MORE HOUSE-CLEANING AND SCRATCH-PAD CLEARING...

The Republicans' (and thus America's) "Fascism Problem" isn't a fever dream cooked up by some old hippies or blue haired pansexual campus coeds. It's very real, and in some cases, very in-your-face. Let Samantha Bee clue you in with this helpful little video presentation!

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Remember back a couple weeks ago, when Preznit Trump revoked former CIA chief John Brennan's security clearance because he didn't like what the man had to say about how he was running the country? Of course you do. The constant churn of the international shit-storm that's been brewing ever since the greasy Beast slithered into the office that was stolen on his behalf makes an awful lot of background noise, it's true, but this particular treachery was the kind of act that leaves a lasting impression no matter what else might be going on at the time. 

The thing about it that really stuck with yer old pal Jerky, however, was that, in his press release about the situation, Trump accused Brennan of “erratic conduct and behavior”, of making “frenzied commentary”, and of making “wild outbursts on the Internet and television.” 

Talk about the pot calling the snowball black! Exactly how deaf to the sound of his own farts does Trump have to be to say such things and not realize that he's providing us all with a perfect, world class example of that favorite right-wing self-own tactic, projection? He's literally screaming into a mirror, shaking a fist at his own fucking shadow.

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Another news nugget that speaks to the cancer gnawing away at the heart of the Spirit of the Age... Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and current official sower of calculated confusion on any of the dozens of illegalities in which Preznit Trump and his criminal enterprise are currently ensnared, sat down for an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo and... well... check out the transcript for yourselves:

CUOMO: I think it's a little early on that. And if fact [checking] is anything, we've never had anybody with the level of mendacity that he has. Not even close.
GIULIANI: It's in the eye of the beholder.
CUOMO: No, facts are not in the eye of the beholder.
GIULIANI: Yes it is -- yes they are. Nowadays they are. Truth is not Truth.

So there you have it. If you've ever wondered where whence that semi-permanent, cold, nauseous, flip-floppy feeling in the pit of your stomach came from -- that feeling like you can't tell which way is up anymore -- you need look no further.

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I realize it's been a few weeks, and I realize that the story was only ever added to the ongoing media churn as a kind of flavor additive, to spice up the data meal one way if you're a conservative and another way if you're a liberal -- with only the Far Right/Fascists and Ultra Left loons making a feast of it -- but hopefully most of you will remember the Sarah Jeong controversy, in which the New York Times' latest tech section hire had some right-wing provocateurs dig up some (this again?!) "controversial tweets" that she'd made, ostensibly disparaging "white people", over the past half-decade or so.

I'm not going to bother going into much detail on the story itself, because it's quite obvious to anyone with at least half a functioning brain what happened here: A bunch of actual racist shit-lords made a bad faith effort to get Jeong fired from the Times by smearing her as a racist, using obviously sarcastic tweets that she'd posted in reaction to actual racist attacks that she'd endured on Twitter, and it didn't work. The Times immediately cottoned to what was up and shut that shit down. End of story (minus the still ongoing low level aftershock of whining from D-level Youtube accounts and the disappointed murmurs of sand-kicking incels clogging reddit and 4Chan and the comments sections of any newspaper that's been linked to by the Drudge Report over the last five years). See the link above for a pretty good rundown of what the assault on Jeong represents in terms of the Far Right's evolving War on Reality, itself.

However, if you will indulge me, I would like to spend just a tiny bit of time on one social observer's published reaction to this cultural event, and that would be the ever reliable Andrew "Give Phrenology a Chance" Sullivan, contributor for New York Magazine and gay conservative gadfly since forever. Hell, the man kicked off his "groundbreaking" political blog a mere TWO YEARS AFTER yer old pal Jerky began his run on the late, lamented Daily Dirt, so you know the chances are good that his will be a take worthy of your time! 

Sadly, you should have taken those odds, because Sullivan's piece, "When Racism is Fit to Print", for the Daily Intelligencer, isn't fit to wrap virtual fish in. 

First off, Sully pretends not to know that Jeong was engaging in a game of racist tit-for-tat, throwing a mutated form of the racism daily hurled her way by the angry, frustrated meat-whites right back in their puffy, squinched up faces, in order to make them see how THEY like it, especially when coming from an intelligent and creative young woman with a playful mean streak a mile wide. Note that I'm giving Sully the benefit of the doubt, here, and assuming that he knows he's full of shit on this count, but carrying forth with it for purely partisan point-scoring. After all, what conservative is a fan of the New York Times, right?

I mean, at one point, he seriously seems to be suggesting that there might be some insight to be gleaned by "replacing the word white" in Jeong's tweets "with any other racial group"! As if precisely this variety of honking racialist cant doesn't already make up a full two-thirds of all online communication! And as if that wasn't precisely what Jeong was/is reacting to in the FIRST fucking place!

And finally, I think it is also worth noting that despite reading dozens of "think" pieces on the Jeong "scandal", I have yet to encounter anything that even comes within shooting distance of the strawman constructs Sullivan conjures up here -- "Asians CAN'T be racist claim lefties!" -- nor have I noticed anyone in real life making such a claim. And I know a LOT of very gabby, opinionated lefties.

So Sully, please... a little more effort next time, okay luvvie?

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So there's this former CIA guy who's got some opinions you might want to know about. His name is Michael Scheuer, and he thinks... well, why not let him speak for himself? Here goes...

As this week’s end, it seems likely that it is quite near time for killing those involved in the multiple and clearly delineated attempts to stage a coup d’état against the legitimately elected Trump government and thereby kill our republic. 

Finally, this week saw a significant and quickening advance toward the moment when those millions of well-armed citizens who voted for Trump, and who have been abused or wounded by Democrats, their Antifa-thugs, and their thug-civil servants for exercising their franchise to elect Trump, cannot be, in good conscience, patient for much longer. 

Fortunately, they have in hand a long and very precise list of the names and photographs of those who hate and threaten them, their families, their way-of-life, their liberty, their livelihoods and their republic. No self-respecting and determined-to-remain-independent citizenry can let themselves forever be held hostage by thug-civil-servants like Strzok, Comey, McCabe, Page, and Rosenstein; worshipers of tyranny, like the Democratic members of Congress, the Clintons, the FBI, and the Obamas; apparent traitors like Brennan, Hayden, and Clapper; all of the mainstream media; and the tens of thousands of government-admitted-and-protected, violent, criminal, and illegal immigrants. 

American patriots have so far, praise God, been remarkably disciplined in not responding to tyranny and violence with violence. For now they must remain so, armed but steady. But the time for such patience is fast slipping away; indeed, that patience is quickly becoming an obviously rank and self-destructive foolishness. If Trump does not act soon to erase the above noted tyranny and tyrants, the armed citizenry must step in and eliminate them. 

It is, of course, far better if Trump does so, and I pray and believe he will. That said, the sheer, nay, utter joy and satisfaction to be derived from beholding great piles of dead U.S.-citizen tyrants is not one that will be missed if Trump does not soon do the necessary to save the republic. But if he fails, the citizenry must act to ensure that Hillary’s predictive words are proven correct. “If Trump wins,” she apparently said, “we will all hang.”

This is the same guy who used to head up the Osama bin Laden task-force up until 1999. So sleep well, America! All the best people have got things under control! On the other hand, if you feel that you just can't shake that spooky feeling you've got, and you're having a hard time keeping your eyes closed, then you might want to read Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone feature on Surviving America's Kill List, featuring the harrowing true-life story of citizen journalist (and bonafide American citizen) Bilal Abdul Kareem!

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Oh, shit! I almost forgot! Before I go... researchers have finally admitted that it is now irresponsible to continue pretending that the USA has an elections system that allows its citizens to know with any degree of certainty whether or not "official" election results are legitimate. Sorry 'bout that.

AN ILL WIND BLOWS COMBOVER

WTF is going on with Trump’s hair?? It is worse than Nunes’ “Memo”

😂😂😂😂😂#TrumpsHair#YoMemoJokes pic.twitter.com/AItHNvobAX

— Gerardo (@gtorres25) February 3, 2018

Does this video of Trump fleeing reporters as #MemoDay flops harder than Battlefield Earth remind you of anything? Here's a hint...

Yes, that's right... it's the Library Ghost from the original GHOSTBUSTERS! Creepy, ain't it? Yeesh...

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ OCT 28, 2016

1. Our old pal Peter Bebergal - author of the essential Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (Canadians buy here) - has just had an article about the Rosicrucians published in The New Yorker. It begins:

In the early seventeenth century, a series of anonymous pamphlets were published in Germany, announcing the existence of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross, a fellowship of mystics and alchemists who, it was claimed, were working in secret to transform European politics and religion. The first of the pamphlets, which were later called the Rosicrucian manifestos, was the “Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis,” and it described a figure called C.R., who learned of magic and alchemy as he travelled through the Orient, two hundred years earlier, and then returned to Europe to share his new knowledge. A second pamphlet, “Confessio Fraternitatis,” appeared not long afterward, laying out the purpose and intentions of the fellowship and inviting others into the brotherhood, where they would “find more wonderful secrets by us then heretofore they did attain.” (This quote is taken from Thomas Vaughan’s translation of the manifestos, republished by Ouroboros Press in 2012.) These secrets would be revealed, the pamphlet explains, but only to a few, at first; in the meantime, they would be “declared in figures and pictures” that would one day become more widely understood. In 1616, a third document, “The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz,” appeared. “Rosenkreutz” is a German play on “Rosy Cross,” and seemed to be the mysterious C.R. of the “Fama.” 

In her landmark book “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” published in 1972, the historian Frances Yates concluded that the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross did not actually exist—but she also argued that the documents had helped to prompt a new way of thinking about the world, one that not only attempted to “penetrate to deep levels of religious experience” but inspired investigations in science and math as well.* This legacy had been obscured, she wrote, because “the advancing scientific revolution” was “eager to cast off the chrysalis out of which it [was] emerging.” Over the centuries, the Rosicrucian myth became the ur-legend for tales of shadowy groups using magic to alter the course of history. It influenced a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century magical and mystical Christian orders, some of which claimed to have a direct lineage with the Rosicrucians. (Even Freemasons have claimed an early link to the group.) And the central idea of the manifestos—that through the application of magic and alchemy we might learn that we are a microcosm of the divine—helped to shape, along with Hermeticism, the occult imagination. 

In the centuries since, that tradition has informed the work of many artists and writers, among them the novelist and screenwriter John Crowley, now seventy-three...

And that's where things get interesting... or disappointing, depending on how much credence you've been giving those weird adverts featuring robe-bedecked figures shooting beams from their eyes that used to run in the back pages of Popular Science Magazine. Regardless, congratulations are once again due to Mr. Bebergal, who is fast becoming one of the DDD's favorite writers on the contemporary Pop Occulture beat!

2. One of the most paradoxically lovable hate-spewing right-wing lunatics of the post-war period in America has moved on to his eternal reward. Yes friends, it is with heavy heart that yer old pal Jerky announces the death of Jack Chick, paterfamilias of the Chick Tract Empire. You know Chick Tracts, don't you? They're those charmingly rough-hewn (and occasionally quite competent) miniature free comic books left in libraries, at subway stops, in restaurant booths, and other public places by practitioners of low-impact evangelical proselytism, tiny screeds bent on enlightening the secular-humanist-indoctrinated masses to the terrible truths about such topics as drugs and alcohol, abortion, homosexuality, Darwinian evolution, rock and roll, and... Dungeons & Dragons?! And, oh yeah, Roman Catholics, Muslims and Jews, natch! Fortunately, Jack's legacy lives on in the form of this immaculately organized online archive of his tracts.

3. And finally for today, I bring you a collection of animations created by Monty Python's sole American alumnus, Terry Gilliam, for the landmark britcom classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, that went unused. Some of these are gorgeous, and I find them to be extremely inspiring, so why not share the wealth? Enjoy!

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HEY GUYS! If you enjoy the content I create and share with you here via the Daily Dirt Diaspora family of blogs - currently including the Daily Dirt Diaspora, the Useless Eater Blog, and Kubrick U - and you buy stuff through AMAZON.COM or (if you're in Canada, obviously) AMAZON.CA... would you mind occasionally entering those two sites via the links that I am providing here? Because when you do, no matter what you buy there - it doesn't have to be stuff that I promote! - I get a very small kickback, at ZERO COST to you! It's a great way to help keep yer old pal Jerky creating content! Because, man, let me tell you, the last time anyone tossed anything into my tip jar, I think we were all worrying about a potential Mitt Romney administration. Ah... happier days, eh? So come on, man! Use my Amazon portals, and keep me from having to set up a freaking Patreon account, like all the Worst People in the World are doing these days!

SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ FEB 3, 2016

1. Set aside a couple hours to check out this century-plus overview of American comedy as assembled and curated by a team of comedy "experts" at Vulture.com. It purports to identify the 100 jokes, sketches or comedy moments that shaped a century of funny. While there are some entries here that I wouldn't have chosen, especially some of the new millennium selections, it's still very much worth checking out. Maybe I'll try my hand at assembling an alternate group of self-declared experts in order to put together a list of our own. Selections and volunteers appreciated.

2. Once you're done wasting half your day with the above overview of American comedy, why not spend the OTHER half wasting it with this encyclopedic overview of the greatest electronic music albums of the 1950's and 60's? Article author Joseph Morpurgo sets the ground rules:

The great electronic albums of the 1970s get plenty of kudos – but what of their predecessors? Casual accounts of the history of electronic music tend to point back to familiar sources: Suicide’s babble’n’hum; Cluster, Klaus Schulze and the rest of the Krautrock squad; the stygian mulch-music of early Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle; and of course Kraftwerk’s meticulous robot pop. Further back? Well, that’s when things tend to get a little foggy. Experiments with recorded electronic music actually date back to the 1940s (hell, depending on how you define “electronic music”, they date back to the 1880s). As early as the mid-1950s, predominantly electronic LPs were already being pressed, marketed and sold to the a willing (if slightly confused) public. Half a century down the line, many of these records still sound fantastic. Some are fascinating relics with plenty to say to the contemporary listener; others sound impossibly ahead of their time. ... Ground rules set – and inevitably occasionally broken – here they are: 15 essentials from electronic music’s Big Bang.

Check it out. No matter your tastes, you're all but guaranteed to find something that appeals to your particular, personal brain circuitry.


3. If you haven't seen The Answers yet, you're missing out on a pretty great, inventive, emotionally potent short film. Everything about this production, from the writing, to the acting, to the production values, is top notch. As a short film maker myself, I'm always encouraged when I see real, honest, worthwhile effort put into one. Kudos to everyone involved. You can watch it here and now:

GOOD GRIEF! CANCER BOY!

"This lost classic short film of 1990 is a post reunification Nihilist allegory of the tensions between the immigrant worker population of Germany and the natives who still long for Heimat. When foreign bullies cajole a young German man into trying to kick an American football. Hilarity ensues."

My friend Todd Graham made this video, as well as the legendary mash-up video Apocalypse Pooh. To find out what he's working on these days, read this recent profile from Ozy.com.

"THAT'S NOT FUNNY!" The Manufactured Crisis of Politically Incorrect Comedy

A spectre is haunting comedy—the spectre of Political Correctness.

If you're reading this, you're either a former reader of my Daily Dirt proto-blog (1999-2006), or you've followed a friend’s link from some form of social media, which means that you’re probably pretty savvy regarding current events, and you don’t need me to tell you about the PC war on comedy being waged by self-appointed Social Justice Warriors the world over.

The most recent eruption involves comedy ‘It Girl’, stand-up comic Amy Schumer. In a recent, otherwise laudatory article in The Guardian, TV critic Monica Heisey wrote: “For such a keen observer of social norms and an effective satirist of the ways gender is complicated by them, Schumer has a shockingly large blind spot around race.” As evidence, Heisey points to a couple of jokes in which Schumer suggests that Mexican men are a) hard workers and b) sexually aggressive.

When Schumer took to Twitter in a half-hearted attempt to defend herself against the racism charge, the aptly-named online entertainment blog Vulture swooped in to publish a rebuttal, in which Schumer’s racial jokes were criticized as having “no big reveal, no clever moment of redemption where the audience member has been edified on the machinations of American race relations.”

Because, as we all know, it’s every comedian’s dream to edify the audience on the machinations of race relations in America. Which works out great, because now, apparently, it’s also their responsibility.

When news of Schumer’s digital spanking started spreading across my Facebook news feed like a rash, I initially experienced a wave of déjà vu. Didn’t we just go down this road, like, a week ago?

Then I remembered, no, I was probably thinking of the time Jerry Seinfeld told ESPN that many of his comedian friends no longer perform at colleges because the crowds have become too PC.

This prompted a self-described “politically correct college student” to write an open letter to Seinfeld—the world’s most successful stand-up comic—in which fingers were wagged, tongues were clucked, and Seinfeld’s point was proven beyond Caitlyn Jenner’s 5 o’clock shadow of a doubt.

Wait… no! It wasn’t Seinfeld! It was Tina Fey! The veteran Saturday Night Live performer and one-woman media empire about whom a recent Flavorwire-by-way-of-Vulture (again) editorial declared that “race” is Fey’s “biggest blind spot” (again), “because the act of mocking something automatically implies that the comedian has, or thinks she has, the authority, objectivity, and distance needed to mock it.” They even go so far as to criticize this quote by suggesting it could be “used as a negative example of intersectional feminism in a gender studies seminar” …as if that somehow counts as a negative.

Or… hold on a second. Could I actually be thinking about the time The Internet collectively decided to pour over every last Tweet ever twatted by Trevor Noah, the comic chosen to replace Jon Stewart in The Daily Show anchor chair? Said “Twit-hunt” revealed a handful of jokes implying that some Jewish people have succeeded in the entertainment industry, and that some fat chicks are funny to look at. Remember? That mini-scandal prompted Patton Oswalt to unleash an epic 53-part Twitter-based take-down of Noah’s self-appointed PC shamers. And then the shamers went after Oswalt, and round and round we go…



On the other hand, perhaps I’m thinking about that one time when “hashtag activist” Suey Park tried to get Comedy Central’s Colbert Report cancelled over the satirical, faux right-wing pundit’s satirical, faux charity, the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever”, which itself was a parody of NFL franchise owner Dan Snyder’s establishment of the “Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation”. That Park’s campaign could itself serve as evidence for certain pre-existing negative stereotypes about the Asian sense of humor was, no doubt, completely lost on her.

In many ways, I suppose, ‘twas ever thus. Only nowadays, I would argue, it’s more so. But why?

In his excellent 2014 documentary “That’s Not Funny”, which you can watch for free on Youtube, Mike Celestino blames a familiar boogeyman: the Internet. Using the 2013 incident when The Onion sparked outrage with an Oscar night Tweet about 9-year-old Best Supporting Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, Celestino explains:

“The Onion started out in 1988 as a cult comedy fake newspaper circulating around the college campuses of cities in Wisconsin and Illinois. After the launch of its website in 1996, it found its way into the homes of comedy fans across the United States and the world. And now, after the explosion in social media over the last decade, The Onion’s articles are shared, re-blogged and re-tweeted by hundreds and thousands of people. And while those people might be sophisticated comedy aficionados, with tastes for edgy satirical social commentary, many of the friends and family they’re sharing the jokes with are not.”

Celestino concludes with a couple rhetorical question of his own: “So now The Onion has to answer to armchair critics and soccer moms who have no interest in or understanding of what satire even is? How does a joke wind up in the hands of someone for whom it wasn’t intended?”

His half-defeated reply: “Well… yeah. That’s a part of being a world culture. The world has an opportunity to react.” Celestino goes on to say that, as a liberal, he’s devoted to the idea of “safe spaces” where people don’t have to be constantly on their guard, worried that they’re going to be attacked or ridiculed. However, he also says “it’s a little unreasonable to expect your safe space to be EVERYWHERE.”

And therein lies the rub.

Mel Brooks famously said that “Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” John Cleese believes that the best comedy requires transgression against taboos, and as such always risks offense. At the peak of his powers, Steve Martin put it succinctly: “Comedy is not pretty.”

From George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television to Chris Rock’s genuinely dangerous meditation on the differences between black folks and “niggers”, comedy is never so effective as when it’s bumping up against, or crashing through, psychosocial barriers, whether or not those barriers are mandated by law.

One of the themes you may have noticed running through many of the above PC critiques of “offensive” comedy is the implied notion that the critics, themselves, are in possession of razor sharp, sophisticated comedy chops. So much so, in fact, that they feel qualified to lecture some of the world’s funniest people about what makes for truly great comedy. It seems as though they want to have their fair-trade, gluten-free, vegan “cake”, and have it taste good, too.

In other words, they desperately want to be in on the joke. 

And in a strange way, they are, because while comedy is definitely a shared, group experience, it is not 100 percent “inclusive”. It almost always requires an Other, an "out" group for those who "get it" to reflexively position themselves against. 

And that, dear reader, is what these critics represent. The necessary, archetypal, ultimate component required for any truly successful and transcendent comedy: the Square Left Out of the Joke.

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MEDIAVORE:TV ~ SNUFF BOX

Premiering on BBC3 in February of 2006, at the tail end of the glorious, decade-long New Comedy tidal wave that swept across the UK, Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher's semi-sketch, semi-narrative, pitch-black TV comic oddity Snuff Box represents either the crest or the trough of that wave... depending on who you ask.

Here's the set-up, such as it is: The couldn't-be-more-British Berry - a whiskey-loving scoundrel with a rapist wit (no, really) and a silky smooth baritone vox - is employed as High Executioner to the King of England. He also may or may not be a direct descendant of Jack the Ripper. Fulcher - a moon-faced, socially awkward American with poor hand-eye coordination and a penchant for profoundly inappropriate bursts of surreal profanity - has somehow weaseled his way into a position as Berry's assistant, not to mention adjunct membership in the posh Hangman Gentleman's Club where much of the series takes place.

Although the two men couldn't be more different, the way they play off each other serves as both an excellent example and a postmodernist deconstruction of the stereotypical Brits-versus-Yanks dynamic.

For instance, while Berry clearly sees himself as an alpha-type upholder of certain manly virtues, he is also a broken human wreck. Whether he's being bested at fisticuffs by a mincing Negro tailor, pompously failing miserably on a trivia-based game show, or violently bullying old ladies and small dogs, we sense in Berry a certain resigned nihilism, nourished perhaps by a deep current of post-Edwardian melancholy at the loss of Empire... like James Bond with a gammy leg and acute alcoholic hepatitis.

Fulcher is equally monstrous, but for entirely different reasons. A rampaging Id to Berry's unctuous Super-Ego, Fulcher is a virtual whirlwind of bewildered frustration, a middle-aged man-child of apocalyptic ignorance whose gross incompetence is so incomprehensibly profound that Berry's mediocrity shines like gold in comparison. Hence their undeniable chemistry.

To the extent that Snuff Box is known at all, it's mostly through a couple of set pieces - unrelated to the overriding story arc - that became viral videos, chief among these being the brutal "Boyfriend" sketches...

...and the comparatively delightful "Rapper with a Baby" sketch.

This is unfortunate, because although the above sketches are very funny, they barely hint at the ice-cold, pitch-black perfection of the show from which they've been excised. There are moments in Snuff Box, such as a Mac versus PC argument that takes place literally on the gallows, that border on the Satanic.

In case you're wondering, that is as unqualified a recommendation as you're ever likely to get out of yours truly.

So go out and buy Snuff Box, which is now available on DVD in North America with a bunch of excellent extras, including a CD of Matt Berry's wonderful music created especially for the series. If you don't like it, you can always just donate it to the nearest orphanage. What with the population crisis getting so out of hand, God only knows we could use a few more serial killers around.