At some point in my adolescence, an unmemorable pop tune came and went. Its title was “Blame it on the Bossa Nova.” This comes from a time when many of you were still decades from being born. If I had to guess, I’d say the tune came out in 1962, shortly before JFK’s assassination and around the time we had begun to carry transistor radios on straps, manufactured in hues other than black.
Why do I remember it? I’m somewhat atypical. That’s why. Why do I write it? To get your attention, of course. In a dog eat dog world, this is always the writer’s first task—to get you interested. Those of us in the biz call it a hook. If my ploy succeeded, I can now tell you my actual agenda. I will reveal now the nefarious criminal who I actually intend to indict. Bailiff, bring in the real defendant, Walt Disney!
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, today we stand atop a dark spire, and behold a three hundred sixty degree view of extinction. As we look around, we can see at least a dozen plausible Doomsday scenarios. Iraq? You’d better believe it. Some other primitive culture, with a trunk full of nuclear war heads purchased at a KGB fire sale? How could it possibly be otherwise?
Many of us grow increasingly convinced, however, that the end will actually come from right here, in America, schooled in the Pledge of Allegiance, provided with its daily iron by Wonder Bread and Flintstones Vitamins. Women, egged on by the omnipresent (and omni-invisible) EVIL NEO FEMINISTS will kidnap one too many of our children, push their luck just a little too hard. Men will finally take a determined stand. Many men are, in fact, now approaching their breaking points in this current and vile little gender war—you know, the one that doesn’t just drop bombs on children, but uses babies for live ammunition? Bloodshed is imminent. And girls, you may have to forget about your old buddy 911. A lot of the men who were struck down by this pox were cops. Ultimately they caught on and stopped working their asses off and risking their lives so that your lawyer could buy his daughter that adorable pink Mercedes.
Now, back to the topic at hand: our virtually certain extinction. In fairness, I must remind you that there are other possibilities. The world teems with evil. Perhaps Mohammar Khadaffi will have one last bout of sibling rivalry with bin Laden and dust off a few rusting canisters of botilinus. Or maybe our demise will come at the hands of “none-of-the-above.” Still, I’ll keep my chips on fifty-five red—the invasion of the legal system into the family. “Excuse me, Your Honor, would you mind passing the salt?”
“And, uh, Barrister, would you mind not gnawing on my infant’s thigh? There’s still plenty of chicken.”
Call it intuition.
I appreciate that as I speak, some of you are only half-listening. You’re busy contemplating the face of the spire itself, trying to remember the route by which you ascended, which is now enshrouded in clouds. I’d advise you to forget that. The spire is Time. It’s not bidirectional. There will be nowhere to hide.
One way or other, I personally think that the planet’s had it. Call it intuition. This superstitious streak is strong enough in me that I do feel a certain urgency to get the word out. At the very least, I’m determined to find someone to blame. If I have to die, I’d at least like some analgesia, and no narcotic can measure up to finding the perfect scapegoat.
With that introduction, please direct your attention along with me to the defendant, slouching there trying to appear pathetic, playing with his Daisy and Goofy dolls. Ladies and gentlemen, behold a cold-blooded killer. I refer not to Mickey Mouse, or any of the other cartoon characters. I don’t lay the blame on Fantasia. (I have never gotten through the film once without falling asleep; but, then again, I don’t think I ever saw it when I hadn’t smoked a lot of pot). Some Europeans will be tempted to shout, “Disneyland!” I’ll agree with you that it’s fairly obscene, but not on a level that would lead to life’s complete extinction.
I’m certain that the actual source of the evil sits at the defendant’s table, cowering in his Mickey Mouse Club hat. Needless to say, when you get to Disney’s level, you never personally get your hands dirty. But he gave the order all right. The killer was a hit man out of LA, with a smooth, avuncular baritone voice—one that children found especially reassuring. The scene of the crime was the true nature film, which Disney pioneered, and which will doubtless prove to be over the long run[1] his greatest aesthetic triumph.
Please don’t get me wrong. I like shows about animals and find comfort in the fact that, night or day, since the advent of cable TV, I’ll always be able to find something on about either sharks or Hitler. Both subjects fascinate me, so I know I need never fear boredom, or even anxiety, when the end is near. I’ll just tune into some show depicting a Great White bashing over and over into a crumbling steel protection cage that contains a tasty human tidbit running a video camera. Five feet away, another human does nothing to help, but does get the event down on film.
Those who did the actual killings were Hollywood script writers, cinematographers, and of course, those adorable little chipmunks. But the capo tutu capos, I assure you, was the silver-throated narrator, acting on direct orders from Disney.
For a long time, the scam worked. Common thugs carried out the genocide while the silver throated baritone lulled us into a state of calm. Whenever a lion gobbled down an antelope, he would merrily say in a dubbed in voice-over, “Nature in her wisdom…” or, he would say. “Nature in its wisdom realized that…” Or, “In nature, there is always a rule that….” Or, “Nature, in its wisdom decided that…”
Kind of makes “Nature” sound like a synonym for God, doesn’t it?
Embedded in these remarks is what I regard as the beginning of our doom. First off, anthropomorphizing may keep children glued to the TV, but it has no place whatever in rational thought. Charles Darwin was the person who got the thing right. No one has improved on what he observed or added more than fluff. Existence isn’t about a moral and fulfilling life. It’s about survival. Various genomes (DNA) result in an astonishing variety of phenotypes (living entities—whether they be spiders, humans, puppy dogs, or chiggers). These proceed to compete with, and/or devour one another until a certain lineage predominates. It’s a numbers game and there is no Nature’s Wisdom. Nature doesn’t give a shit. Darwin called this survival of the fittest and natural selection. Here semantic distinctions are essential. He did not say Get fit and you’ll make a big splash on earth. He said, You may not have a personal trainer or washboard abs, but if you can mutate in time, and put up with a lifetime of smelling rotten eggs, you may be able to survive by hovering near sulfurous vents in the ocean’s floor and breathing the sulfur dioxide (yes, there are indeed such fish).
It is a no-brainer that DNA will mutate. But how fast, and with what ingeniousness? Even more daunting—the mutation must ultimately emerge in physical form, the phenotype. Here’s where I place the obligatory sex scene. It turns out that quite early, a couple of phenotypes got together and found the act of coupling pleasurable. Sexual reproduction quickly took over (by natural selection) because it increased the speed with which an organism can crank out significant and varied mutations. Giraffes, roaches, and Homo sapiens all appear to have benefited. Do Do birds and snail darters---a different, sadder tale.
Tomorrow - Part IIIn 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
