Random Thoughts

• The reason I like the new New Pornographers album so much is that they finally kicked R2D2 out of the band. Seriously, I think he wrote, like, almost every song on Mass Romantic, including beepy-bloopingly retarded classics "Centre for Holy Wars" and "Execution Day." He did have one genuinely good song, Twin Cinema's "Streets of Fire," but all in all I'm glad they told the droid they don't serve his kind here anymore.

• Speaking of R2D2, how do we know it's a he? I mean, it's a fucking fire hydrant. Is a little projectile dick one of the extra features he had in Episodes 1 through 3 but somehow forgot about by Episode 4, even though they didn't wipe his memory, only C-3PO's, because George Lucas is retarded?

• Speaking of why science fiction annoys me even though I love it: So. I was watching science fiction yesterday, and it pissed me off. You know why? Because science fiction is the most right-wing pro-establishment fiction genre outside of police drama and The Passion of the Christ there is.
  
• Example: I randomly flipped on "Stargate," which I generally don't do because it's so fucking dumb, and what was the scene? A clean-shaven Mitt-Romney-looking colonel (who I think is played by MacGyver) is having a run-in with a sneaky reporter, who has learned something about the "stargates" that Colonel MacGyver and his military buddies use to hop across the galaxy. Of course, the reporter, who is trying to expose the government cover-up of space travel, is the bad guy, and Colonel Chisel-Jawed Never-Tried-Pot Church-on-Sunday Mitt-Fucking-Romney's-Younger-Brother MacGyver is the good guy -- for trying to keep a massive secret from the American people! In real life, these characters are Seymour Hersh and Ollie North. But on Stargate Ollie North and Negroponte and all those fuckers are the heroes.
• Example: "Star Trek: Voyager." I watched this the other day for the first time in forever, even though it sucks and the characters are crap. So the premise of this show is that a Starfleet crew and a rebel Maquis crew get stranded on the other side of the galaxy a hundred zillion light years or whatever away from home, and have to make their way back. That's a pretty cool concept to start with, right? Half the characters are renegades or misfits; you could do something really neat with that. But what do Rick Berman and the rest of the idiots that ruined Star Trek do? Immediately the rebel ship is destroyed and everyone goes to work for Captain Janeway, who is basically your stereotypical CEO, and even though they're a million quadrillion miles away from any command center or admiral or bureaucracy or headquarters, they all happily adopt this strict military discipline and call each other Captain and Lieutenant and never ever break protocol, and they all love this living situation and no one ever wants to mutiny. And that includes the rebels, who have never had to put up with this shit before--as if the Star Trek people are saying that, given the choice, anyone would put on a uniform and follow regulations and be a good soldier. And that's why that show fucking sucked, because plastic robot soldiers are fucking boring characters and in real life no one would live that way. They would cut off Janeway's head after a year of that fucking bullshit, set up their own organization for running the ship, and change their clothes ever.
• In spite of all this, I am sexually attracted to Captain Janeway. I'd wear a uniform for her any day.
  
• Michael Moorcock had a good essay on this topic, even if it gets a little over-the-top and Authoritarian Anarchist (to the effect that, you can't read Tolkien or Frank Herbert without being a Tory or crypto-Stalinist).
  
• Why is sci-fi (and even more so fantasy) so often so reactionary? I guess the reason can be found in the genre's origins. The original science fiction is the likes of The Iliad, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The History of the Kings of Britain-- the Romance, the Epic-- the stories about Great Heroes, i.e., the ruling class, the priesthood, the military, who in the old days were descended from gods but today have to settle for being rewarded vast wealth for their capitalist piety, going on grand magical adventures and killing monsters and fighting wars and winning kingdoms. And these stories were always designed to expound and reaffirm the values of the societies from which they emerged, to legitimize the political and economic order of those societies and the power of their ruling classes. Thus it is no wonder that when writers want to write stories about wizards or space ships, they reach for soldiers and cops as their heroes; thus it is no wonder that the sort of people whose heroes are soldiers and cops and Mitt Romney are also the sort that want to write about wizards and space ships.
• I hate Mitt Romney, but I really like stories about wizards and space ships. Where does that leave me?

• By "Authoritarian Anarchist" in the above paragraph-bulletpoint-thing I mean the sort of dreadlocked jackass that believes in "free association" and "cooperative economics" and "anti-authoritarian" and all that shit, and therefore believes in governance through interpersonal relationship, and yet is completely authoritarian in his interpersonal interactions, intolerant, vicious, and stupid, and therefore is nothing but a fascist sonofabitch in disguise (and not a very good disguise). A lot of the "anarchists" I've known or met or spoken with or read are like this actually, with the best example being that bloviating illiterate fuckwad Kevin Tucker.

• On a completely different note, one of my goals for this week is to write a ridiculously self-aggrandizing entry about myself on Wikipedia.
  

• This has been a post of random thoughts. As we can see, half of the random thoughts I have are venomous and enraged. So why don't we all unwind with Captain Janeway, the sexiest captain in all of Star Trek:

Hott!!