It was the eighth shopping day
before Santa jumps in his sleigh
and sprints around the world
on a trip fueled by meth and cocaine
stealing my cookies and all the acclaim
for the gifts I bought with a card
I'll no longer be allowed to retain.
Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Tag Archives: Satire
The Children’s Crusade
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim. He’s an American born in 1922, but he’s a senile widower who has “come unstuck in time” when we meet him. He can revisit any moment in his life as if he’s watching a video, and the novel consists of non-linear video clips of Billy’s life, including the time he was kidnapped by aliens, brought to Tralfamadore, and put in a zoo.
The Tralfamadorians teach Billy about time and how it’s like looking at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. ”All the moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Except for their habit of putting humans in zoos, the Tralfamadorians are pretty cool dudes. ”They can see how permanent all the moments [of time] are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” So people die, but they also continue living in all the prior moments, which will always exist. That’s either comforting or distressing. It depends on how much love and happiness you’ve experienced in your allotted time – things you may not have much control over.
Billy blinks and it’s 1945, and he’s a chaplain’s assistant in World War II. In his first battle he becomes a prisoner of war, and he’s sent to a German POW camp where he and his fellow American POWs meet a group of English POWs, who were captured early in the war. The English POWs look “stylish and reasonable, and fun” so their German guards love them. The Americans are wrecks. They don’t make war look stylish, reasonable or fun, so the Germans send them to Dresden to sweep the streets. They’ll be exhibits in a different zoo.
Dresden looks like a “Sunday school picture of Heaven.” The Allies have bombed nearly every other German city, but Dresden is unscathed because it serves no military purpose. Less than a month after Billy’s arrival, the Allies inexplicably bomb it turning it into “one big flame.” 135,000 people were killed for no reason at all. Billy is one of the few survivors, and he traverses the demolished landscape looking for someone new to surrender to.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a success on all levels. It’s a comic opera that skewers American-style capitalism and consumerism. ”Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” It’s elite science fiction that explores what time means and how that affects our understanding of life and death. But at its heart, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the all-time great anti-war novels. As fantastical as the novel is, it won’t allow you to ignore a fundamental truth: wars are fought by babies. Every war is a children’s crusade, and it’s the children, our children, who suffer most the brutal consequences of our tragic inability to get along.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
Bubble Butt
When I grapple with something truly complicated, like the current Israeli-Hamas conflict, and consider the tortured history and the tangled motivations, I can’t help but wonder. What do the celebrities have to say about it?
Fortunately I never have to wonder for long. Celebrities are extremely generous with their opinions on, well, everything. And that makes sense. They’re good-looking, excellent at pretending, and live in a bubble where people are paid lots of money to do mundane things so those celebrities can focus exclusively on serious issues, like being good-looking and pretending to be someone they aren’t.
Many people are subject-matter experts on the serious and thorny matters that concern humanity. But here’s the issue. They aren’t good-looking. And subject-matter experts suck at pretending there are easy answers to complex problems. It’s a wonder anyone would ever listen to them.
Saffron Crow, Editor of Simple Solutions
Enlightenment and Joy
Anyone who has read this blog will say it’s mostly pointless. Long ago I proposed changing its name to Masturbating Chimpanzees, because truth matters. A careful reader will note I said mostly pointless, and I did so intentionally because my posts are the only ones worth reading. So congratulations on reading this post. I bring enlightenment and joy.
As you know I’ve been on a campaign to alleviate homelessness in Roanoke. When I walk down Church Avenue, I encounter homeless people. I patiently inform them that they wouldn’t need to live on the street if they would just get jobs. Sometimes I give them a dollar as a jump start to a better life. So far this year, I’ve given away $8.43.
Last February, right before that vicious polar vortex, I encountered one homeless man in particular. I’d seen him before but I’d never had the chance to give him my pep talk. He was messier than most with a raucous grey beard, blank eyes, and ancient clothing. I told him to pull himself up by his bootstraps and gave him a dollar.
I never saw him again. In fact, it’s been nine months since I thought of him, but last night was frigid and he appeared, uninvited, in my mind. That’s when I realized my pep talk and dollar must have saved him. I drove around Roanoke this morning, and he’s nowhere to be found. All because I gave him a second of my time and a scrap of my wisdom. It’s easy to make a difference in the world. All you have to do is care.
Knowgood Carp, Owner of all the Hotels on Block Island and some in Connecticut
Mrs. Muzzle
By Monday morning, a furious Mrs. Muzzle pounced on Uncle's lap, took her petite paw and gave his smirking lips several wicked whacks. But he continued to talk as if he was used to that repeating a tedious tale about a dubious time when Smear the Queer was a Hunger Game the neighborhood kids would play. And everyone was proud and happy though no one was proud and gay. Problem people stayed silent otherwise they were gagged, and proper people spoke English with a mid-West accent - the same one Jesus had.
Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Morally Bankrupt
Everyone knows politicians are morally bankrupt, but what Maryland has done is an abomination. That state’s politicians recently passed a law removing the statute of limitations on civil child sex abuse claims. Now victims can sue their purported abusers decades after they were raped. Worse, these abusers include priests who only wanted to lay their hands on these children and prey.
This has left the Archdiocese of Baltimore with one moral choice. It must resort to chapter 11 of title 11 in the Eleventh Commandment, which states “Thou shalt file bankruptcy to absolve yourself of financial liability for your sins, but only after exhausting all other options, such as lying, obfuscating, delaying, and deflecting.” So we have been forced once again, as if a nine inch nail was being held to our head, to put another diocese into bankruptcy. It’s unfortunate, but it’s far better than confessing . . . or being held responsible for our actions. And we take great consolation in knowing it’s what God wants. Trust us.
Excuse me, Father Orifice? Actually, it’s pronounced Oreefeechee, but what is it my dear pathetic fool? Are you saying God expects us to trust the people who allowed our children to be raped and then lied, covered it up, moved the abusers around so the truth would be hard to prove? God wants that?
Praise the Lord! I was concerned you wouldn’t get it. Hell, yeah, that’s exactly what God wants. Sure, we brought rapists into your communities and families. Then we lied about it. Covered it up. We did do that. But we would never do something evil like hiding assets, undervaluing property, and cynically manipulating the bankruptcy laws to delay accountability for years, minimize claims, and hope that with the further passage of time, God willing, more victims, abusers, and witnesses will die thereby decreasing the amount we would ultimately need to pay, hopefully, with Bitcoin. Now that would be morally bankrupt.
Father Orifice, Chaplain of Pungent Sound Technical College of Technology
Precious Little Useless Things
What do we call the innocent? Those precious little useless things we honor with large words and then largely ignore. As we do ethics. Or courtesy. Better yet - those prophets of doom with science degrees. What do we call them? Oh, yes, we call them fools. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Voltaire and the Art of Gardening
Written in 1759 Voltaire’s Candide remains relevant. That’s quite a feat, so let me revise that lackluster opening sentence with this: the story is a timeless treasure; a garden of raucous flowers all with sharp edges. There, that’s better. Am I the only one sexually aroused now? Surely not.
Candide is a “young boy whom nature had endowed with the gentlest of dispositions.” He is “sound in his judgment” and has the “most straightforward of minds.” His tutor is the great German philosopher, Pangloss, who taught him “everything is for the best.” So when Candide is literally kicked out of a baron’s castle for kissing his daughter, Cunegonde, and ends up forsaken, cold, and hungry in a nearby town where he is “recruited” into the army on the eve of battle, he is not concerned. “Everything is connected in a chain of necessity, and has all been arranged for the best.” That’s comforting to know.
But then the prevailing army kills the baron, destroys his castle, gang rapes Cunegonde, drives Candide out of the territory where he encounters the Spanish Inquisition, plagues, earthquakes, and every other kind of human and natural disaster. Still, he remains indifferent. After all, Pangloss always said “Individual misfortunes contribute to the general good with the result that the more individual misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” I’m still sexually aroused.
Candide is a stunning satire that has you laughing at the most degenerate of humanity’s creations: war, religion, philosophy, civilization, government. The list goes on. Candide travels the world and everywhere his foundational belief in optimism is challenged and fails. Eventually he lands in Turkey where he abandons optimism as a “mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”
But what philosophy can replace optimism? Don’t we need a philosophy to understand why humanity exists? When Candide questions a learned dervish why there is so much evil in the world, the dervish asks “What does it matter whether there’s evil or good? . . . When his Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?” My guess is no.
Leaving the dervish, Candide encounters a humble, but content, farmer who advises him to cultivate his garden because “Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
So cultivate your garden, my friend, and may you prosper from your endeavors. Still sexually aroused.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
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Titmouse Beak, President of Pungent Sound Community Bank
An Oxymoron Without a Muffler
Driving home from work on Jubal Early Highway, I heard the roars of an outraged rhinoceros stampeding towards me at 75 mph. As the sound got closer, I realized it was a decrepit pick-up truck without a muffler. From its flatbed a proud flag streamed from a pole attached with plastic zip ties. It was half an American flag sewed to half a Confederate flag.
Giving the driver the benefit of the doubt, he probably thought this display would prove that he was only half an asshole. He was half right.
Tengo Lecho, Flag Reporter
Pungent Sound Journal of Pulp Poetry 