high energy resource waste and continual anarchist expansion. In other words, we are coming upon tight times ahead, while our world economy is a waste,toss, and run one. We’re running towards a brick wall.
My announcement to the audience about the March 17-18 antiwar activities ahead in our city, was followed by a further brief comment about how the US military was a major waster of energy and was acting as pirates around the globe looking to loot remaining energy supplies. Matthew Simmons then instead of addressing what I had just said, only commented that the military leaders were now beginning to show interest in the Peak Oil ‘question’, and that he was happy by that. Well, la-de-la-da! It was Peak Oil turned into shallowest ecology like gold turned to lead in front of my very own eyes. Peak Oil in a puff.
So I now have an energy formula to produce new critical masses of Shallowest Ecology? Just put Colorado Springs local Richard Skorman, any Dupont exec (preferably racial minoprity or woman), Matthew Simmons in his Twilight (partial name of his book, Twilight in the Desert), Dick Cheney, and Al Gore all together into a giant green bag. And then shake hard! Then listen to whatever pops out of their mouths. That is Shallowest Ecology in its purest essence. We’re in big trouble.
Funnier than the poor selection of comics that The Gazette carries, are the poor selection of opinion pieces on their editorial page. And on no issue do these Neanderthals post more comedy than on environmental issues. For example, they must be the last people on the entire planet still poo-pooing the idea that global climate has actually been changed by human activity and the overuse of fossil fuels!
Today, right above their pompous “Principles of Freedom’ nonsense ‘We believe that freedom is a gift from God… blah, blah, blah) is media whore Thomas Sowell’s trashpiece titled, “Global-warming gasbags launching an eco-inquisition’. Can’t you just imagine it? Exxon-Mobil execs being burned at the stake, Cheney with his nuts in a vice, and Bush’s rear end lit up as the natural gas is burnt off secondary to oil production? All victims of eco-inquisitors!
Also on the same page, was their editorial piece against ‘social engineering’. What is that in their minds? Well, they call trying to promote less environmentally destructive vehicles ‘social engineering’ by ‘wackos behind the wheel putting the pedal to the meddle.’!
What a group of total nincompoops. Who paved over their brains with such nonsense?
And a week ago, they were saying that endangered wolves in the state were nothing but rats. The extermination of earth species to them is part of a natural process where real estate developers rule over other forms of life, by the survival of the fittest. That type of ‘social engineering’ they totally adore and love. Engineering towards extermination of other life forms on the planet, no problemo.
What a bunch of social retards they seem to favor and collect at Freedom Communications, publisher of The Gazette and other local brands of demented toilet paper!
I wanted to study dance in college. I wanted to perform on Broadway. I wanted to walk through campus, and life, with “jazz hands.”
As a freshman, I was at CU-Boulder, living the life of a lab rat as a Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology major. My older brother was a year ahead of me, also an MCDB major, brilliant beyond belief. He seemed to understand the “cell,” with all of its asinine complexity, at an intuitive level. He understood physics, chemistry, had memorized the Periodic Table and was even capable of making hilarious jokes about it. I, meanwhile, stumbled around campus humiliated by the forehead crease left by my lab goggles wondering what geek could help me figure out the molarity of my latest unknown.
I eventually changed my major to business, accounting more specifically. It wasn’t so much that I was wildly excited by debits and credits, I’m still not, or that most of the gorgeous fraternity boys were in the B School (they generally studied “finance,” accent always on the second syllable, and went on to be successful brokers or developers), but that I didn’t come from a particularly wealthy family and I needed a career, not just an education. Becoming a CPA seemed a safe bet. It has proven to be such.
Because of my college experience, and maybe my perceived lack of personal creative freedom, I always find it interesting to hear what young people are studying these days. I wonder how the parents feel, especially the fathers, when they hear that their young son is going to be, say, a puppeteer. Does this revelation cause Dad to puff out his chest and smoke a stogie on the back deck? Does Mom call over her coffee klatch girlfriends to boast about her son’s incredible prowess with a hand puppet?
When my son (now 21) was little he had a puppet as his constant companion. We got it at Poor Richard’s Toy Store and it was, sad to say, a beaver. Furry brown with lewd teeth and a hopeful demeanor. Bren wanted to take it everywhere. Unfortunately, after about five minutes, he wanted me to hold it. He was a very engaging child and, frequently, when he saw someone he found interesting he would shout, in a loud Mickey Mouse voice, “Look at my mom’s beaver!” This, of course, had an EFHutton effect. Everything would slow to a crawl, people would turn their heads deliberately toward me to see how I would respond.
I learned quickly to deal with this recurrent nightmare. I “worked up” a little beaver dance and performed it on the person nearest to me that appeared somewhat sympathetic. I would take “Beav” and bite the person’s forearm and say “Come help me build my dam!”
I don’t want to malign puppeteers. In fact, I want to laud puppeteers. In my immediate family, we have three CPAs, a pathologist, an attorney, a pharmaceutical drug rep. Our parents are proud of us. We all have careers and children, big houses and big mortgages, lots of demands for our money and our time. We’re living the American dream!
I can’t help but wonder, though, if any of my siblings ever feel like I do while I’m scurrying through the office clutching my mechanical pencil and my laptop, wearing the latest Ann Taylor fashions, picturing myself instead in fishnet hose and a bustier, standing under the bright theater lights, bowing demurely to thunderous applause. When my older brother holds his stethoscope does he secretly wish it were a paintbrush? When my sister makes her closing arguments in front of the judge and jury, would she rather be doing improvisational comedy in a little club somewhere? I don’t have any idea.
I know one thing. I hope my children will pursue their passions. It may be an uphill battle. Already their Dad and I have college funds set up for each of them. We have firm ideas about which elite schools they should attend and what careers might hold promise. I imagine we’ll have a doctor or two, maybe a physicist, probably a computer whiz. The IQ tests have been administered and we know where their strengths lie. But not where their dreams lie.
I have secret wish. I want a puppeteer.
My muse is upset because everyone is making fun of Kumbaya.
Relax, Kumbaya is safe. The story you read in the Gazette, Oh Lord, not Kumbaya, syndicated from the Dallas Morning Herald, is a rather underhanded loaded question. You know the classic example: “When did you stop beating your wife?” Whether you never stopped or never started, the load is delivered, you do. (But you don’t.)
The DMH article asked “How did Kumbaya become such a joke?” and then lists instances of the joke being made: A GOP ad, a Christian Science Monitor quip. They are able to find an early instance in an obscure 80’s comedy Volunteers spoofing the Peace Corps. It seems to me SNL has made fun of everything, that wouldn’t make the ridicule universal.
I was tipped off when my friend paraphrased the article as having said Kumbaya was an “international joke.” What international? The rest of the world isn’t making fun of our spirituals, certainly not our peaceniks. The lambast is purely English-speaking and it’s coming from corporate mouthpieces who want to ridicule any tools of grassroots community efforts.
Television has no interest in sing-a-long songs. People singing together and not looking at the TV doesn’t serve them at all. But for people communing together, a melody and lyric like Kumbaya is very powerful, especially because everybody knows it already. When protestors assembled with Cindy Sheehan last year in Crawford, we sang Kumbaya among others. We wound up singing all the patriotic songs too because they were the only ones we all knew.
And so the media is determined to keep the heat on hippies and idealists, religious or not, by making fun of them, and concluding that the derision is universal. The press laughs with each other’s jokes and then report the humor to be statistically unanimous.
The Dallas reporter asked several etymologists “why did Kumbaya become an idiom for idiocy?” And none of the etymologists knew. Maybe that’s a tip off it isn’t.
Hopefully one day the press will stop trying to paint people who hope for peace and goodwill to all mankind as idiots.
Hollywood has a long history of producing and distributing films with antiArab racist themes and imagery. Shall we just say, that they are quite embedded with the Pentagon on this dehumanizing of the current official US ‘enemy’, the Arab Muslim. Standard Hollywood ‘action’ tripe goes where some lower class All ‘Merican Black and White US heroes together, take down shady looking terrorist Middle Eastern types, who are out to kill good wholesome Christian babies to drink their blood. They don’t like our freedoms, it seems, but our buffoon heroes always win after some big bang bang. OK, how many times can you run the same crap before it gets old, right?
Enter racist Zionist Jew, Sacha Baron Cohen. He does the Muslim-face comedy routine of showing Christian Americans just how backward those Jew hating Muslims really are. Ha-Ha-Ha. It’s not the same old Black and White, buddy action figure, GI Joe stuff, at least. So the film, Borat, is sweeping America’s cinema land, including right here in Colorado Springs. ‘Borat’ being the backward Negro, oh sorry… I meant backward Muslim that Cohen portrays.
If this sort of schtick was done by a White actor portraying a Chinese man, or a Latino, or a Black person, we would have a media world in outrage at the blatant racism. But have a Jew portray Muslims as backward, comedic, imbecilic, and anti-woman, well then…. aw shucks, them Jews just can’t be racist, can they? Look what Hitler did to them. So they get a free pass from God for eternity, we Christian folk feel so damn guilty ’bout it we do. Let’s laugh along with the Jew about those Muslim retards in the boonies we are abombing right now. AntiMuslim racism just feels so damn good! We’re America!
Here is the prototypical Cohen routine if you have yet to see it, Throw the Jew down the well.
I shall be selling meth and male massages outside the New Life Church at 11025 Voyager Parkway Colorado Springs starting at 8:30 Am this Sunday. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition! Come join us and offer your own goods up for sale, too. Join us in an orgy of passion for our Lord, this Sunday. It will be a gay time, and maybe we can make some money to do more of the Lord’s work. Also, we will be selling this same merchandise starting at 6 PM, November 11, at our church’s Thou Shalt Laugh Comedy Night. For more information about this comedy event, go to New Life Church. Be there, or be straight and square!
Reprise: Junior Samples, Grandpa Jones, Buck Owens and Roy Clark.
No I’m messing with you. This is the cast of Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again or something like that. Three funny guys who make an enormous living by speaking for the common man, plus the Cable Guy, their greek chorus, in this case impersonating the common lower common man. Really, when Larry The Cable Guy, Bill Engvall, Jeff Foxworthy and Ron White appear in promotional pictures, CD covers or movie posters, they are never shown in any other order than where their fans have seen them sit on their Comedy Central special. What an interesting opinion of the intellectual incapacity of your target audience.
I caught a little of this popular act on TV and I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. HEE HAW! It was funny then, and it’s funny still. But back then we didn’t have hicks for country music stars and for race car drivers and for president of the United States. Is this where you get when you idolize people who behave like they were schooled in a barn?
We make multi-millionaires out of people who talk like hayseeds. Nothin’ wrong with hayseeds, on tractors naturally. And clearly country music stars, like redneck comedy stars and like NASCAR driving stars have a lot more going for them upstairs than your average service station gofer. Most of the time we can tell that politicians and preachers who pander to the lowest common denominator, are not themselves so gullible. However, we don’t want our doctors to be hayseeds, nor our scientists, nor our news reporters, nor even customer service representatives. Why are we looking for comedic wisdom from hayseeds?
Lauding a hayseed for comedic wit seems to me to set a terrible example. We’re supposed to laugh at what stupid thinks is stupid? It’s terrifying to me that there’s even an entire auditorium full of stupids who want to hear country dumbkins opine about life. This is misogeny and gay-bashing and oversimplification of everything. Sure it’s funny to laugh at political correctness, until you consider why something is thought correct or incorrect in the first place. Life is a little bit complicated, and we don’t mind admitting that we like the most qualified person to be driving the bus. What is so funny about an idiot sounding off? Especially in a world where the court jester resembles the radio commentator and worse our presidential dauphin.
These guys tell the same jokes to each other, even work in ad libs for each other from their own original routines. This would not be so bad except that the good ol’ boys give each other kudos for their clever repartees, even though the audience would know from the CD they’ve already memorized that even the joviality is canned.
Most of us, when retelling a story in the presence of someone who we might have told already, will begin by saying “I was telling such-an-such…” so awkward are we about repeating ourselves. Performers naturally have to repeat themselves, and have to act among each other like the material is fresh. But to give each other credit for extemporizing a put-down is pretty damn lower denominator.
Is it time to bite a bullet and watch BRAZIL again? You might remember this movie as a wonderfuly dark comedy. Now it’s horror! And the evil doesn’t vanish when you turn the lights back on.
When Terry Gilliam made BRAZIL in 1985, his film was a sci-fi comedy, granted it was Orwellian and unsettling. Gilliam had to take out full-page ads in Variety to beg the studio to release it, because the studios thought it was too dark.
Could he have released BRAZIL now? Now it’s all come true! Now it’s plain horror! Remember the premise? Department of Information Retrieval! War on terrorism! Swat abduction! Sanctioned interrogation! Secret detention, except the family receives the bill! Bureaucratic arrogance! Even facelifts gone awry!
Jonathan Pryce stars, Robert DeNero is Tuttle, the repairman who defies the Central Services monopoly, he’s the terrorist!
Do you think you’ll have the stomach for it? Will any of it be funny? On DVD you can chose from three versions: the one Hollywood wanted -with what is now know as the “love conquers all” ending, the compromise version we all saw in the theaters, or Gilliam’s director’s cut. Your choice. They’re all going to be plenty scary.
I watched a Buster Keaton film featuring a locomotive in the title role as THE GENERAL. It’s the silent comedy whose civil war settings took Keaton way over budget, flopped and ruined his career. In the sixties the film was rediscovered and is now hailed as one of the ten greatest films of all ever.
In my favorite scene, Buster and his long-time enamorada, damsel in distress whom he has just rescued, are being chased by Union soldiers in another train. Buster asks her to help feed wood into the boiler while he works the controls. At first she complies but perhaps tiring thinks to make herself useful tidying instead. When Buster turns and sees her sweeping, he admonishes her that the fire must be tended. Thereupon she walks to the tender and meticuously carries a smallish branch of wood over to the boiler oven, while Buster watches quite incredulous. He interrupts her before she can fetch another load, pointing to a chip of wood on the floor which he takes up and hands to her. She takes it oblivious to his sarcasm, dutifully opens the oven door, tosses it inside, and closes the door again. Buster now leaps to her neck as if to throttle her, and begins to shake her wildly until suddenly he kisses her smack on the lips. Then they release each other and resume their train chase.