MiSTing: CLR 5/5
Chris Mayfield
> The links stop here-- BeaconWay Press
>
> COOL LITERATURE & THINGS
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:48:47 -0700
>From: jo...@sedona.net
>To: mcgu...@physics.unc.edu
>Subject: Jolly Roger
>
>I lost my ship a year or two ago--
Tom: My ship died today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I don't
remember.
> it could be more!
>The sea has since surrounded me--
Mike: He's been treading water for a year now?
Tom: He gets his swimmer's medallion.
> no isles in sight.
>Then--a wake! A roiled sea!
All: Ewww!
> Arrowed waves!
>Gasping grasps to Lighthouse Lights--A Beacon Way!
>Then: Seagulls hunting me?
Crow: Don't ask me. You're the author.
> Their wordy cries--
>The salted sea--an alphabetical soup--
>Grab an H, an E, an L a P--
Mike: Give me a V! I! C! T! O! R! Y!
Bots: V! I! C! T! O! R! Y!
All: Victory! Victory! Go, team go!
> stick with papery glue--
>Toss HELP to the GULLS--watch them dive to see...
>Grab the WORD...
Crow: The WORD is the LAW and the LAW is the WORD.
> and disappear...
>And then...a band of red bandananed
Tom: It's Roseanne Bandannadana!
> men!
>SHOUTING "We are from the JOLLY ROGER"!
>"SINK!" They said, "or give us TRUTH!"
Crow: WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN BY "TRUTH?"
Mike: HOW SHOULD WE KNOW?
>"Truly" I replied, "SAVE ME!"
Crow: [high] Help me. Help me.
>The sea tossed on--and on--and on.
Mike: The posts rambled on and on and on.
>The gulls cried.
>Tears are in my salted eyes.
Tom: I prefer the honey roasted eyes.
>My arms are out-stretched--palms are up--
>The sea tossed on.
Crow: I tossed my cookies.
>The Seagulls cried--
>The salt is in my tear filled eyes.
>I cried and cried "HELP"!
Mike: [singing] Help! Ya know I need somebody...
>No truer word was ever heard.
>A line appeared on the blank sea.
>An honest line?
Crow: A straight line?
>I have grasped it--"PULL ME IN!"
>The line goes slack and sinks.
Tom: Oh, *that* helped!
>The sea tossed on.
>The gulls cried.
>"IN TRUTH, SWIM!" came the word.
All: [singing] Bird bird bird. The bird is the word.
>"Or sink in your salted sea."
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Date: Mon, 24 Jul 1995 15:52:33 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Kevin McCloy
>To: mcgu...@physics.unc.edu
>Subject: Ruminations of a nothing Generation...
Mike: Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
>
>Generation X. The Baby Bust. The Baby Gap. The Slacker
>Generation. My guts twist
Tom: Then don't eat at Jack-in-the-Box.
> at being labeled by a generation that
>will, ultimately, be the cause of more destruction of the
>American psyche
Mike: All right, who broke the American psyche?
Bots: Not me!
> than any other in our history. As a teacher of
>History, one of the first things I teach is that history
Crow: Is a pack of lies we play upon the dead.
> is not a
>dead study, but a very pertinent one. Without an understanding of
>the past, we can in no way hope to prepare for the future.
Tom: Did you come up with that all by yourself?
> And a
>curisory glance
Mike: Curisorier and curisorier...
> at the history of the so called "Baby Boomers"
>will show all who can see the truth what I mean by my opening
>statements.
Crow: Does this mean we get actual facts? Oh please oh please oh
please...
>
>To whit: In our history, the children born between 1945 and 1960
>were the first to be labelled; i.e. The Baby Boomers.
Tom: Believe it...or not!
> Since their
>genesis, they have been the driving force behind a consumer
>oriented economy in this country.
Mike: And this is bad?
Tom: For conservatives, they sure are anti-free market.
> Look at old TV and Magazine ads
>from the 50's. Filled with ads for and about children,
Tom: For children?
Mike: Drive to work or play in your new Chrysler Toddler!
Crow: I don't think that's what he meant.
> and the
>programming itself was youth oriented. There were no "Murphy
>Brown" or "Thirty Something" TV shows.
Crow: What about the Honeymooners or General Hospital or Car 54
or...
> This was also the time of
>the shows "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver", which
>showed model American families, to be emulated, admired and,
>even, envied.
Tom: To be the source of tortured angst as America wondered why
their lives of quiet desperation never matched their TV Eden.
> To be sure, not all of America was as perfect as
>the Cleavers,
Mike: Or as white middle class.
> but the programming, created by a generation that
>had fought and won the Great Depression
Tom: Grandpa, tell us a war story.
Mike: [grizzled] I served in the 107th Keynesian Brigade back in
'37.
Crow: Tell us about the run on the bank!
> and WWII was confident
>and strong in the American Ideal. They had undergone tremendous
>hardship and trial,
Mike: Their television was in black and white!
Bots: [gasp]
> and were glad to revel in the victory they
>had achieved.
>
>But their children, the Boomers, grew.
Mike: As children are wont to do.
> They grew up having it
>all.
Tom: They have everything! I have nothing! I hate them!
> (And of all the generations in this country's history, they
>were the first not to have to struggle mightily for what they
>had.)
Crow: We'll just ignore all the noncaucasian non-middle class
kids, for the sake of argument.
> Toys. TV. Radio. Heros. They were taught from an early age
>that they were the inheritors of a great legacy. They would be
>successful. They would buy into the American dream.
Mike: I thought I might just marry into the American dream.
> But somewhere
>along the way, things went sour. Perhaps having it all without
>effort made the having seem less meaningful. And we come to the
>next level,
Tom: The Phoebes Anomaly.
> the next label. The Hippies.
>
>The 60's were a confusing time for America. In the early 60's, we
>were strong. JFK was our president.
Crow: Very good! I can see why you went into history.
> (More on that later.) We had
>faced down the Soviets in Cuba. We were challenging Communism
>planet wide. Let us take a quintesential boomer, born 1950. In
>1963, they would be 13.
Tom: And he can do math, too! Wow!
> Just at the age for forming early
>political opinions. (JFK as a Boomer cultural hero?
Mike: Argue yes or no in complete sentences, citing proof.
> If the man
>were to have run today, he would never make it past the
>primaries.
Crow: Cause he's dead.
> The rich son of a Bootlegger. Afflicted with a
>crippling condition that he hid.
Mike: Teddy?
> A womanizer. An adulterer. Yet
>he was killed before all of his skeletons could be brought out of
>the closet. ) Let us run to 1965.
Tom: The future is only a brisk jog away.
> Our boomer is 15. Unsure of
>themself, but growing still. Vietnam. The war enjoyed popular
>support at home for a number of years.
Crow: It had the highest Neilson ratings of any military
intervention in history!
>
>1969. Our boomer is 19. In college, pursuing that American dream.
>Yet, they have had the dream all of their lives.
Tom: Then what the hell are they chasing it for?
> What is left to
>pursue? And suddenly, all their years of taking have a price.
Crow: $3.50 for the first year of taking, $1.50 for each
additional year.
> The
>country asks them to serve. And they refuse. Of course, it's on
>high moral grounds.
Mike: Screw moral grounds. I wouldn't want to be killed.
Tom: Wrong! You should be proud to mindlessly march to your
pointless death in the name of our country!
> "We should not be fighting this war!!" "Stop
>the war!" They begin to reject all that was America.
Mike: Their antibodies kicked in.
> The values
>that they had been raised on, they now found to be repugnant.
Tom: Which is why we saw the Civil Rights movement and other
strides toward racial and gender equality.
>They have to be, in order to reject the request to pay back a
>little. A new generation was born. Free Love, (AIDS)
Crow: The Hippies created AIDS?
> Drugs,(the
>destruction of our cities) (Tune in, Tune on, Tune out.) and Rock
>and Roll, (debased lyrics that glorify violence
Tom: As opposed to Vietnam, where they simply performed it.
> and angst with no
>solution). Education became not a place to educate yourself as to
>the truth,
Mike: The Truth is a registered trademark of the Conservative
Literary Revolution (CLR). Any unauthorized use is strictly
prohibited.
> it became a place to socialize our citizens. And
>higher education became literally that, a place to get high. And
>because of their numbers, they caused change.
Crow: Change is bad! We fear change!
> They claimed
>victory in ending the war. Yet the war did not end because of
>them. Politicians wouldn't let the war end.
Mike: No kidding.
> Not until they saw
>that by not letting the soldiers fight, the soldiers could never
>win.
Tom: Thank you for stating the incredibly obvious.
>
>Now we reach the seventies. Our boomer is suddenly hit with
>reality.
Mike: Wham!
Crow: Why don't they look?
> No longer are they sponging off Mom and Dad. They have
>to fend for themselves. They get married.
Tom: They sponge off their spouse.
> And since their years
>at college had nothing to do with learning,
Mike: So I guess State U. just *gave* dad that Ag engineering
degree.
> the wife must work to
>keep the family in the same position as they were used to.
Crow: The day we let women off of the bed is the day this country
went to Hell!
> (Look
>at the stats for working mothers in the 60's and 70's.) So who is
>raising the kids? And wait, are we not in the 70's?
Tom: No. Some of us are in the 90's. Why don't you join us?
> That's us!
>Welcome to a new generation, the Busters, Gappers, the Latchkey
>kids.
Mike: You are all a Lost Generation.
> So who is raising the kids? The TV, thats who. Who is
>teaching the kids?
Tom: Buzz! The television!
Mike: I'm sorry, that's incorrect. How much did you wager? All of
it? Ooooh.
> The boomers who finally waved away enough
>smoke from their pipes and reefers to graduate and teach. (Those
>who can't, teach. Right?)
Crow: What was the author's profession again?
> And what did the boomers do to the
>educational system in this country?
Tom: They hocked it so they could buy a pack of cigarettes.
> They flushed the old and
>created a monster out of their drug induced haze.
Crow: Frankenstein vs. Reefer Madness.
> Go find a
>school that was built in the 70's. Alot of them have (or had) no
>walls between the classrooms.
Mike: Whoa! Like Zeeman! That was one weird place.
> (I know. I went to school in one,
>and now teach in one.) Try it sometime if you have no direct
>knowledge
Crow: You don't need skill to teach! Just look at me!
> of one. Once you do, you'll know what I mean when I say
>that no "Real" teaching can go on.
Tom: Especially when it's me doing it.
>
>But, to get back to the boomers in the seventies.
Mike: Disco. Need I say more?
> Reality hits
>them square in the face.
Tom: Smack!
Mike: You think they would have been on guard the second time.
> It doesn't care jack about their high
>ideals. So, they come to the sad realization that they have to do
>exactly what they rejected about their parents. Become part of
>the system.
All: [whispered] Conform...conform...conform...
> And we have what Jimmy Carter called a "Malaise" in
>this country. To top it off,
Crow: Whipped cream, some nuts, and a maraschino cherry!
> all the talk about helping the rest
>of the world, giving to the poor third world, etc., was thrown
>right back in our face.
Crow: Pow!
Mike: Stop it! Stop it! I'll do anything you want--just stop
hitting me!
> OPEC embargo. Iran. Revolutions. Burnings
>of the American flag.
Mike: Flag burning certainly ranks up there with other crimes
against humanity.
> And, our enemy, Communism, was now our
>friend. Nixon's trip to China.
Tom: [singing] News! News! News news news news news news!
> The warming of the cold war with
>the Soviet Union.
Mike: War is Peace! Ignorance is Strength!
> All this prepares the boomer for the next step,
Crow: So boomerness is a twelve step program?
>the next label. The moral bankruptcy of the Hippie years is
>exchanged for the financial bankruptcy of the Yuppie years. Next
>time.
Tom: Same Nazi time, same Nazi channel!
>
>Kevin McCloy
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Date: Thu, 10 Aug 95 14:22:22 EST
>From: "Forman, John"
>To: mcgu...@physics.unc.edu
>Subject: Poetry and Philosophy
>
>Here are a couple of poems for your perusal:
>
>Asunder,
>An old word perhaps, but one which fits the purpose.
Mike: It's a word that means something.
>I am being torn thusly by forces within;
>Powerful forces that seek to shape my destiny.
>Poet and writer, politician and financier,
>Student and teacher, historian and philosopher;
Crow: Quite a resume.
>All these and more struggle for the dominance,
>The dominion of that which is my very being.
>Liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between,
>Which way will I be swung today?
Mike: He's a political Sybil.
>Should I seek stability and all that it represents,
>Or give in to the adventurer that lies deep within?
>Can I find a place, a career in which I will forever be happy,
Crow: Don't bet on it.
>Or will ambition and drive disallow everything but change?
>
>All around there is the darkness.
Tom: I really need to change the lightbulbs.
>Alive with its own life, it surrounds me.
>I can feel it breathing, pulsing, pushing.
>Voices from within it call to me always,
Crow: Kill your parents...kill your parents...
>They beacon to places deep inside,
>Places hidden even to me in my mind.
>They want me to join them,
All: Join us!
>Submit to the chaos of the dark.
>Some days the night
Crow: Uh...
> within subsides,
>Hardly to been seen or felt.
>But on others it presses close,
>Threatening to swallow me whole,
Tom: [makes spaghetti slurping sound]
>Wrapping me forever in its embrace.
>The light holds the blackness at bay,
>But whither comes the light?
Mike: What light upon yon window breaks?
> I know not.
>I know only that I am its keeper,
>And its brightness depends on my will.
>Should that will falter the light will fail
Crow: And the light will have to repeat a grade.
>And I will succumb at last.
>Falling into the abyss from which none returns.
>
>My poetry of late, as evidenced by the two selections above, has
>tended to the darker side. It is not always that way.
Mike: Sometimes it's downright suicidal.
> Sometimes I
>think it is a reflection of the confusion in my life lately, but
>let me shift gears
Tom: Ok, into second--wait, no--the clutch--there. Now brake--
shift! Shift!
> and talk contemporary philosophy.
>
>I read the piece by Kevin McCloy you posted recently,
Mike: I found it McCloying.
Bots: Boooo!
> and found
>it certainly worth the required reading time. My only problem
>with it regards a lack of
Crow: Support?
> projection and/or suggested actions. He
>has written about songs which protest with offering solutions,
>and it strikes me that he is doing the same.
Tom: Mike, M-mike! What's that? Is that--a rational thought? Oh,
it's been so long...
> Like many
>historians, he has focused on the past without offering a plan
>for the future, despite his early comments on the use of history.
Tom: Yes! Finally! A glimmer of light in amongst the darkness!!
>
>Actually, this seems to be a common malady among us Busters,
>Xers, or whatever you want to call our generation.
Crow: Losers?
> Too many of us
>focus on the past, seeking to lay blame on those who came before.
Mike: I'm sorry. You're making sense. We're going to have to ask
you to leave.
>Naturally, the Boomers are the most frequent target, partly
>because of our own inherent jealously. Growing up they had it
>all, and we envy them for it.
>
>Far too many of us use our shattered family lives as excuses,
Mike: Where's your homework?
Crow: My dysfunctional family ate it.
>making victims of ourselves. We spend too much time looking back
>at our own personal development, or lack thereof if that is the
>case. Suck it up! Look ahead, not backward, and figure out where
>you are going. Do not let the past determine your future. We are
>each capable of determining our own direction. Stop thinking
Tom: If it's good enough for Rush...
> of
>the good or not so good old days, and make something of your
>life.
Mike: I took my life and made this soapdish.
>
>Having said that, however, I must also say that the study of
>history is the responsibility of us all. As Mr. McCloy said,
>history should be used for the betterment of the future. Learn
>the lessons of history, so that maybe you can get right what
>others failed on in the past.
Crow: So you can set right what once went wrong.
>
>Of course all this means taking an active role in living. No more
>hiding from life.
Tom: We tried that once. He found us.
> We are a generation of drifters in the
>physical, emotional, and intellectual sense of the word.
Mike: Where you going?
Crow: Nowhere in particular.
Mike: Man, I wish I was you.
>Eventually roots must be put down. Our future must be based in a
>stability of some sort, however transitory it may be.
Tom: Like sand through an hourglass...
>
>Eventually we will have to take over the leadership of this
>country from the hated Boomers. Will we be ready to do so? Not if
>the potential leaders among us are caught within a maelstrom of
>self-pity.
Crow: How about a hurricane of doubt?
Tom: I was thinking more along the lines of a light summer rain of
aprehension and smugness.
> We should start making our move now, as the oldest
>among our generation have already slipped into their 30s.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
> The links stop here-- BeaconWay Press
>
> The links stop here-- Beaconway Press
> Educating, Exalting, and Entertaining the Sober Spirit.
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> One picture says it all,
>
> [Image]
[The author encourages everyone to visit the CLR site and to take
a look at the above image which I could not copy or place in my
MiSTing. It is a truly comically pathetic attempt to look like the
angry young rebel.]
>
>It's a free country...
>
>I see you fake the knowledge for the grade,
>just so that you can sue them for the cash,
Tom: But if they give you the grade, why would you sue them?
Mike: They don't have any logic in their prose, and yet you look
for it in their poetry?
>hookin' up free love, you don't feel it fade,
>language you destroy and the soul you trash.
Crow: Oops. Uh, anyone got any glue?
>When the feelings leave your favorite CD,
>you just smoke it for yesterday's high,
Mike: That's what happened to these guys! They inhaled fumes from
burning CDs!
>invisible to you is all I see,
All: [singing] Got to be good lookin' 'cause he's so hard to
see...
>those old ways, my friend, have begun to die,
Crow: [Brit] I'm not quite dead...
>Upon the shelf the Great Books gather dust,
>and your friend's on heroin to stay thin,
Crow: Sound's like a diet I could stay with!
>the marriage has failed, dead are words of trust,
>they said there was no good so they could sin.
>I spoke the truth, then I took to the run,
>'Til I found a loaded pen, made it my gun.
Tom: Would that make them the fastest *draw* in the West?
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Why do so many liberals hate our minds?
Crow: Get one first. Then we'll hate it.
> Imagine, if you will for
>a moment, that you thought you were rebelling by growing a
>goatee, or something,
Tom: I'm gonna listen to R.E.M. They only sold *12* million albums
last year.
> and smoking whacky tobaccy to get in touch
>with your deeper self,
Mike: I'm sorry, your inner self isn't in right now. If you'd like
to leave a message...
> taking out loans for creative writing
>lessons at some ivy-league college, tuning in religiously to
>Connie Chung and Melrose Place, and three everyday Joes came
>along and said,
Tom: Liberals suck.
Crow: Women can't write.
Mike: We are the Gods of Literature.
> "We're not gonna dance, or rap, or sing, or shoot
>drugs to entertain you;
Crow: We're going to do mime!
> we're not going to brown-nose liberal
>professors to get into law school, and we're not gonna let the
>corporate-conglomerate-liberal presses tell us who we are. And
>we're not gonna make them faster laser printers, either.
Mike: What is up with their obsession with laser printers?
Tom: They were abused as a child by a Hewlitt Packard.
> We're
>going to revel in sobriety,
Crow: That doesn't sound like much fun.
Mike: You wouldn't believe how not plastered I got this weekend.
> we're going to stand up to radical
>professors for all that we know to be true, and we're going to do
>what Random House, all the creative writing workshops in the
>world, and MTV can't do-- we're going to set in stone the soul of
>a generation.
Crow: Break out the cement overshoes!
> If you were a liberal, you'd hate us too, for doing
>it all without the government's permission, or a literary agent,
Tom: No. We hate you because you are a bunch of pretentious idiots
who equate having read Hamlet with understanding great literature
and making two lines rhyme with writing poetry.
>one of which Elliot actually has. But they're out in Hollywood,
>and they're not so excited about the project, anymore.
Crow: The trouble started when they read the script...
> They
>wanted him to write a screenplay for, The Drake Raft Field Trip,
Tom: We'll get Roger Corman to direct...
>but Elliot had already gone through the trouble of bringing it
>into this world, and he wasn't about to murder it.
Mike: That's our job.
> Pulp Fiction
>does a fine job of entertaining us in the way Hollywood trained
>us to be entertained,
Mike: Did anyone else find that movie watching description in 1984
really disturbing?
> and we have no desire to compete with it--
>that's the movies, and this is our soul.
>
>All the Best
>
>THE PHANTOMS
Tom: Maury Yeston?
Crow: Andrew Lloyd Webber?
Mike: Ken Hill?
> IN THE MACHINE--
>Drake "Red Avenger" Raft
>Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham
>Elliot "Ahab" McGucken
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
> The links stop here-- BeaconWay Press
> Ahoy! Drop the crew a line!
>
[6...5...4...3...2...1...]
Mike: So, what did you guys think of the experiment?
Tom: It was completely unfounded rightist propaganda, endlessly
restated, differentiated only by an occasional literary reference
to remind you that it was supposed to be art. It was garbage! It
was ignorance transcribed! Forget a golden pin of truth. How
about a LOUISVILLE SLUGGER OF TRUTH?! HA HA HA!! LOOK OUT CLR,
IT'S TOM SERVO AND HE'S PACKING HIS COLT .45 OF TRUTH!! HA HA HA
HA HA HA--huh? [Tom's head explodes]
[Mike stares at Tom as the smoke from his dome slowly waifs away.]
Mike: Well, at least it's over with. What do you think, sir?
Crow: You broke him...
Mike: No I didn't...
[Deep 13]
Dr. F: No, no, no. It's not over by a long shot.
[SOL. Tom's head is back to normal. Everyone looks worried.]
Mike: You mean it isn't?
[Deep 13]
Dr. F: Of course not. There are still pages of their WWW site I
haven't touched yet. Plus, if you thought their rhetoric was bad,
just wait until you see their fiction. Or even their poetry.
There are pages and pages of this stuff left to be exploited! But
that will have to wait. Until next time...
\ | /
\|/
---0---
/|\
/ | \
fwshhhh
Mystery Science Theater 3000, its characters, situations, and
merchandise are copyright 1994 Best Brains, Inc. Also, I think
that some of the prose and poetry are copyright of either the CLR
or their respective authors. This MSTing is not authorized,
endorsed, or supported by anyone. This article may be freely
distributed as long as this notice remains intact.
MiSTed by Chris Mayfield, camf...@iastate.edu. Comments welcome.
>'Cause we're not sure if they'd know a piece of literature if it
>bit 'em in the hiney.
Brian Jones
>Crow: Can we be considered art?
>Mike: Sure, the deconstructionism of modern media using post-
>modern rhetorical critique.
-bj
sounds like architecture-speak to me -- let's see: books, architecture...
Ayn Rand? Coincidence? You decide...