THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS The Subgenius Foundation (McGraw-Hill)

THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS The Subgenius Foundation (McGraw-Hill)

Creemedia

Glory Be To Bob!

by

David Keeps

Beware the Subgenii! They have charms to smooth the average beast and speak with forked tongues that can pierce the thickest skull, rattling the brainpan with seductive wordplay and narcotic mindfuck. They scoff at our gods, bearing testimony to the pipe-smoking salesman, one J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, who preaches fulfillment and easy money through the rites of "Slack." Roughly translated, this thing called "Slack" means earning a living doing whatever you like best, be it counting flowers on the wall, playing solitaire 'til dawn with a deck of 51, or simply creating your own religious cult. They walk among us. Should you persist in disbelieving, try this basic test and fill in the blank: Fuck 'em if they can't take . ' ■ .."■

THE SUBGENIUS MUST HAVE SLACK!!

If you think the answer is a joke, you may already be a subgenius, that most exalted (so they'll tell you) of wise guy existentialists. But fear not if you "guess wrong," the test is infallible because the germ of subgeniusness is already festering in the moist inner crevices of your being, waiting for an act of revelation that could be as mindless as buying a book.

The Book Of The Subgenius is the bible of the Church of the Sub-Gee, a group of Dallas (space) cowboys who roamed the ranges of paranoid conspiracy theorem, religious pamphleteering and copyright-free advertising illustration (a.k.a. "clip art") to create a brochure that asked the mystical qustion "ARE YOU ABNORMAL?" (Answer: Then you are probably BETTER than most people!) The booklet went on to insure, your soul's deliverance through this "Bob" cat and his tenets of Slack, offering spiritual earplugs for the imminent apocalypse and even promising "Intercourse With A Live Beautiful Girl."

You could buy this pamphlet for a mere buck and impress all your friends; magazines (The Stark Fist Of Removal), cassette tapes, and mail order ministries soon followed. The Church revealed the recession-proof power of Slack by upping the membership fee from $2 to $20 in less than five years, took to the road with revival meetings, and even linked with a major publishing firm to create this lavishy illustrated tome, the perfect replacement for your mildewed copy of Jokes For The John.

This ain't no blasphemy, the SubJeez themselves endorse the divination process called "excremeditation," (thinking on the throne) though the complex language/ thought patterns of the text may keep you glued to the seat for a suspiciously long time. Set that book on your coffee table, then, and savor its wild aromas: Chapter 4's richly detailed history of "Bob'"s rise from salesman to savior, the Dateline For Dominance ("Dedicated to the vision of America as the Hell's Angels of the world") which makes better predictions than the Enquirer through 1996, and special chapters on Health, Sex and Money. Thrill to the strangely named deities and demons that inhabit this brave new world like so many cheap sci-fi novels; weird charts and illustrations that you'll never find in your Subatomic Astrology textbook; and longwinded rantings that outdo the raps on the wrappers of castille soap. Finally, learn to spout this inarguable gospel: "Remember, God spelled backward is Dog, but Bob spelled backwards is Bob."

Just like a real bible, the Book of the Subgenius can be a roadmap for personal salvation, a survival guide "for the Coming Weird times." Its dense layers of possible meaning can (and should) be referred to for revisionary guidance and the scriptures scream for scholarly concentration. OK, so I'll admit that even this brainchild is still trying to finish the sucker, but then again, the Pope wasn't built in a day.

Parsing The Cosmic Gonzola

by

Richard C. Walls

MASTERS OF SUSPENSE: So with another pathetic slew of new shows having come and gone, what, aside from movies, talk shows, and Cheers, is worth watching (not counting syndicated reruns and yeah I know St. Elsewhere and Flill Street Blues are wonderful, wonderful shows too, but personally I don't think that commercial TV, with its ridiculous PG-at-best standards, should even attempt social realism but then that's what makes me a cranky guy and you a reasonable person)? Well, there are a few things and this month's whole-hearted recommendation is that you check out some of these fundamentalist/evangelical shows floating around on the various UHF stations —they may not engage your mind quite as forcibly as Alan Thicke's layers-of-meaning musical routines, but for sheet entertainment value they've got AfterMASH beat all to hell (and believe it or not, buckaroos, I'm not putting down anyone's religious beliefs here—how one chooses to parse the cosmic gonzola is one's own business-igjbut, as you'll see, religion is only a part of what these shows are all about). My favorite is the Jim Bakker show which is patterned after the Carson soiree, only here the amiable chitchat centers around how we're all gonna die any second now, which is what makes the show so engrossing—it's hard not to get caught up in the doomsday scenario that hangs over everything they talk about, from the more overtly religious messages, i.e., how to prepare yourself for the coming end-that-is-near ("get right with God" is the homey exhortation) to the much less obviously religious matters which are the meat of the show and the hallmark of the new evangelical spirit. Bakker and guests have an opinion on everything and every opinion, oddly enough, adhering to traditional ultra-right wing doctrine but with ah added dimension of paranoia (and, for them, legitimacy) which, they claim, comes straight from the Bible (the famous Jerry Falwell show has a similar emphasis though Falwell himself has a somewhat less tacky exterior than most evangelists—he reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock's belief that movie villains, even if they're psychopathic murderers, should be reasonably presentable or how else would they be able to get close to their victims? Falwell's probably no psychopath [it's debatable], but he is proof that someone with a bizarre, twisted point of view doesn't necessarily have to have a hairlip and drool on his tie).

The wonderful thing about this crazed religious/right-wing worldview is it makes for great melodramatic condemnations of the modern world that go beyond a satirist's wildest screed. If you support the nuclear freeze movement you're not only playing into the hands of the evil empire but (as a sort of bonus punishment) you're probably going to go to hell, women's rights advocates and gays are beyond the pale, abortion involves "burning bags of babies" (Bakker's poetic analysis), TV soap operas feature "women crying out for every perversion imaginable" (ah, if only the world were a quarter as spicy as these clowns think it is) — the paranoia thickens, the non sequiturs and crackpot political theories accumulate (you could throw your shoulder out of joint just from wincing at this stuff). At one point recently, Bakker, during one of his continual pleas for money, was whipped into such a frenzy by the infamy of it all (burning babies! peace creeps! environmentalists!!), that he momentarily forgot that he was a privileged white male middleclass putz and said, appropos of some imagined crackdown on Christianity: "They can't put all of us in jail!"

Wow! (Not to mention "huh!?") I almost dug into the ol' pocket and sent in 40 or 50 bucks myself but darned if those pesky commies hadn't gotten to me first via the latest public radio pledge drive—a drive supporting just the kind of devilish music that abortion-loving oneworlders listen to while they're scarfing down their godless tofu burgers! Cripes!

It's insane but it's entertaining, the way a good horror movie is, in that you get the vicarious thrill of living in a world gone mad and then after the show's over you go back to the real world—which is still mad but a little less single-mindedly moronic. And that's the good news.

Next time: David Hartman's hidden agenda!