Tag: Bugs Bunny

Mike Gold’s As Is: Everybody Look What’s Going Down!

“He don’t know me very well, do he?” – Bugs Bunny, “Rebel Rabbit,” 1949

I’ve been taking some time off from political proselytizing. The truth has been quite blatant and either you recognize it for what it is or you are so deep in the Rabid Right’s tank that reality testing is a waste of energy. There’s extraordinarily little middle ground anymore, and you don’t need this fool on the hill to tell you squat.

On the other hand, I’ve been pontificating since 1965 and this doesn’t feel like the right time to stop. As Bob Dylan said, “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” So I’m going to pundit on, with the proviso “he that pundits is verily full of shit.”

There’s been a great deal of talk about the 2024 presidential election. I don’t know why; political years are akin to dog years and there’s a lot of dogs to be wagged. But I do recognize what is missing from our uncivil discourse.

Everybody is acting like the race will be between the current president and the criminal poser with the giant Mussolini complex. I’m not as certain that’s the way it will come down. Both men are really, really old – several years older than I am, in fact – and one of them has a digestive track that is as rotted out as his moral compass. If, next year, the Republicans fail to take back the house, which is an if that is somewhat larger than those other pundits let on, our nation’s dipshit il duce will likely be under indictment if not in prison – unless he picks up an AR-15 and starts murdering Black Lives Matter Wisconsinites, which is now perfectly legal.

The current White House keyholder presently enjoys a popularity rating only slightly higher than his predecessor, so, of course, now the wags are predicting he won’t run for reelection and/or his party will dump him. Yeah. Um tut sut.

This reveals the Democratic Party’s overwhelming dilemma. It’s always something, but this time at this moment they’re completely screwed and those other soothsayers ain’t ponying up much in the way of revelation. Not me. I’m always the guy who farts loudist in the swimming pool.

People don’t like the incumbent as much as they did a year ago. Well, that will happen – but those running down-ticket don’t want to risk drowning in the undertow. As we learn time and time again, politicians love their phony-baloney jobs more than they love America.

But if they dump Joe Biden, or if he dumps himself, the pressure to promote the candidacy of Vice President Kamila Harris will be enormous. A whole lot of people went blue last year with that very understanding. The non-White vote will have a hard time backing another old White man – promises inferred are promises made. The non-male vote will have a hard time voting for any man. In politics, perception is reality and such “promises” are nothing more than perceptions.

So let’s say the Democrats back Harris. That will prove interesting. You might remember Barack Obama, the president who recently inducted Jay-Z into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. His election and his subsequent reelection empowered the Pathetic Right and titillated the big money monsters who want to keep all the loot they’ve stolen from what once was the middle class. These people either could not abide by the concept of a Black president or have profited enormously from the reaction one-third of Americans have to the reality of a Black president.

Just imagine how these liquored up bible-babbling assault weapon hugging democracy hating marionettes are going to react to the concept of a Black WOMAN as president! It’s like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all rolled into one! The very prospect will make the little bigots crawl out of their heads. They will come out en masse to prevent Harris from ever putting her hand on any bible. They will do so more aggressively than they have been doing since The Great Pumpkin floated down his escalator informing us the Mexicans are all drug dealing rapists, Satanists, and Communists.

As the kids say, these people will lose their shit. You know, like they did, literally, when they invaded the Capitol building this past January.

In other words, the Democrats are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Roll on, roll on. Keep a happy thought.

And happy Thanksgiving.

 

Brainiac On Banjo: Hey, Kids! VIOLENCE!!!

Brainiac On Banjo: Hey, Kids! VIOLENCE!!!

I’m a mean mistweetah, A wabbit feastah, And I pwedict, A bwoody Eastaw, A scuwowing shadow, And dah shadow was dis wabbit, And dah night aiwah echoes, Kill dah wabbit! — Bob Rivers, Kill The Wabbit, 2009

Felix The Cat was our first animated hero, making his debut in Otto Messmer’s Feline Follies in 1919. The plot: A stereotypical old lady goes out for the evening, leaving her house in the hands of her kitty, Mister Tom (played by Felix – look, just go with that). Being a tom cat, once the coast is clear Felix splits to his girlfriend’s house for an off-screen tête-à-tête.

Of course, while the cat’s away the mice will play. In fact, they’ll rip the old lady’s house apart. By the time Felix returns, the house is decimated but he’s too blissed out to notice. Then the owner returns, freaks out at all the damage, beats the poo out of Felix and slings him out of the house.

The slightly indignant Felix doesn’t care. He goes back to his girlfriend’s house and is greeted with open paws. Then about a billion newborn kittens, each looking exactly like Felix, swarms all over their papa. Evidently, cartoon kitties have a remarkably short gestation period. Be this as it may, it is now Felix’s turn to freak. He runs away, straight to the nearby gas field where he attaches a hose to an in-ground spigot and commits suicide.

Was there general outrage over Feline Follies? Was there an upsurge of kids running to gas fields to off themselves? Did anybody ban the sale of brooms to cat-owners?

Hell, no. People didn’t take this stuff seriously. It was a cartoon, not a documentary.

Was Messmer advocating violence by mice, cats or old ladies? Was he advocating unprotected kitty sex? Was he suggesting suicide was the best way to handle trauma? Again, hell no. It was a cartoon.

Because my brain is wired differently than yours, I thought of Feline Follies when I heard of a comics writer/artist being accused of being a fascist for working on a best-selling heroic fantasy comic book. Said writer/artist was accused by another writer/artist, who was no stranger to the concept of cartoon violence. If you labor in the fields of heroic fantasy, evidently, you are wearing an invisible SS uniform. Well, as Lenny Bruce pointed out, “Gestapo? I’m the damn mailman!”

Violence has been the cornerstone of heroic fantasy going back to the Year Gimmel. The line was blurry when the major source of such stories was in the realm of the religions that are now regarded as mythology as well as the religions that various warring factions today regard as gospel. But once it is removed from these trappings of conviction, fictional violence is just a plot device. If Elmer Fudd inspires your kid to want to get a shotgun, your kid needs professional help.

But once parenting became perceived as a science – which it is not; it’s an art form – “cartoon violence” had to be… edited. ‘Doilies for the mind’, to quote Mason Williams. The Three Stooges have been entertaining people since 1922, but their oeuvre became scissor-fodder in the early 1960s. How many of you have great-great grandparents whose eyes were poked out? Bugs Bunny is a latecomer, having debuted (as developed) some 80 years ago. He, too, has suffered the fate of a thousand cuts.

Entire generations of humans have been raised since we became smotheringly overprotective. Are we now a less violent society? Maybe you’ve never read a “newspaper,” but if your knowledge intake is limited to even the most anti-social of social media you should be aware that real-world violence remains a VERY Big Deal. Maybe we should deal with the real, physical issues that lead to such behavior instead of emasculating Wile E. Coyote and Larry Fine.

I have been known to toss the fascist tag around myself. I understand the definition of the term because I know how to work a dictionary. I try to use it appropriately, even when I’m being purposely offensive. Simply working on a heroic fantasy story that involves such violence does not make you a fascist, it makes you a storyteller. Batman could be perceived as a colloquial fascist, yet many of his better stories have been created by the late card-carrying liberal Denny O’Neil as well as by his opposite number on the right, Chuck Dixon. This does not make either a fascist.

Owning a gun, let alone writing about owning a gun, does not make you a fascist. Believing Smith and Wesson, Ruger and Colt should be in charge of our foreign policy just might – but any student of 20th century history should know better.

Brainiac On Banjo #105: The Fat Lady No Longer Sings [UPDATED]

Brainiac On Banjo #105: The Fat Lady No Longer Sings [UPDATED]

This past Monday, Dallas Mavericks maverick owner Mark Cuban decided to enact a policy he committed do a year ago: he stopped playing the American national anthem before home games. Evidently, since that moment nobody’s dick has fallen off.

Of course, Cuban’s obvious communist affiliations came to light a few years ago when he supported athletes who took a knee during the Star-Spangled Banner. Funny how that works: had he implemented the decision to shit-can Francis Scott Key at that time, the loony-right might have promoted him as a proto-Proud Boogaloo Boy.

There’s a phrase in common usage: “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” If you are unfamiliar with its roots, well, it’s not about body shaming. It refers to Brünnhilde’s aria that ends Richard Wagner’s 15-hour long opera Der Ring des Nibelungen. Generally speaking, a woman of rather large dimensions is cast as the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, although the true culturally elite more likely recognize the part as played by Bugs Bunny in Warner Bros’ 1957 masterpiece “What’s Opera Doc?” Bugs is neither a female soprano nor of rather large proportions.

A bit closer to the point, in some circles the phrase can refer to the singer who came out at the end of various British entertainments to close out the show with “God Save The Queen.” More recently, Monty Python replaced this with a slide that urges those who attended their live performance to “piss off.”

Which is what Mark Cuban did. What the hell does the playing of the national anthem have to do with the playing of professional sports? Why is that considered patriotic? It’s a gathering of temporarily gifted athletes who have signed indentured servant agreements with insanely rich people who conflate team ownership with the size of their respective penises.

Hmmm. Wait. Maybe that is the American Way after all.

After Cuban performed his act of sacrilege, NBA spokesman Tim Frank told the Associated Press “Under the unique circumstances of this season, teams are permitted to run their pregame operations as they see fit.” I would not want to play against Mr. Frank in a game of Dodgeball.

Nonetheless, some said Cuban’s move “disrespected the nation.” I beg to differ. I believe the opposite is true. Do we play The Star-Spangled Banner when firefighters show up to battle a four-alarmer? Not usually. Podcaster Ben Shapiro asked if they would play the Chinese national anthem instead, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is as dumb as shit. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo #105: The Fat Lady No Longer Sings [UPDATED]”

Brainiac On Banjo #022: Road Runner, Coyote, Ripley & Hubris

Brainiac On Banjo #022: Road Runner, Coyote, Ripley & Hubris

This September, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner will turn 70 years old. I’m telling you this now so you don’t have to wait until the last minute to get them presents – I do not know if there’s an Acme Prime. They were created by director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese as a response to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s Tom and Jerry, which MGM sandwiched in between the trailers and the A-movies at your local neighborhood theater back in a time when there still were local neighborhood theaters.

Both Tom and Jerry and Coyote and Road Runner were quite successful; both received Oscar nominations, although only the cat and mouse copped a statuette. Amusingly, when Bill and Joe discovered the flip book and left MGM to produce vaguely animated cartoons for television, Chuck moved over from Warner Bros’ withering termite terrace to take their places.

O.K. I’m not a big fan of Hanna-Barbera. Sue me. Hang in there; I’ll get back to the Endless Chase in a moment. But first…  Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo #022: Road Runner, Coyote, Ripley & Hubris”