Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
Archive for the ‘Mondo Cane’ Category.
Anthropologists say the human race became the dominant species on the planet because it’s the most adaptive species; if this is true, it carries the corollary that we learn by our mistakes. But I have seen so many cases indicating the contrary that I can’t help doubting the proposition—until I think about money, specifically about how the glee of having a surplus of it or the fear of not having enough short-circuits man’s psyche. What else might explain why a heretofore successful businessman would purchase an acclaimed restaurant, then proceed to amortize his investment by reducing the cost—-and thereby the quality—of precisely those amenities that made the restaurant popular to begin with?
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
When the ladies of Wall Street torched their brassieres in the late 1960s, inaugurating the age of feminism, the preponderance of men were not the chauvinistic beasts the women’s spokespeople labeled them as being. However, when the feminists objected to being treated “demeaningly” by fellows who stood up when they entered the room and made a habit of opening doors for them, then announced not only did they have the right to be promiscuous “just like you,” but had taken to regarding men strictly as sex objects, guys began to think, “You know what? This suits the hell out of me.” In the space of five or six years the feminists reversed fully three million years of the evolutionary trend affiliating men to women as post-mating husbands and fathers, a behavior not originally inherent in the anthropoid male. Consequently, most men today, if they had their druthers, would fuck at least one fresh woman every day of the week, no strings attached; and if the women didn’t like it, they could kiss the men’s asses as they left the bedroom. Did I hear somebody say Mondo Cane?
Every corporation faces three debilitating dangers: careerist politics among the executives and managers; bureaucratic intransigence and self-aggrandizement; and mutually reinforcing incompetence up and down the line (e.g., “I can’t report her shortcomings because if I do, she’ll report mine”). Among the evils resulting from these factors, the most elemental is the diversion of human energy from the actual conduct of the business.
Can it be surprising that a people who allow appearances to govern their opinions and existence should always be addressing the symptom rather than the disease?
Good People Need to Learn How to Duck. It did me good one morning when I entered the building of a prospective customer—a man-and-wife start-up operation—and discovered in the receptionist a young lady who was happy as a tick to be working there. She enthused: “They called us into the warehouse last week and said that we are all a family. They said that if the business succeeded and they succeeded, so will everybody here. They’re like the mother and the daddy.” Well the company did really well—thanks in no small part to all the energy and infectious volubility of this young woman—but a year and a half after we met they let the receptionist go. “Why did they do that?” I asked her and, not too happy now, she replied: “I don’t know. He just said the Corporation decided it needed someone more polished. I didn’t even know that we’d become a corporation.”
“To see ourselves as others see us….” Be careful what you ask for.
If you go to a 4-stop intersection in a Yuppie neighborhood, you’ll think you’ve found Courtesy Central, for you will see all four drivers spending minute after minute flapping their hands vehemently from the wrist at each other, signaling for somebody to come on out. Appearances, however, can often be deceiving. In reality Yuppies are paranoid materialists who experience a chip the size of a mosquito feeler in the Jaguar’s paintjob about the way Hamlet experienced the tragedy of matricide. Every overdressed bitch at the intersection is mortally afraid that none of the other overdressed bitches has the ability to navigate the X without totaling her precious high-performance foreign engineering marvel and probably killing her in the impact, depriving her of untold years of acquisitiveness.
Commercial advertising is one of our principal nemeses. As consumerist materialism saps our essence by diverting us from our needful concerns and authentic self-interest, the advertisers step up the intensity of the imagery and phrases that evoke our former normalcy to goad us into buying some new dingus or other while preventing us from understanding what we’re doing to ourselves. How many thousands of nuclear families have gone into hock buying presents this Christmas, imperiling everything they live for and on, from next-month’s electric bill to Sissy’s college fund, because they were lured into doing so by soft-focused images of idyllic nuclear families? We are moths to the flame, the kamikaze consumers. To paraphrase the exquisite Vietnam-era tagline: We are destroying the village in our very effort to preserve it.
The problem with replacing thought with feeling as the guide to behavior is that thought leads to such knowledge as If I hurt someone in my pursuit of happiness he might hurt me in return and then I won’t be happy; therefore individual rights must be mutually balanced for all to be happy; whereas if you go by feelings the only knowledge you’re ever going to have is If I stick my finger in the fire it hurts.
The unerring tendency of the human race to accomplish the opposite of what it tries to accomplish is referred to in these pages as Mondo Cane, after the 1962 Italian trash-documentary of which the central segment features the giant sea turtles of Bikini atoll whose genetics were garbled by the testing of H-bombs and which today, after giving birth to their young, crawl inland to expire in the hideous heat of the sun instead of back towards the life-restoring ocean. Mondo Cane means “a dogs’ world.”
Mondo Cane has the appalling consequence of leading people to lie when they are presented with evidence that they’ve wound up doing the opposite of what they started out to do. They reply that no, this is the right thing after all, you’re mistaken, night is day, black is white. And thus the universities absurdly continue to maintain that they are “havens of free speech” and “arenas of contending ideas” though they have long since stopped being either, while the secondary and primary schools continue to call themselves “educational” institutions when in truth they are destroying our children’s minds.
Gore-ism, n. Form of political suicide achieved by drawing attention to one’s virtues with a combination of clamorous shrillness and bathos until the public is obliged to analyze your claims, concluding that they are fantastic delusions.
Gore’s modus operandi reminds us that we have sent a lot more than our fair share of prize boobies to Washington.
I hate to tell you this, but it wasn’t love lost you felt when she walked out, pal. What you felt was: the desolating sense that you had not been adequate to her desires; agonizing frustration at the loss of a neurotically needed other; and the inescapable knowledge that your warps and kinks goaded you into such insane behavior that she had no choice but to get as far away from you as rapidly as she could.
A huge problem evolving during the last forty years of “self-actualization” (can you hear me laughing?) has been the readiness of the fun-seeker to “leave that kind of stuff [to wit, the activities necessary to sustain existence] to the experts so I can get on with my life.” You’d have to have been pretty well shellacked by sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll not to see the manifest idiocy of this kind of decision-making. “Let’s see now. I make more money in three months than my father made in a year. I’ve got a loving wife, three swell kids, a position in the community and a business providing a livelihood for seventy-eight people. But what makes me feel truly serendipitous now is perpetually getting my rocks off, so I think I’ll turn my real-world affairs over to some schmuck expert whose goal in life is to make a fortune off of each and every one of his clients.” In all honesty, the ground for this rejection of critical personal responsibility had been well enough prepared during the forty years prior to “tune in turn on and drop out,” when the increasing demands on people’s time, and the ordinary person’s sense of bewilderment during an age of proliferating technology, prompted many to turn to the mavins of solicitude for detailed guidance in such everyday concerns as the proper way to bring up babies. Evolution must have slammed the cooking pot down in its kitchen when it heard about that one.
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The headwaters of the river Mondo Cane are found in Wishful Thinking, USA.
God summoned G.I. Joe to His cloud-throne from the enlisted man’s canteen in Paradise where the infantryman had been taking his ease since his death by tracer round in World War II. The Lord transformed the private into human guise again and instructed him as follows: “I want you to go down there and reconnoiter America, son. Then report back to Me on what it’s like now.” An instant later the valorous sharpshooter rematerialized in Hoboken and set about conducting his surveillance. Returning to stand before the Wellspring of Divinity, Joe said, “I wish you hadn’t done that, God.” The sadness in his voice troubled and perplexed the Heavenly Father. “Done what, Joe?” “Sent me back,” said the soldier. “Now I have to tell the guys we died in vain.”
For the majority of Americans, the phrase “higher learning” applies to the revelations that occur when one is stoned. Certainly that is the only form of higher learning most Americans experience, including a great percentage of those who attend the drinking academies and holding pens for youth called colleges and universities.