The Church of the SubGenius recognizes the programming

From: The Anti-Reagan <walker555@MailAndNews.com>
Newsgroups: alt.slack
Date: Wed, May 9, 2001 11:34 AM

Partial list of what the pop culture of the late 70s & early to mid-80s
programmed me to believe:

Part I: Movies & TV

The Breakfast Club:
--Authority is uniformly cruel, irrational, and inept.
--Adulthood is to be avoided at all costs; if you must grow up, the only way
to retain any street cred whatsoever is to work at a meaningless, dead-end
job.
--Tearing up books is cool.
--Marajuana can turn sworn enemies into the best of friends.
--People from wildly divergent backgrounds--adolescents especially--are
inherently wise enough and strong enough to unite against a common enemy.
--The rich prom queen will end up with the bad boy. The blue-collar sports
hero will end up with the freak. The brainy nerd won't get any. Ever.
--Makeup and a nice dress will cure mental illness.

Pretty in Pink:
--It's OK to want the rich boy; especially if he's totally hot and vaguely
angst-ridden.
--If you lose the girl by "doing the right thing", another girl will appear
out of nowhere and ask you to dance.

St. Elmo's Fire
--An addiction to bad drama can be cured by a clever application of more bad
drama. Either that or the smell of burning hairspray.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
--Teenagers are smarter than people twice their age.
--Lie through your teeth.
--To acheive true enlightenment, trash your dad's Ferrari.
--Be cool and nothing bad can possibly happen to you.
--Even your bratty kid sister can be bought off. Again with the bad boys.

Dirty Harry
--Renegade cops are the good guys.

The Terminator
--Technology is dangerous. Computers are the enemy

Aliens
--"Take off and nuke the site from orbit; it's the only way to be sure."

Any Motherfucking Vietnam Movie.
--Anyone over E-5 is an idiot.
--Anyone E-5 and under is either insane, a redneck, or a brilliant and
bitterly ironic pacifist.
--The VC are invincible. Sometimes they're even the good guys.
--Abuse from your Drill Instructor is sufficient grounds for murder-suicide.
[Kliebold & Harris take note.]

Saturday Night Live:
--It is acceptable to publicly refer to your coworker as an "ignorant slut".

Star Trek:
--Violating the Prime Directive is OK, as long as A) you had a good reason,
and B) you didn't get caught.
--A good enough engineer CAN ignore the laws of physics.
--It is better to be a Captain than an Admiral. An Admiral has no business
commanding a starship.
--Diplomats are excess baggage.
--Saving the universe typically involves killing the Captain's girlfriend.
(FUCK YOU, HARLAN!)
--Gods must be destroyed.
--Eden doesn't exist. If it looks like Eden, the apples are probably toxic.
--The lower ranks are expendable.

Scooby-Doo
--All hauntings are hoaxes
--Kids can always outsmart adults. (Here we go again...)

The A-Team
--Nobody ever gets hurt in a firefight.
--A loony, a badass, a conman, and a prima donna can make an effective
combat
team.
---30 minutes in an abandoned blacksmith's shop can turn a Ford Econoline
into
a Main Battle Tank.
--You can actually make a living defending the weak and innocent (See also
"The Equalizer", "Kung-Fu", and/or any P.I. show...)

MTV
[No, you idiot, the *old* MTV; back when they played *videos*.]
--Art doesn't have to make sense.
--It's OK to be a caricature, as long as you know you're a caricature, and
subtly make fun of it.

Mork and Mindy
--Don't get me started....

***

.and a bonus musical interlude.
(I don't know if I've posted this previously or not, but WTH....)

Boy, the way John Denver played
Songs that never got me laid
Geeks like us we had it made.
Those were the days

And you knew where you were then
Tao was Tao and Zen was Zen
Mister, we could use a man like Jimmy Carter again
Those were the days

Didn't need no cyberpunk
Just acid rock and stoopid funk
Kwai-Chang Kane the Shao Lin monk...
*Those* *were* *the* *days*!

[Apologies to N. Lear, C. O'Connor, & J. Stapleton.]

***

And finally, evidence of why the existence of Fred Durst and Marshall
Mathers
doesn't surprise me, even if it *does* offend me:

"She's got a smile that, it seems to me, reminds me of childhood memories
when
eveything was as fresh as the bright blue sky. Now and then, when I see her
face, it takes me away to that special place, and if I stay too long, I'll
probably break down and cry."
--Guns-N-Roses

"It'd hold eight kids and four hound dogs, and a piggy we stole from the
shed;
didn't get much sleep, but we had a lot of fun on grandma's feather bed."
--John Denver.

--
The Rev. Dr. Lt. Chaos Israel
Talent on loan from Buddha.

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Original file name: The Church of the SubGenius rec - converted on Friday, 29 June 2001, 22:35