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Cartoons

My sister-in-law is visiting with her two kids, so there are a total of four in the house, which means of course we are watching cartoons.

Like most old stoners, there are some cartoons I actually like.  I enjoy the stylized violence and felinophobia of Kid vs. Kat, the gross out humor of Quest and the colorful fantasy worlds presented in Tiny Planets.  My favorite is Phineas and Ferb.  I think it has a Simpson’s like level of creativity, the songs are great and, very much like my favorite cartoon from my youth (Rocky and Bullwinkle), a lot of the jokes are way above kid level.

One thing I’ve never really got, though, is the anthropomorphization thing.  I mean, if the characters walk and talk like human beings, go to school, wear clothes and drive cars, why do they always have to be animals?  One that particularly bothers me in that respect is Arthur.  All of the characters have those rounded ears on top of their heads, but other than that it’s really impossible to know what animal they are, so why do they bother making them animals at all?  Tiny Planets, of course, carries that to an extreme, and anything carried to an extreme is O.K.  I don’t know what kind of being they’re supposed to be, but they’re way cool.

Anyway, there are cartoons out there with cows, pigs, dogs, ducks, mixed farm animals, mixed forest animals, mixed jungle animals, dolphins, dinosaurs, bears, ants, cats and mice.  Lots and lots of mice.  My daughter loves Angelina Ballerina.

Why so many mice?  I suppose it all started with Mickey Mouse and from there on out can just be attributed to the fact that the producers of cartoons have no more originality than the producers of any other situation comedies, so they keep going with the formula that works.

I suppose the other reason is that mice are small, like kids.  Everybody likes to see the underdog win, but nobody likes to see that more than an actual underdog, and that’s what kids are.  Living in a world of adults, they are small and powerless.  So, when the mouse defeats the cat or the roadrunner defeats the coyote, it is reassuring and inspiring.

Not exactly realistic, though.

I’m going to go ahead and make an inflammatory statement here:  religion and patriotism are forms of mental disease.

Now, there are many different definitions of mental illness.  Continually doing the same thing but expecting different results, being a danger to yourself or others, actually having physical or neurological damage to the brain, not knowing the difference between right and wrong or between reality and fantasy are a few of the more common ones.

I’m not suggesting that god fearing, flag waving folks have something physically wrong inside the cranium, but they do fit every other one of those definitions.

Nations have risen and fallen for the last 6,000 years, at least.  Populations have been transferred from one to the other.  They have expanded and they have fought wars.  Ultimately, whether from the inside or the outside, they have all collapsed.

Religions, too, have come and gone.  They have offered meaning, solace in time of sorrow, and hope for an afterlife.  They have also been the cause of oppression, war and deliberate ignorance.  Yet people still have such a deep hunger for spiritual enlightenment that new religions are being invented all the time.

In religion and politics, people keep trying the same things and hoping for better results.  Insane.

Nationalism is clearly a danger to ourselves and others, because it can lead to war.  Very few people, probably less than 1%, would actually be capable of deliberately killing another person.  You may be angry at your boss, but you’re not going to put a bomb in his car.  You may shout at your neighbor and say “I’ll fucking kill you!,” but you won’t, really.  But large numbers of people will vote for leaders who will drop bombs on other people, killing them.  They won’t think twice and they won’t feel guilty.

Religion is also a danger to ourselves and others because nationalist leaders use it to rally people around their nationalist wars.

Not knowing the difference between right and wrong is actually a point of pride among extreme nationalists.  “My country right or wrong,” they say.

Religion’s no better.  People assume that whatever their priest says is right.  Not only do religious people not know the difference between right and wrong, thay have stopped trying to figure it out.

The big thing for me though is that last one:  not knowing the difference between reality and fantasy.  Nations are not real things.  There is no physical barrier at the Rio Grande.  Birds fly across it with impunity.  They are entirely human inventions, i.e. artificial, and people would be better off without them.  Yet they continue to exist.  Insanity.

Religion as well.  If everybody on earth stopped going to church, synagogue, mosque or temple the plants would continue to grow, the rain would continue to fall, and babies would continue to be born.  There are scientific explanations for all  of these things, and all religion does is to provide us with a fantasy.

I’m not against fantasy.  But when you start believing in it, you have a problem, and that problem is called insanity.

A couple of days ago I wrote a blog entry about the evils of television, but in the middle of my rant about the torture propaganda on all of the cop shows, I forgot about the original idea which sparked me to write the piece.

That is the Christian propaganda on TV.  I’m not talking about the 700 Club, or the Hour of Power or stuff like that.  Those are just televised sermons and if you enjoy watching them, God bless you.  (I mean that as a figure of speech meaning something like blessings be upon you, may you fare well, I bear you no ill will.  I am not, personally, a believer in the existence of a supreme being)

No, I’m talking about entertainment TV where the Santa Claus like mythology of helpful angels and a sweet afterlife are presented.  Joan of Arcadia is probably the most glaring example.  I’ve never been able to force myself to watch a whole episode, so I can’t claim to be an expert, but the shows very premise is that this average teenager sees God and he (or she) tells her what to do.  I guess it’s a harmless enough premise, if you like that sort of thing.

Then there is The Ghost Whisperer.  O.K., it’s about ghosts and they exist outside of, as well as in, Christian tradition, but her job is to persuade them to “go into the light,” i.e. heaven.  There they will find love, and forgiveness, although usually she needs to find them some forgiveness here first.  My kids just see it as a good story, and it’s about the raciest thing we’ll let them watch, I think my wife actually enjoys the schmaltz factor and I think Jennifer Love Hewitt is smoking hot, so everybody’s happy.  Listening to a bit of sugar-coated Christian propaganda seems a small price to pay.

I was quite excited when The Others came out.  It seemed to be a bit like The Ghost Whisperer, but with an expanded premise, i.e. a large group of people with various psychic powers, but it’s really just the Ghost Whisperer with an ensemble cast and the producers were obviously hoping that with this many actors at least one of them would have some charisma but, alas, that is not the case and the writers don’t have any original ideas either so it comes down to a whole lot of guiding dead people towards the light and sudden frightened looks and spooky music.

Actually, I guess it’s not that many and we should let the Christians have their fun but I just wanted to point out that their sales pitch is showing through.

Jumping to the Wrong Conclusions

I’m not so much disturbed by the findings of the Simon Weisenthal report, as I am by their interpretation of the results.

The Simon Weisenthal Center for Tolerance scanned the web and found a 20% increase to 11,500 in hate-filled social networks, Web sites, forums, blogs, Twitter feeds, and so on (up from 10,000 last year).

Well, that could be just due to increased usage of the Internet, and Twitter, but we’ll leave that detail aside for now.

It notes that beyond its role in our social lives, the Internet often acts as the incubator and validator of dangerous conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 and organ theft, according to the article on Americablog.

What the hell does he mean, dangerous?

In what way does it endanger anybody for me to suggest that Vice President Dick Cheney, the head of security for the World Trade Center Complex Marvin (the president’s little brother)Bush and building owner Larry Silverstein conspired to have the buildings knocked down, knowing full well that their good friend Rupert Murdoch would report the events in a way favorable to them and that Marvin’s brother George would reap enormous political benefit, Cheney’s old buddies at Halliburton would get billions of dollars in contracts and Larry Silverstein would get a cool $5 billion for that real estate he was otherwise losing money on?

Unless, of course, they are actually guilty, in which case it endangers them, I guess.  But I don’t know why the Simon Weisenthal Center for Tolerance would object to that.

The other thing is, why the connection between 9/11 and organ theft?  Now, I do believe it is entirely possible that there are organized criminal gangs which are willing to kill people and harvest their organs for a profit, and are able to do so.  I also believe the Cheney/Bush/Silverstein theory outlined above.  But I don’t see any connection at all between those two theories.

So, I’m forced to conclude that they are trying to be funny.  The Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance is taking the piss.

With all due respect, because I’m sure the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance are generally fine people, this was a dick report.

The Slime

I watch way too much TV.  It’s on pretty much whenever I’m at home.

Before my mind is completely rotted and I am left a drooling vegetable in the middle of the living room, gazing blankly into a screen of randomly changing images, I have a couple of observations I’d like to make.

1. Way too many cop shows.  All intensively violent, fast paced, one sided and propagandistic.  CSI, Criminal Minds, Third Watch are a few that we get over here in socialist Europe.

It’s the technology bit that really ticks me off, and I’ll tell you why.  Because it’s bullshit.  If the police actually had access to that stuff and knew how to use it, crime would be over and there would be a serious risk of us becoming a police state.  Some good, some bad.

Even the hospital shows wind up being cop shows half of the time.  Which is really, really unrealistic but how boring would a realistic hospital show be.  Can you imagine that as a reality show?  Who will die next.

I remember one episode of House that particulary angered me.  There were two brothers, and one was dependent on the other for a bone marrow transplant.  After numerous misdiagnoses and screwups, they wound up (well, one doctor, spur of the moment) drilling directly into this poor kid’s bone without even the benefit of local anesthetic while he screamed horribly.  The doctor had a soul searching moment about it later “I tortured a kid…”  The word torture was used a couple of times.  But it was a necessity.  One that only a writer could create.

It’s bad enough when cop shows do that.

1. Discovery Channel is far too fond of car shows and jackass type stuff and blowing stuff up.  I’d much rather they enlighten me about the world.  I like animal planet but their surely must be other animals out there besides sharks and crocodiles.  Jeezus.  It’s the cop shows of the wild.  You never saw a lion read a zebra his Miranda rights, did you?  That’s the cop everybody is rooting for.
2. History Channel might as well be the WWII Channel.  Which is not too bad.  Whenever they do history since 1960, I wind up shouting “Liar!” at the screen a lot, which makes me wonder what they’re lying to us about that happened before that, and how far into the future do we need to go before we stop lying to ourselves about the present, or does the lie eventually become real?
3. I get really bored when they show people’s old home movies, though.