Great Old TV Episodes...from Beavis and Butt-Head

Animator Mike Judge's breakthrough into television fame was his MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head, which originally ran from 1993 to 1997.  One of my favorite episodes from it is CITIZENS ARREST,  from  '97...although it would be another ten years or so before I began to follow the series. The title characters are two boys in their early teens whose ignorant notions of what is "cool" revolve around anything sexual, violent or gross...I actually knew some kids around my neighborhood and school bus stop when I was growing up who had very similar personalities (and probably still do). When Beavis and Butt-Head was first being shown on MTV I had a problem with it as that channel seemed hell-bent on indoctrinating young viewers to the values it was promoting (like they did with their numerous, tedious reality TV series), and I've always felt that the series should have been targeted at a more mature, discerning audience...kids tend to copy what they see on the screen. After all, I never saw the Three Stooges as role models either, but rather a source of comedy both for their ridiculous behavior and beliefs and at the pretentions of society around them.  In Citizens Arrest, the boys are at work at Burger World when an armed robber comes into the store: of course Beavis and Butt-Head think it's all very cool.  When a policeman walks in on the holdup, Butt-Head's careless reactions to the robber inadvertently save the day and the cop praises the boys for making a "citizen's arrest".  The rest of the episode has them harassing customers in the name of security, including the above-pictured elderly gentleman who just pulled into the parking lot: the dialogue is side-splitting...how the two get carried away with their new "role" reminded me of the Hall Monitor episode in SpongeBob SquarePants.  Beavis and Butt-Head is a series you either love or hate...I've felt both ways at different times over the years.  The original series featured the two young losers sitting on their couch at home watching and analyzing various music videos during each episode. I thought that was hilarious, but the versions aired now (and on DVD) omit that section: too bad...

Great Old TV Episodes...from South Park

YOU'RE GETTING OLD...from South Park, first aired in June, 2011, is probably going to be the newest episode I feature on this blog for a while: most of the others go way back to twentieth century television.  I'd like to say that South Park is a favorite series of mine, but I honestly can't even though from time to time there is an episode that is spot-on with its message and humor...subtracting the last seven years in which there hasn't been anything on it I liked in the least. South Park, although animated and regrettably (like its predecessor Beavis and Butthead) marketed at minors,  has distinctly adult themes with an often over-the-top viciousness in its depictions of real people as well as being very satirical.  I'd estimate that I'd consider watching again maybe only 5-10% of its catalog of episodes, but then again there are those special ones that I check the TV listings for: You're Getting Old is one of these.  Stan Marsh, one of the four main South Park kid characters who live in a fictional, wacky Colorado town, has just turned ten and for his birthday his best friend Kyle Broflovski gives him a new "tween wave" CD: his mother, who thinks it sounds like shxt, prohibits him from using it, though.  But Stan figures out a way, and while lying in bed at night secretly plays it...and discovers like his mom that it's a lot of "crap".  As the ensuing days pass he increasingly sees everything around him that he used to enjoy in the same critical light, and the story progresses (or maybe I should say "regresses") from there.  It all intrigued me in that it covered two points: (1), the self-realization that hits people at different times in their lives that they're aging and that their lives will eventually wind down and come to an end, and (2) what it means to experience what is commonly referred to as a "sea change", which is a fundamentally altered way of perceiving the very reality to which one has been habitually been accustomed.  I may have been a special sort of kid in that long before I turned ten  I always sensed that I would age and eventually reach an end to it all, but that sea change experience has been a recurring element in my life, each time drastically changing how I felt about people and my own life and its priorities.  If you can manage to get past all the profanity and cartoon turds, this episode just might remind you of a few sea changes in your own life as well.  If I were you, though, I'd probably not try to get too used to watching South Park...

Breezing Through Redacted Mueller Report

I started reading Robert Mueller's redacted report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and found myself slogging a bit through this 400+ page monstrosity.  And then it happened, gradually at first, as the report made its way toward discussing Russia's role...especially in regard to their Internet Research Agency, the front organization behind several bogus Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter groups that disparaged Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign and promoted Donald Trump.  Suddenly I was breezing through the report, having found myself covering several pages in only a couple of minutes.                                                                                                                            

And besides that,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           . . I recommend to anyone daunted by the length of this report to just take a gander at it through the many news outlets online that provide the full report (with just those "few" redactions) in pdf form that you can scroll down without needing to download.  Here are the five most important things about Russian 2016 interference I've gotten from it so far: 

1.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

2.                                                                                                                            

3.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

4.                            Trump                                                                                                    is                                                                                                                        a                                                                         j                                   er                                               k.

5.The American people are really a bunch of                 s to have fallen for all this      !

In closing, I think that it's extremely urgent that                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               . And that's all I have to say about that...

Weekly Short Story: SQ by Ursula K. Le Guin

Science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who just passed away at 88 this past January, wrote the famous story The Lathe of Heaven and well as the Earthsea fantasy series, which I read a couple of years ago.  Back in 1978 she wrote the short story SQ, which appeared in the retrospective anthology Donald Wollheim Presents The 1979 Annual World's Best SF.  What does "SQ" stand for? Well, IQ stands for intelligence quotient, so...

First of all, let me remark that this story is something of a satirical farce about some trends the author obviously noted going on in the society around her.  "SQ" tests, designed to measure one's sanity level, are routinely administered around the world...those scoring 50 or higher are deemed insane and sent to asylums.  The man in charge of developing and implementing the examinations, Dr. Speakie, is a "psychometrist" who is gradually building his power as a higher and higher percentage of the population fail the test, and the remaining "free" people in the world are increasingly under his control.  The story is told from the viewpoint of one of his fanatical assistants, who sugar-coats the disturbing news: the average SQ test scores keep getting higher, indicating that the world is losing its grip on reality...

I have a couple of reactions to this story.  One is the notion that you can accurately measure things as complex as people's intelligence, personality types...or even their level of sanity...by administering multiple-choice tests...complete bull, in my opinion.  Apparently, Ursula K. Le Guin agreed with my point of view about this and decided to expose its nonsense.  The other is related to this: although SQ was written forty years ago, the situation regarding society's addiction to identity politics has only gotten worse.  Many of us have had it repeatedly drilled into us as to our uniqueness and, I'll reiterate, incredible complexity. But this all gets thrown out the window when we insist on seeing ourselves as being members of groups that are often...if not usually...very subjectively defined, and with narratives that we're expected to adhere to.  I prefer the idea of seeing folks as individuals who have the power and authority to make their own choices in life and to be responsible for those choices...this classification obsession only creates victim classes and robs us of the dignity and accountability so necessary to us as functioning, mature people...

Weekly Short Story: Foster, You're Dead by Philip K. Dick

Renowned twentieth century science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote his scathing short story Foster, You're Dead back in 1955, in the midst of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. when bomb shelters were in great vogue and nuclear war seemed inevitable, even to the point where it became a marketing tool.  The story jumps ahead in time to 1972 when our society has structured itself around that notion of inevitability, with companies producing new shelters for consumption...each "new and improved" model rendering the previous one obsolete.  Little Mike Foster is isolated in his own school as all of his classmates' parents are into buying bomb shelters and contributing to civil defense.  His own father, though, sees it all as a shameless sham to squeeze the people by seizing on their fears...he doesn't have a shelter nor does he participate in the almost constant war preparations.  Mike knows there is a public shelter, but even it costs money...fifty cents...and he is penniless.  As anxiety builds up within him, the continual pressure from elders and advertising only exacerbates the problem.  Will Mike's father relent and join the herd of consumerism-driven sheep?  Well, you can read Foster, You're Dead to find out...it's part of a collection titled Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (Pantheon Books, 2002).  I've also searched for it online...there seems to be a dispute as to whether it is public domain or not: I'm going to err on the side of caution and not put a link to it, although you're free to make your own choice...

I remember back around 1998-99 when I would listen to late night talk radio while at work on the graveyard shift.  There was a show called Coast-to-Coast A.M., hosted by Art Bell.  On it he regularly had on as guests folks espousing their doomsday theories about the upcoming Y2K debacle when all the world's computer systems would fail and we would be sent back into stone age conditions.  One of the show's advertisers sold several months' supplies of storable food, anticipating this possibility and wanting to capitalize on listeners' anxieties.  But that's part of how commodities are routinely marketed: you're not safe until you buy our product...and oh by the way, you need the latest model that really makes you safe, not what you already have.  Philip K. Dick hit the target dead center with his story...

Weekly Short Story: The Liberation of Earth by William Tenn

I read The Liberation of Earth several years ago when I bought the science fiction anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953), published by DAW Books in 1986.  For some reason 1953 featured several outstanding short stories of this genre...I discussed Time is the Traitor by Alfred Bester in an earlier article.  Today's story is another one by William Tenn, the pen name for Philip Klass...you might have read my article about his 1959 story The Malted Milk Monster...

The narrative in The Liberation of Earth is from the future...nine generations after the described events.  One day an alien ship arrives on Earth and proclaims that they are the Dendi, who preside over the galactic federation and have been observing humanity from a distance...without interference...while we develop to the point when we are admitted as a participating member.  But events have interfered with this as the invading Troxxt have occupied nearby star systems and our solar system is within their sphere of influence.  To counteract them and "liberate" Earth from the Troxxt, the Dendi have arrived to set up their own base here.  Then the Troxxt attack and drive away the Dendi and proclaim themselves as liberators.  This conflict between the two galactic powers goes back and forth...and each time untold numbers of people are killed and the environment progressively ruined.  At the end, well...the story is told as an oral history handed down from generation to generation...the narrator gives a hint of his current situation on Earth by stating. "Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!"

The Liberation of Earth is a very thinly-veiled satire about how the East and West during the Cold War treated the many different countries that they deemed as strategic in their struggle against the other.  It was written at the opening of the Korean War in 1950 and published at its conclusion, three years later.  Each side in that conflict...as well as in Vietnam a few years later...made great public fanfare about "liberating" the country's people...while increasingly making their homeland uninhabitable.  After the Cold War we still have our proxy conflicts...look at the devastation in Syria and Yemen as other countries interfere with them while proclaiming themselves as liberators...

Earth as a proxy war target between two much more advanced alien races may seem a little bit too speculative for anyone to seriously consider as a possibility, but if you happen to live in one of the Third World countries with relatively little military might to defend themselves and you have little to interest you other than taking care of yourself, your family, and immediate community, the relatively sudden presence of super military powers and "wars of liberation" on your land may seem just as far-fetched to you...and just as tragic...