Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that its now or never
Everybody knows that its me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black joes still pickin cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows its coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
"All the Stones the Builders Rejected" 
(And some days it takes more Stones than others...) Where Mythical Bestiary meets Contemporary Culture and Chews On Its Leg Until Covered with Slobber.
Showing posts with label cynicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cynicism. Show all posts
LET'S PUT THE CTHULU BACK IN CHRISTMAS
It’s not about the monster show, the man in the rubber suit that jumps out of the dark. A B-movie or a rollercoaster can accomplish as much. That is a momentary scare, not something that freezes your soul until you can never be warm again.
The most frightening thing in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft isn’t the ichor dripping from the jaws of elder gods, or the thought of vulnerable flesh being pierced and stripped from our bones by the scuttling claws of unnamed things that the very sight of would drive men to insanity. We already have diseases enough that do that to our bodies in microcosm, and in our visible world men build machines to destroy other men, women and children in a hundred ways to teach us that our hopes and dreams and ideas of beauty and truth are easily turned to garbage for dogs and crows.
The horrible perception of reality in Lovecraft comes when his characters feel the weight of aeons before humanity ever existed and the endless stretch of darkness after our last spark is gone. It is the awareness of the indifference of the universe that is represented by the metaphor of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. You matter no more than a speck of sand that dreamed it was a mountain once.
In contrast, in, I hope, unending opposition, we have the symbolism of Christmas Eve: that an indifferent universe heard Job’s complaint, and took on human form. I am well aware of the historical evidence that makes the baby Jesus just one of many gods and avatars of the same idea; I usually find myself better read on the subject than most of Christianity’s critics and defenders.
It seems to me that these half-informed debates over the historicity of Jesus are beside the point. The conservative Christians and Muslims, with their simpleton’s insistence on their faith as literal and exclusive “fact”, do more damage to religion than the most science-bound atheist.
I have faith in certain metaphors as the potential salvation for mankind. Shelley was right about that much, when he called poets the secret legislators of mankind, even if he was a dope about sailboats. I feel anger and pity for those religionists who claim, “If every word in my holy book [insert title here] is not literally true, then all my faith is in vain.” A pretty shoddy faith, if it’s so easily undone.
It’s the meaning we attach to a vulnerable child that spits in the eye of Lovecraft’s indifferent, cold stars, and the marketplace sensibility of the social Darwinist capitalists who dominate our culture, and the mechanistic reductionists who sneer at love and the nuturing impulse as mere chemical predestination.
The ox and ass of the nativity crèche were once recognized by Egyptians as Osiris and Set, giving their blessing to the new god bedded down in their hay. If the self-important, indifferent to human suffering god of the Old Testament would give up his place of prominence to an unwed mother from a gynophobic culture and an all-too-human child, then surely that’s a good thing for the rest of us? Let us be tender towards the universe tonight as if it were a small child, and if the Elder Gods are still cruel, then that's their problem, not ours. Punk-ass slime monsters.
The most frightening thing in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft isn’t the ichor dripping from the jaws of elder gods, or the thought of vulnerable flesh being pierced and stripped from our bones by the scuttling claws of unnamed things that the very sight of would drive men to insanity. We already have diseases enough that do that to our bodies in microcosm, and in our visible world men build machines to destroy other men, women and children in a hundred ways to teach us that our hopes and dreams and ideas of beauty and truth are easily turned to garbage for dogs and crows.
The horrible perception of reality in Lovecraft comes when his characters feel the weight of aeons before humanity ever existed and the endless stretch of darkness after our last spark is gone. It is the awareness of the indifference of the universe that is represented by the metaphor of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods. You matter no more than a speck of sand that dreamed it was a mountain once.
In contrast, in, I hope, unending opposition, we have the symbolism of Christmas Eve: that an indifferent universe heard Job’s complaint, and took on human form. I am well aware of the historical evidence that makes the baby Jesus just one of many gods and avatars of the same idea; I usually find myself better read on the subject than most of Christianity’s critics and defenders.
It seems to me that these half-informed debates over the historicity of Jesus are beside the point. The conservative Christians and Muslims, with their simpleton’s insistence on their faith as literal and exclusive “fact”, do more damage to religion than the most science-bound atheist.
I have faith in certain metaphors as the potential salvation for mankind. Shelley was right about that much, when he called poets the secret legislators of mankind, even if he was a dope about sailboats. I feel anger and pity for those religionists who claim, “If every word in my holy book [insert title here] is not literally true, then all my faith is in vain.” A pretty shoddy faith, if it’s so easily undone.
It’s the meaning we attach to a vulnerable child that spits in the eye of Lovecraft’s indifferent, cold stars, and the marketplace sensibility of the social Darwinist capitalists who dominate our culture, and the mechanistic reductionists who sneer at love and the nuturing impulse as mere chemical predestination.
The ox and ass of the nativity crèche were once recognized by Egyptians as Osiris and Set, giving their blessing to the new god bedded down in their hay. If the self-important, indifferent to human suffering god of the Old Testament would give up his place of prominence to an unwed mother from a gynophobic culture and an all-too-human child, then surely that’s a good thing for the rest of us? Let us be tender towards the universe tonight as if it were a small child, and if the Elder Gods are still cruel, then that's their problem, not ours. Punk-ass slime monsters.
THE DEMIGOD'S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE
Panels written by Kurt Busiek and Alan Moore, two writers more skilled than I at articulating the problems inherent in the genre. And you thought religion holds up an impossibly perfect role model...?
Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of "The Left Hand of God" notes on C-SPAN that society sometimes regards cynics as "wise" and knowing, and other times its concept of objective reality shifts towards an optimistic worldview. These shifts are writ large in the dreamland of comics.
FUCK Ironic Detachment
from HUMBOLDT'S GIFT by Saul Bellow:
"For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satifaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, 'If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.'"
"For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satifaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, 'If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.'"
Islands of Sanity: Driving Away Despair with Cartoonist Stephanie McMillan and E Network's "The Soup"
The "ironic" attitude of my generation towards suffering disgusts and drives me to despair. It has led to the lionization of "Sin City" and Saturday Night Live, to a self-preening "hipness" that is in fact no more than collaboration with evil, a homoerotic reacharound for Dick Cheney. It is not to be confused with dark humor, with redeeming laughter in the face of despair; it is indifference.
I am cheered by the emergence of cartoonists like Stephanie McMillan, who remembers what human beings are supposed to be like: human, and outraged by attacks on our humanity.
Visit her website here for more., or e-mail her here if you want a cartoon sent to you every week.
***
Careless channel hopping should be avoided by depressives. The reigning culture of "reality"-TV, celebrity news, sadistic animation and Football is All We Can Talk About in Endless Permutations sometimes drives me under the covers with thoughts of suicide. Given the freedom to express and amuse ourselves, this is what Los Angeles and New York feeds and America swallows, Strasbourg gooses amusing themselves to death.
"The Soup" (formerly "Talk Soup") delivers the bittersweet news that you am not alone. I still miss Aisha Tyler, but Joel McHale has won me over, and the catcalls from the backstage guys-- they can't believe this shit either!-- restores my faith in humanity.
"TV producer Mark Burnett is developing a new reality show inspired by Touched by an Angel. It will be a quest to find the one reality-show contestant who doesn't deserve to go to hell."
"Paris Hilton may also be called to testify in a criminal case involving a two year old burglary. The district attorney's office says that Paris 'just happens to be a witness.' I hope the trial is televised. I don't care about the outcome, I just want to see what happens when Paris puts her hand on the Bible."
"Mick Jagger's daughter Lizzie has defended supermodel Kate Moss following her cocaine scandal, because 'everybody in England is taking the illegal drug.' When asked for comment, Queen Elizabeth went on a tangent about the first Blondie album for three hours."
See Also: Cheap Thrills 2005, Capitalism Stole My Virginity, Richard Pryor, If a Social Darwinist Dies, Should Any of Us Care?, Neo Monster Island 2005, Zippy the Pinhead and others
I am cheered by the emergence of cartoonists like Stephanie McMillan, who remembers what human beings are supposed to be like: human, and outraged by attacks on our humanity.
Visit her website here for more., or e-mail her here if you want a cartoon sent to you every week.***
Careless channel hopping should be avoided by depressives. The reigning culture of "reality"-TV, celebrity news, sadistic animation and Football is All We Can Talk About in Endless Permutations sometimes drives me under the covers with thoughts of suicide. Given the freedom to express and amuse ourselves, this is what Los Angeles and New York feeds and America swallows, Strasbourg gooses amusing themselves to death.
"The Soup" (formerly "Talk Soup") delivers the bittersweet news that you am not alone. I still miss Aisha Tyler, but Joel McHale has won me over, and the catcalls from the backstage guys-- they can't believe this shit either!-- restores my faith in humanity.
"TV producer Mark Burnett is developing a new reality show inspired by Touched by an Angel. It will be a quest to find the one reality-show contestant who doesn't deserve to go to hell."
"Paris Hilton may also be called to testify in a criminal case involving a two year old burglary. The district attorney's office says that Paris 'just happens to be a witness.' I hope the trial is televised. I don't care about the outcome, I just want to see what happens when Paris puts her hand on the Bible."
"Mick Jagger's daughter Lizzie has defended supermodel Kate Moss following her cocaine scandal, because 'everybody in England is taking the illegal drug.' When asked for comment, Queen Elizabeth went on a tangent about the first Blondie album for three hours."
See Also: Cheap Thrills 2005, Capitalism Stole My Virginity, Richard Pryor, If a Social Darwinist Dies, Should Any of Us Care?, Neo Monster Island 2005, Zippy the Pinhead and others
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