Round
Acid     The
Clock
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Bullshit Talks
source: Culture Warrior of Fortune
posted: Mar 9, 2005, 2:01 PM
by: rgb
"Is there anything else I can get you?" Money said to Bullshit.

"No. That'll be all," Bullshit said to Money.

And when Bullshit talked, Money walked.

Bullshit got on the phone to get MORE money walking.

"Hello. This is Bullshit."

The man who answered cupped the receiver and whispered excitedly to his associates that it was Bullshit calling. He put it on the speakerphone.

"You're not putting this on the fucking speaker phone, are you?" Bullshit snapped.

"NO!" the man snapped back nervously, like Don Notts in the 1955-7 Steve Allen show man in the street interviews.

Now, one by one, the workers at the Manilla call center stepped up to the phone and spoke their piece (truth) to Bullshit on the other end.

They were pitching the screenplays they'd written about normal everyday life in America -- about average Americans going through an average American day performing the average American tasks they performed every day without thinking --

But then, suddenly, there'd be a plot twist.

Like a murder or disappearance or kidnapping, or earthquake or tidal wave, or a member of each of 2 couples fucking each other on the side unbeknownst (give or take) to their partners.

And then, just as suddenly, everything would go all wacky. Characters would start violating average American cultural norms up the wazoo.

People would start dressing funny and talking funning and having funny haircuts. They'd start cutting up their sofas and other furniture and placing the broken pieces meticulously around the room. And acting in ways that could not be traced back to the way anyone acted in any actual American past, and could not be extrapolated forward from even the most extreme behavior of the farthest out edge of the social order today into any possible American future.

But then, when all seemed lost in hopelessness and incomprehensibility, a distinctly American hero comes along and saves everybody -- everybody he doesn't have to kill in wanton acts of extreme violence for the good of the people and their revolution, that is.

Unfortunately, the average everyday American culture in these films is based on slight misinterpretations of slight mistranslations of American pop culture of 30 and 40 years ago, as taught in overseas call center training schools.

In these slightly whacked out cultures, teenagers with names like Marvin and Herb, for example, refer to their friends by means of colloquial expressions such as "kiddo" and "daddyo", for example.

But Bullshit doesn't give a shit, and greenlights every one of them, except for the one where the free market is shown violating itself by having no competition and so, in the final act, has to die right along with the other 2 main characters, Romeo and Juliet.

The greenlighted films will all now be generated by purely digital techniques which pay absolutely no regard to content and give no shit about what comes out. As in the universe itself, algorithms take care of everything1.

And if they don't, and the audience walks out scratching its head saying "what the fuck was THAT?!", there is still, waiting in the wings to save the day, the ultimate marketing truth -- that if you ram enough bugs down enough throats enough times, pretty soon, when it's added all together, the audience realizes what a thankless shit it's been2, and will now sit passively by while the bugs become a feature.3

--------------

Notes:

1. And natural selection takes care of the rest

2. Moving from denial to acceptance of failure to a life-affirming struggle to make themselves into parodies of a 35-year-ago nonexistent self, produced in error overseas by minimum wage people in the few precious free moments of pee and coffee breaks when they're not otherwise occupied telling hapless "users" to reformat their hard drives even though the problem is really just an unconnected modem or sticky SHIFT key.

3. This process is sometimes referred to as "culture".

permanent link to this article

copyright © 2005 by HC