Sorry for lack of updates of late — I recently got a new job and started a new relationship and am basically just extremely busy in a number of different (but pleasant! for a change!) ways.

There are a couple new Chick Dissections in the pipeline, though, and a handful of other things.

Stay tuned, and sorry again for the update infrequency.

Jabberwock

Beaten and alone, a child dies. But Jesus cares.

He doesn’t care enough to keep the kid from getting beaten to death, I guess. Hell, I’d stop a kid from getting beaten to death, and I’m just a regular ol’ human.

A particularly depressing, ugly turd of a Tract. Way to go, Jack!

(more…)

Jabberwock

    Desi took the absolute minimum of comfort from the fact that she could work the rest of the day and probably the next without having to worry about the implant activating. They always spaced the days out with one or two between to ensure maximal semen saturation during the most fertile period of her cycle. She could take out the sperm worm, then, after a couple days, allowing enough time to flush out any of its already negligible traces before her monthly examination.
    They seemed to be increasingly suspicious about her persistent lack of conception. By all professional accounts she was supposed to be rabbit-level fecund — the most amusingly she’d heard it described was by a doctor who’d called her “explosively fertile”. She anticipated it wouldn’t be long before she was caught.
    Across the touch screen built into her desk were splayed the manufactured, strikingly realistic-sounding stories that were supposed to pass as news and nearly always succeeded at it. The generally unimportant reports were usually real news; anything that could possibly be construed as polemic or political or having to do with the ongoing war was always fabricated, or at least favorably edited to such an extent that it might as well have been. People usually cared the most about the news that directly pertained to their daily lives and activities. As long as that was verifiably real, the rest would seem so as well.
    The newest story was about the apparently contagious insomnia, a growing concern with predictable blame placed on what the government and its subsidiary news organizations liked to call “terrorist insurgents”, who were in actuality mostly just the opposition in the rather frosty but apparently ongoing civil war. With a swift swipe of her hand, she slid it over into a folder icon on the left side of the desk marked “Clear”, and the next story automatically replaced it in the center of the screen.
    She was supposed to file any stories that seemed potentially subversive into “Flag”, where they’d be sent to one of the editors’ incoming “Flag” folders. The editor would “correct” the article and send it back, then initiate an investigation into wherever the offender may have intervened in the article’s assembly process. Often, she suspected the editors sent out intentionally “defective” articles themselves, as a test of the target recipient’s loyalty. For this reason, she made sure to read every article carefully for any signs of anything that might question the greatness of America. Unless you were paying close attention, some witty bit of subtle satire — like adding an extra synonym or two for some patriotic words to a phrase that had already been modified in such a ridiculous way, e.g. “Free New Free Freedom York” — might slip through and actually be read on the air. Lack of “patriotic duty” wasn’t nearly as serious a crime as writing the article to begin with, but it was still a punishable offense. And once they began their inquiry into her life, they would uncover everything — the implant, the sperm worm, Nemo’s connections — so it was safest to err on the side of rampant paranoia.
    All of the bullshit displayed on her desk screen each day had been shoveled in from somewhere in Richard’s building deeper in D.C. She shuddered a little every time she remembered that some of it may have even been orchestrated directly by him. It made her want to wash her hands, even though the files she was in contact with were all digital.
    After combating the psychosomatic sliminess that seemed to accompany even the idea of Richard Packard, she moved on to the next story about an assassination attempt by terrorists, foiled thanks to the unrelenting patriotism of the American people. It was undoubtedly fabricated; she’d developed a knack for identifying all the earmarks of a fake report. The three suspects — likely random bearded men of Arabic descent photographed on a sound stage and paid for their time — were all supposedly being detained on one of the New Liberty Army’s battleships.
    There was an accompanying media resource snippet, which she was also required to screen for subversive content. One never knew when someone with, for instance, an unpatriotic t-shirt might wander through the background. The video was a brief interview with the everyday hero who’d provided the information leading to the arrest. Despite an excellent job with makeup and post-processing and the fact that the woman was a spectacular actress, Desi recognized her as a coworker from one of the upstairs floors.
    She closed the report’s package and dragged its folder into “Clear”, making way for the next one. As she was enlarging it for easier reading, she yawned and stretched a little. Shit , she thought, hope I’m not catching that contagious insomnia .
    ”WHEN MEN SEE SHAPES IN THE SHADOWS OF THE MOON, THEY’RE REALLY ONLY SEEING THEMSELVES,” read the next file. She slid it around on her desk with her fingertips, enlarging and shrinking it, turning it, looking for something more, but that was it.
    ”What?” she asked, aloud. Someone’s personal note must have gotten mixed up and included in the reports. As unusual and nonsensical as it was, it was hard to believe it was some kind of intentional attempt at sneaking a subversive message into the broadcast.
    She slid it over to the “Flag” icon, highlighting it, but paused before letting it go. Likely it was an innocent error — perhaps someone wasn’t paying attention to what they were doing and slid this stupid note in by mistake. The subsequent and undoubtedly inevitable investigation might ruin this person’s life, or at least his or her ability to ever urinate comfortably again.
    Of course, if this was actually a test of her loyalty, they’d accounted for all of the possible excuses she could give for not reporting the note. They’d likely have to “reeducate” her to ensure her future willingness to sacrifice individual for country.
    ”Oh goddamn it,” she grunted, nearly inaudibly. She hesitated a moment longer, then withdrew the file from the icon and tossed it up into a corner to deal with it later. She feigned a violent sneeze while doing it, moaning and sniffling afterward, in case they’d planted a bug in the room. If anyone asked, she could claim she sneezed with her hand on the screen, messing up all her files and losing the one in question.
    The next story popped up in its place — a saccharine “hero story” from the “front lines”, where troops were flushing out insurgents from disputed territories. She recognized the actor playing the soldier as a man named Jeremy, whose office had been a couple doors down from hers until he’d been promoted a few months ago.

    *

    Surprisingly exhausted after a completely unproductive day at work, Marty collapsed onto his couch, his eyes reflexively tracking the moving images on the television he’d apparently left on that morning. He was barely even aware of what was on.
    At first, the insomnia had proven somewhat beneficial. In his first week of early workdays at his thankless and unimportant office job, he’d managed to catch up with a backlog he’d had for months. It wasn’t as though it actually mattered, but it felt good to get ahead. Over the course of the last month, however, the lack of sleep had worn him into a zombie-like state where he could barely accomplish much more than feeding himself when the need arose. Even then, it was getting to the point where the hunger pains really needed to cramp his belly to get his attention.
    The TV provided the only illumination in the room; he’d stopped bothering with any of the other lights in the hope that a darker atmosphere would help contribute to his ability to sleep. This theory continually proved false.
    He glanced down at the precooked chicken pot pie he’d taken out of the microwave maybe ten minutes ago and had forgotten about, and his eyelids began to drop a little. As his head rolled back into the padded outcropping of couch behind it, he drew in a powerful yawn. After a moment, when his eyes had nearly completely closed, he shuddered a little and shot upright as though he’d never even been tired.
    ”Motherfucker,” he yelped. Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes, and he began to sob a little.
    He grabbed the pot pie from the table, nearly tossing it into his lap, and bitterly started shoveling it into his mouth. It was the same meal he’d had every night for the last two weeks, but it didn’t really matter since he could barely taste anything anymore anyway.
    The news cut to a commercial break, mostly composed of advertisements for mattresses and sleep aids, and he muted the TV wondering how much the ’sleep industry’ would be benefitting from all of this.
    He reactivated the sound when the news came back on. Midway through the first story, digital artifacts appeared briefly on the screen, accompanied by a burst of noise similar to the sound of a fax machine. Panic filled him, blossoming from fears that the only source of distraction from the wide-awake nightmare he’d been experiencing might break, or that the signal might be cutting out.
    When it didn’t appear again after a few minutes of fiddling with the TV, he shrugged it off and lay down on the couch.
    It was over an hour later when he regained consciousness, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually slept. He arose from the couch with as profound a grogginess as any human had ever experienced, and his head felt like a group of kids had borrowed it for a game of kickball.
    Nearly reflexively, he grabbed the bottle of aspirin he kept on the table and washed it down with the remainder of his iced tea. Swarms of unfamiliar thoughts flittered through his brain but were moving too quickly for him to catch. It was like waking up from thousands of tiny dreams, only to have all memory of them immediately slip away back into his subconscious.
    He turned off the TV, shoved his feet into his boots and headed out the front door, wondering where the hell he was taking himself.

    *

    A grey utility van bearing the Tettix Robotix insignia rolled to a stop along a strip of Interstate 40, just east of Albuquerque. They’d embarked from the desert a couple hours after the bugs — and all their potential investors, for that matter — had departed, after finding a news report online from a small town called Groom in the Lone Star Republic about a swarm of bugs forming briefly around an enormous cross made of metal sheeting before ascending again into the skies. Eyewitnesses had interpreted the event as a message from God, an indication of the imminence of the end of the world or a sign of some coming plague. Tate had interpreted it as an indication of the flight path of the electronic insects he’d lost several hours earlier.
    He sat in the passenger seat, pulling up a map from the internet using one of the satellites mounted to the roof of the van. Despite absolutely abhorring dress clothes, especially in the desert, he was still wearing his suit from the presentation. He hadn’t had time to head back to his hotel room to change.
    ”Anyone mind if I turn up the air conditioner? This laptop is really baking my crotch.” There was a silence. He reached for the knob. “No one?”
    ”You should try putting it on a briefcase or something,” said Jenna Xun, the engineer who’d been running the presentation that morning. She was in the back of the van monitoring the tracking equipment.
    ”Ah, thanks. That suggestion probably would’ve been more helpful before I went completely sterile, but thanks all the same.”
    ”I’m… sorry? I was just–”
    Tate sighed loudly, interrupting her. “No, don’t apologize. I should. I’m just a little stressed about the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars of prototypes deactivating and dropping into some kid’s yard for him to smash up in fights with his Transformers or whatever.”
    ”It’s okay,” she replied. It was obvious — to her, at least — that he blamed her for the disappearance of the insects. After all, she’d been the one who’d programmed and run the entire demo. She blamed herself as well, despite being almost positive it wasn’t her fault in a way she hadn’t quite figured out yet.
    ”You getting anything? On the sensors?” asked Tate, over his shoulder.
    Jenna checked the screen she’d been monitoring in case anything new had shown up over the last few seconds. “Nope. Nothing. Just noise.”
    ”Damn, just remembered to ask, but did everyone bring their passports?” asked Tate. “They’re going to check when we get to the border. And coming back out again will probably be worse.”
    The driver, a man named Mitch, pulled back onto the road after one of the other engineers returned through the rear doors of the van from a roadside bathroom break. “I hear they’ve been attaching GPS tracking devices to visitors’ cars, to make sure they’re actually only visiting. If you’re not out when you said you’d be out, it alerts the authorities in the area where the transmitter is located. They scan your InfoCards at the border when you go in, and use them to track you down if you don’t go out.”
    ”Are they really that fascist about it?” asked Jenna. “I mean, I’m sure those are the official rules and all, but are they that strictly enforced?”
    ”I think so, actually,” replied Mitch. “They’ve got this huge, creepy volunteer force that guards the borders. I heard they’re starting to build a fence around the entire perimeter, starting down on the Mexico side.”
    ”Well,” said Tate, “let’s be sure to get the hell out of there as soon as possible then.”

    *

Jabberwock

The thing possessed poor Maria. It drove her to do strange things. But Jesus’ power delivered her so the thing couldn’t hurt her anymore.

I want to read this as a euphemism, and considering how religious and superstitious folk have treated everything from mental disorders to menstruation over the course of human history, I probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark: “The thing” possessed poor Maria, and made her do strange things! (Psst — “the thing” is her menses! Oogabooga!)

Anyway, here’s another terrible Tract for you, hand-crafted by Jack Chick with all the talent, love and beauty of a cat throwing up half a dead mouse onto your bed. Enjoy!

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Jabberwock

So, who here has interesting or entertaining stories about dealing with religious kooks of one variety or another? Did your parents join a cult? Have you gotten into a heated and serious argument with a fundamentalist only to find out to your embarrassment that they were actually schizophrenic? Were you ever forced to go to one of those “Gay Cure” camps? Did your religious friends put a bucket of holy water above the door and keep a priest or pastor handy so that they could baptize you when you walked in? Ever find a Chick Tract rolled up inside a condom? Any Catholics out there ever need the Heimlich because you choked on the communion wafer?

Well, I want to hear about it.

The best, most amusing (and most believable — and trust me, I’ll probably be able to smell bullshit when I read it) stories will be featured as posts (with all due credit, of course, plus a link to your website if you have one or a sketch of your favorite pony or whatever you want to accompany it). And, as with FMyLife and other such sites, don’t be offended if your story doesn’t make the cut.

For right now, e-mail them to me using the “Contact” page over on the left (or if you have an account on the site, log in and submit them as posts) — I’ll try to have some kind of form up by the end of the week.

Tell your friends. Seriously this time. I know some of you actually are, and I really appreciate it, but you other guys… it takes thirty seconds. Only slightly more time than it takes to *cough ahem* click an ad on the side of the page and then close the browser window *choke cough ahem*.

Speaking of telling your friends, only TWO MORE DAYS to the END OF MAY 5TH, the HOG CALL DEADLINE. I’m still 249,879 Twitter followers away from my goal! Let’s get on this shit!

Jabberwock

“The Passover lamb saved the lives of the firstborn Jews in Egypt. Now Jesus is the Lamb who can save you!”

Ah, Exodus. One of the most famous books in the Old Testament, and my favorite for all the wrong reasons. This… this will be fun.

J: It’s my favorite for even wronger reasons. *breaks out the Kleenex and Vaseline* Let’s do this!

J: (Again, my stuff will be denoted as you see here, with the J:, and anything unmarked belongs to the guest Dissector. This one wasn’t a tag-team-style one like the last few — I just added my two cents afterward.)

(more…)

Funny, campy, over-the-top. This Halloween tract by Jack Chick starts with a vampire story, but ends with a straight gospel message.

Storot:Yeah, “campy”…concentration campy.

nepphi: I don’t know, I think less ‘intense, soulless horror’ and more ‘awkward teenage years’ when I read this one, so maybe…bible campy?

Storot: I was just looking for a pun on the sheer awfulness of the tract. Or Jack’s Jewy arch-villains.

J: You know, isn’t Jack kind of disobeying his own moral guidelines, here, by telling a vampire story? If other forms of fantasy are all evil and will lead people to demonic possession, does it really matter if they tack a gospel message onto the end of it? By this logic, if D&D guidebooks included some random passage from Mark at the end of it, would Jack retract Dark Dungeons?

Storot: When reading the following tract, enhance your experience with an audio track. We at Consolidated Incorporated (our slogan “If you need it, talk to someone else. We can’t help you”) recommend “Fingernails on a Chalkboard”, “Cats In Heat”, or “Rosanne Barr’s Rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’”. Anything to distract you from the pain before you.

(more…)

Jabberwock

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

Then you’ll see this man or woman — someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

You can find the full essay at the other end of this link.

Jabberwock

We had some server issues over the last couple days. Apparently, there was an Apache upgrade that somehow went wrong, and etc. But thanks to Djur, we’re back up and running, and all’s right with the world.

More updates to come, and hopefully a Chick Dissections soon.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a ten-episode run of an online-only TV show, which will hopefully begin filming sometime in early November. Each episode will run roughly eight or ten minutes. To stay updated on developments, check out the Unfair Dinkum Production Blog, and sign up for an account.

-The Mgt.

Jabberwock

CNN: “Speaking of the troops in Iraq, Palin says they were sent on ‘task that is from God’.”

Yeah, this is totally someone I want in the copilot’s seat for the nation. Definitely. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping us from stitching ornate crosses on the uniforms of our soldiers is that it would be counterproductive to camouflaging efforts.

Anyway, two decades of Pentecostalism under her belt, huh? Maybe the reason they won’t let her give press conferences or participate in debates is that she has a habit of dropping to the floor and speaking in tongues.

In other news, I’ve started working on an online-only television show. I’m aiming for ten episodes, roughly eight or ten minutes apiece for the first (and possibly only) season. I’ll try to squeeze out a Chick Dissection at some point soon, though. Promise.

Jabberwock

(but it will sell you the T-shirt.)

The other night I read an article about the “Ezzo Method” and this thing that has been bothering me about the ways Americans often treat babies finally clicked in a way that I can express competently and articulately to other human beings, rather than just being some vague feelings of unease and displeasure.

This post will not deal directly with the Ezzo Method itself, but with the more general concept of baby “scheduling” — the Ezzo Method is just one school of scheduling thought. Scheduling is one of the more detrimental parts of an overall movement away from natural, healthy, instinctive parenting methods towards ‘expert-approved’ methods which occurred during the mid-20th century. This is not to say, of course, that our ancestors had it all perfect. There have been a great many improvements over the last century as well. But things were taken too far, and with negative effects all around.

Even a quick perusal of the ‘natural’ childbirth literature tells the unfortunate story of how basically good advances in medical technology which have saved the lives of millions of women in childbirth have been taken to extremes where they begin to hinder, not help. Women no longer delivered babies, doctors delivered babies. Pregnancy has been transformed from a natural process to a disease to be treated and managed by doctors. Birth has become an event acted upon mothers, who are immobilized, sedated, and anesthetized for the benefit of their doctors. And as a result, the rates of unnecessary caesareans, inductions, episiotomies, and other interventions soared as one intervention led to another and because they benefited the doctors. (Of course, having had a natural birth, I am all for pain killers the next time around. Birth HURTS.)

After birth, babies were immediately taken away from their mothers to be weighed and measured and scored; boys were clipped and snipped to make them more ‘hygienic’; babies were stuffed with formula and shoved in a nursery — all ostensibly for the ‘benefit’ of their mothers, who were supposed to now ‘recover’ from the trauma and ordeal of childbirth. The mothers’ breasts were bound up and they were instructed on the importance of these new, ‘better’, more ’scientific’ formulae to feed their babies, and their milk never came in.

And then the babies were taken home and put on a schedule — to be fed at their parents’ convenience, not when hungry. To sleep at their parents’ convenience, not when tired. And if baby should cry with hunger, or loneliness, or pain, or sleepiness? No comfort should be given. Comforting a crying baby would only encourage the ‘bad’ behavior of crying. Instead, crying babies were locked away in their rooms and ignored until they gave up and became ‘good’.

My grandmother still tells the story of how my biological father used to cry and scream all night long. When she took him to the doctor, the doctor gave her tranquilizer pills so she could sleep through his cries. And lo and behold, the baby, given no comfort in response to his cries for help, stopped asking for help. As it turns out, though, my dad had pyloric stenosis (as did I), a condition in which food cannot pass from the stomach to the intestines. If left untreated, the baby will literally begin to starve/dehydrate, and death is very common. My dad was quite lucky to survive.

But never mind that. With baby sleeping through the night and eating on schedule from the bottle, mom and dad were free to return to their corporate lives as quickly as possible, and since baby had no attachments to his caregivers, he could be popped from daycare to daycare, cared for at the cheapest price possible.

Who benefited from this new, modern way of doing things? Certainly not the babies, for whom the combination of cribs and formula led to a much higher risk of SIDS; who died of malnutrition and dehydration because their feedings were scheduled too far apart; who cried alone in their cages cribs at night with no one to comfort or hold them; whose IQs suffered because formula lacked vital brain-building nutrients.

Certainly not the mothers, who suffered increased complications during labor and childbirth; whose postpartum healing was negatively affected by the lack of breastfeeding; who suffered far more breast cancer; who were denied critical bonding time with their children; who were pushed back into jobs before they’d finished healing because, after all, they didn’t need to be taking care of their own children. Anyone could give the baby a bottle of formula.

Certainly not husbands, whose lives haven’t really been affected by most of these changes.
And not your average families, whose net incomes have barely risen since the 1960s, despite women going into the workforce in tremendous numbers. If anything, the average American family is slipping, as new parents must juggle college loan debt, outrageous medical expenses and insurance fees, high housing costs, pay for two cars and the gas to power them, daycare fees, etc. (But don’t worry. The rich make it up for us so we can look good in comparison to other countries.)

So who has benefited? Corporations/capitalists/the wealthy.
Babies have to be on schedules so their parents can be on schedules. Thus we have created the “new woman”, freed from the tyranny of breastfeeding, freed from the shackles of caring for her children, allowed to sleep through the night and kept on a schedule, is free to return as quickly as possible to her corporate masters lovely job.

Babies are put on schedules for the same reason that the public school system was founded, to turn them into obedient little workers who will do what authorities tell them, when they tell them, without question. They go from feeding schedules to daycare schedules to school schedules to factory schedules. Any trace of independence, of individual human spirit, of unique needs or individuality must be quashed. The fact that one baby may simply need more attention than another baby — that different babies do, in fact, have different personalities — is merely an inconvenience. Scheduling eliminates these inconveniences, forces all babies into the same rigid mold, and prepares them for a lifetime of service to their corporate masters, while pushing their parents back into the workforce as quickly as possible. (Corporations have never had any issue with hiring women, only with paying them living wages.) And the more people in the workforce, the lower the wages are for everyone. It’s a game the owners win and everyone else loses.

There are additional benefits to corporate America from the industrialization of babies, of course. With rare exceptions, they can’t sell you breastmilk — but they can sell you formula. They can sell you cribs. They can sell you daycare. They can sell you medicine to help soothe your baby’s stomach after the formula makes her ill. They will sell you all manner of unnecessary things, all the while telling you that this is how you show your love. Or at least, that these things will make your life better, and don’t we all want that?

Let me reiterate that this is not to say that all of these things are bad. Hospitals have saved the lives of many women in labor. For parents who cannot make milk, formula is a godsend. Some babies sleep better in cribs. And the right to a good job is extremely important. It is the systematic promotion of these things *together* in a way that hurts babies for the sole purpose of getting women back into the workforce more quickly that is bad. (While some of us may like our jobs and return to them eagerly, for many of us, work itself is fairly unpleasant — we would much rather be hanging out with friends, reading a good book, or even just watching TV. We work because we need to.)

Scheduling hasn’t been promoted because it allows us this glorious world where women are freed from the shackles of the patriarchy; it’s been promoted because it benefits corporations. Birth and babies have become industrialized. You are part of the corporate machine, and if you aren’t, you’re doing something wrong.

On the Discovery Channel, I recently saw an episode of “How It’s Made” in which they showed the industrial production of baby chickens. It was, to be honest, quite horrifying, even though there was no obvious cruelty of the PETA-Propaganda sort. The newly-laid eggs were immediately removed from their mother chickens, collected, and put into big egg cartons which were stacked in a giant oven. Every so often the cartons would automatically tilt from one side to the other, to simulate the mother chicken’s care. A machine then drilled a needle into the eggs to vaccinate them (I wonder how many chicks died from a needle accidentally going into their brains?) and then the eggs hatched on a moving conveyor belt. The newborn chicks were dropped between spinning rollers to sort them from the eggshells — not even worth the effort of a human hand, just cold mechanical steel rollers, then tumbled down chutes to be sorted (sexed) and tossed (by hand) down more chutes, where they were packed in with hundreds of other baby chicks to be shipped and sold.

The horrifying part of this all was the total lack of creature comforts; they never saw their mothers, never had a protective wing to nestle under, nor felt the warmth of her belly. They were incubated in an oven and born on a conveyor belt. They were not living creatures, they were ITS, they were industrial products being produced. They were just things.

But they weren’t things. They were babies. They were lost and confused and their mommies had been taken away from them.

My grandmother’s ranch was the sort of place you read about in children’s books. The goat kept climbing on top of the house; the geese chased me around; and the chickens (and rooster) had their run of the yard. For many years we didn’t even have a chicken coop — the chickens just nested in the shed. My grandmother showed me how to hunt for nests, look for eggs, and trick the chickens into laying eggs by putting golf balls in their nests to make them think they’d already laid one. (Chickens aren’t too bright.)

The baby chicks we gathered into a baby swimming pool (better to keep an eye on them and keep them out from underfoot.) And my grandmother showed me how to comfort the chicks, by holding them under my chin. This way, they felt like they were nestled against their mother chicken, safe and warm.

The point of this trip down memory lane is that baby chicks want their mothers. They draw comfort from their mothers and their mothers take care of them and those babies had been separated from their mothers and were all alone.

Of course, we may easily brush aside the feelings of baby chickens — they’re not, after all, human. They’re food, and if we want cheap, abundant chicken meat and eggs, this is how it’s got to be done. But how different is this from how we were taught to treat our own babies? Whisked away at birth to be weighed and measured and washed and snipped; swaddled and fed formula rather than their mother’s own abundant and more nutritious milk; put into nurseries and denied love and comfort until they finally give up on asking.

The only thing we’re lacking is the conveyor belt.

People in ‘primitive’ societies do not practice scheduling, nor was it ever practiced before the modern age — people without watches do not concern themselves with whether it’s been two hours yet since baby last fed. People who do not have to be at a factory job at 9 AM every morning do no care if baby keeps them up a few extra hours.

When people hear of my baby’s night-owl sleeping habits (he used to regularly keep me up past 5 AM, though he did thankfully scale back to 3 AM fairly quickly,) they often respond with, “Oh, you’d better get him on a schedule,” and perhaps some nonsense about babies waking up early early in the morning. Why on earth would I want to put him on a schedule like that? I don’t wake up early in the morning — why should he? Then I’d just have to get up early!

Except, oh right, I’m supposed to be heading off to work at 9 AM. So of course he needs to be getting up at 7 AM so I can get us ready and drop him off at daycare before heading into the office. Right. And if I don’t drag my sorry butt out of bed at obscene hours of the morning, I’m spoiling my baby and not realizing my full potential as a woman.

Sorry, folks, but corporate America doesn’t give a shit about feminism. It employs women because we’re useful and having us in the workforce keeps down wages, not because it wants to help us fulfill our potential. And corporate America does not care if your baby suffers in daycare, because babies are not useful to it unless they can sell us something for them. Formula companies don’t care that their products and sales tactics result in the deaths of thousands of African babies. Corporations only care about your money and your ability to make them more money.

In our industrial capitalist society, even the creation and care of babies has become industrialized.

I am reminded here of Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. Now, I am no Marxist (if anything, I lean towards the opposite,) but this doesn’t meant that all of Marx’s theories are trash. Klarfax (whose knowledge of Marxism is limited to the first few pages of the Communist Manifesto read back in highschool) has often come home from work and begun ranting about how the “owners exploit labor” and how alienated he feels from the products of his labor, and I pat him on the back and say, “Congratulations! You’ve just re-invented Marxism!” (Klarfax, it should be noted, is also decidedly not a Marxist.) But he observes these things happening at work.

Marx describes four types of alienation:

* alienation of the worker from his or her ‘species essence’ as a human being rather than a machine;
* alienation between workers, since capitalism reduces labour to a commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship;
* alienation of the worker from the product, since this is appropriated by the capitalist class, and so escapes the worker’s control;
* alienation from the act of production itself, such that work comes to be a meaningless activity, offering little or no intrinsic satisfactions. (As I write this, my husband is complaining about this one, though he’s never read the theory.)

Marx further expounds, “Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt…”

To translate into ENGLISH (damn turgid Germans, damn you, too, Hegel and Weber), “when you get to do your own thing, work is more fun and the things you make reflect your personality.” When you work for the owners, work is boring and dull and you can’t even say at the end, “I made that.”

The mother, in our modern society, has been alienated from the product of her labor, that is, her child. We do not labor (give birth) as people, individuals; we do not breastfeed like other mammals, but feed our children machine-made products, like calves separated from their mothers and raised in industrial feedlots. Mothers are encouraged to do nothing that would allow them to bond with their babies — no breastfeeding, no cuddling when they cry, none of that — so that they can be as unattached as possible. So that the mother becomes interchangeable with all other potential caretakers. The care and keeping of babies is no longer regarded as special, but just a job hired out to the cheapest workers available.

And the babies themselves are denied their essential humanity. It is easy to see why people might be tempted by these theories — I myself did not recognize the humanity of babies until I had one of my own. I didn’t think of babies as people with their own personalities. I thought of them as screaming little pee and poop machines, with the personalities emerging over time as they grew older. But babies do have personalities. I saw the signs of Link’s personality even back when he was a wiggly little fetus in the womb, doing backflips for the ultrasound machine. Babies are people, but through scheduling they are forced to conform to a rigid mold, preparing them for their lives as workers in a world which does not care about their needs or wants or souls, but only their ability to perform as a cog in the corporate machine.

If you haven’t seen Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” yet, well, you should! It’s an excellent, funny movie. The beginning is the best/most important part.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9.

The crux of the movie is the story of the exploitation of labor by the owners, the alienation of the worker, and how factory life damages men and drives them mad.

We are all part of the system, and even our babies must be made to conform to the factory schedule.

Thankfully, thankfully, the excesses of the twentieth century have been recognized and the pendulum has begun to swing back to a more sensible path. We now know that breast milk is better than formula, and in most hospitals, mothers are encouraged to breastfeed. The rate of unnecessary cesareans is going down. Doctors now recognize that scheduling is bad for babies, as is being left alone to ‘cry it out’. And circumcision rates are falling. People have begun to recognize that babies need to be nurtured, not disciplined into ‘good’ behavior.

Unfortunately, many of these advances are still unavailable to poor babies. I have the luxury of avoiding the corporate machine (and it is truly a luxury,) but most mothers (and their babies) do not. Poor mothers forced back to work too early and too long are going to be naturally attracted to the idea of baby sleeping through the night. People are not willfully ignorant–information is expensive. For poor, hard-working people who may not even be literate (or speak English,) the time and expense of gathering information on modern parenting theories is often more than they can afford. So they do what they’ve heard is best, generally relying on information made publicly available by large corporations. Unfortunately, there’s no money in advertising breast milk. So the poor are mislead into wasting thousands of dollars on formula, put their babies on schedules, carry them around in car seats, etc., all the while trying to do their best for their children.

Our society does not value infant nutrition (no child left behind my ass!) enough to provide women with the necessary resources to care for their children. Pumping and working is *hard*, and many women are ignorant that it is even possible. If we, as a society, truly gave a shit about “women’s issues”, we’d stop whining about how porn ‘exploits’ and ‘objectifies’ women and instead work towards real gains in the quality of women’s lives and the lives of their children. And we would stop promoting a system which only benefits our corporate masters, and work instead towards a more balanced system based on the needs of humans.

The following is a response to the Dissections from an Orthodox Jewish client of Janet’s. He left this on a private LiveJournal entry, so I can’t really link it (and actually couldn’t even see it at first), but I figured I should respond here as well as there, since it addresses some things I’ve been meaning to clarify or discuss.

Here’s what he wrote:

A Gentle Reproach
How shall I say this in a gentle way? After all, Josh’s own fiancée is reading this. (Perhaps she could bring it to his attention?)

[Movin' On Up]

In the cited post, Josh (legitimately) attacks a stupid cartoon by — What’s his name? Dick Chick? Chick with a Dick? Oh, right — Jack Chick.

I want to correct some of the fallacies of that post, without being agressive.

It’s sad that Josh extrapolates from the Fundamentalist Christianity of Chick, and makes generalizations about all religion. See, he’s almost as ignorant of religions as Chick is of scientists and non-fundamendalists. In the a previous post of his, he made broad statements about “religious people who are fucking stupid”, and backed it up by quoting some retarded statement by Chick. I really think he’s unaware that there are many different kinds of religion, and many of them are neither fundamentalist, nor based on blind faith, nor even obsessed with theology.

Plenty of Orthodox Jews, for example, are very committed to their religion, but hardly ever talk about God. There are other concepts, such as ritual or law, or study of legal texts, which are far more important to them than pondering what God may or may not be. And I recently posted a comment on a blog, in which I demonstrated that the Rabbis of the Talmud didn’t believe in an afterlife. (The moron who owns that blog deleted my comment, presumably because he felt it was threatening to his whole worldview.)

There exist religions which are basically systems of law and ritual, with associated “ideational content”, which is not necessarily meant to be taken as literal truth. There are people who accept a religion because “it works” for them, i.e. it creates a fulfilling life, or an ethical life. Religion is not opposed to science, because one can easily follow the practices of a religion, and work within the system of its Sacred Myths and other ideational content, but fully believe in the latest scientific research. Maybe this doesn’t work if you’re a right-wing evangelical American Protestant with a shit-eating grin, but it works for many other religions.

When I first started making these Dissections back in 2002 (wow, over six years), I’ll admit that I’d extrapolate Chick’s beliefs as representative of Christianity as a whole, or even religion as a whole. But hey, I was nineteen. Eventually, I recognized what I was doing, and even went back and corrected such references in the earlier Tracts. I’ve made it a point since then to ensure that I’m being moderately clear about the fact that I’m referring specifically to fundamentalists and not to all Christians or members of all religions as a whole.

However, I consider nothing beyond reproach (*), and there are more general beliefs and concepts that it’s impossible to criticize without criticizing religion or belief in a broader respect. As, for instance, when I point out that God’s behavior in the Bible casts him in a villainous light in the book: It’s hard for me to do this while referring specifically to fundamentalists, because there are many who aren’t fundamentalist who believe that God’s actions are always just and moral, for some reason. As though being the biggest and most intelligent person on the playground gives you the right to be cruel to everyone else.

((*) There’s this weird sentiment today, particularly in America, that religious belief is somehow beyond reproach. Like, as soon as you question or make fun of it, you’re somehow crossing some societally-acceptable line, unlike with other philosophies people subscribe to like economic policy or general cultural attitudes. I don’t really support this, in part because I constantly question everything, and etc various other reasons.)

These things aren’t so much a problem if you view the Bible — as you point out — as an inspirational work that teaches lessons and general guidelines through metaphor and parable. However, if you’re going to take it literally, as some do, then the Biblical God as a real entity who actually did these terrible things is tremendously immoral. “Mysterious ways” or no, we can only experience God and his actions to the extent that boundaries on our perception allow, and if this is how he presents himself to us, knowing that we can identify right and wrong and good and evil, then there’s something really wrong somewhere.

But now I’m getting too far into tangential specifics. In any event, I refer specifically to fundamentalists as much as possible, and hope that the sentiment remains clear when I’m making fun of the ludicrous things Chick espouses. I don’t by any means think that all Christians hate science, or that there are no people with religious beliefs who agree with the theory of evolution. In fact, there are a number of people of faith who comment here who are able to recognize that I’m not extrapolating Jack’s beliefs as representational of Christianity or religion as a whole, so I’d think I’m doing an all right job at making the distinction.

But this is all beside the point. The point of these Dissections, often above all else (save for the most recent one, because I was frustrated and a little off my game and more ranty than anything), is a kind of harsh and brutal humor at the expense of anything within the Tracts that I find deserving of mockery. Sure, I’d love to be able to actually get through to fundamentalists and convince them to at least consider my perspective. But given the rarity of success, without any kind of humor or entertainment/information value, my incessant ranting attempts at being convincing would be a boring monotone that would eventually be the same kind of pathetic and depressing as a man in the 1970s spending six years trying to punch down the Berlin Wall with his bare hands.

I can’t quite seem to find the “religious people who are fucking stupid” quote anywhere on my site or in a Google search, but I’m pretty sure that such sentiments expressed are more about the religious people who are fucking stupid than religious people as a whole.

In any event, I’m well aware of the gamut of religion and belief that exists among the many varied peoples of the world. But I’m no expert, and I’m always curious about and interested in the specifics.

“Hey, guys, here’s what Christianity is: Every Sunday, Christians get together and spit into cheesecloths for an hour. They sing to get their phlegm going. When they’re finished, they go down into the basement of the church in order to bury the cheesecloths. This is called the Holy Sacrament! During the Feast of All Saints, they dig up the cheesecloths and lay them out on the altar to feed the saints. Jesus was a man with a magical beard. He’d use it to tickle the sick, and their laughter would make them better. (This is the origin of the phrase “laughter is the best medicine.”) The pope keeps Jesus’s beard under his tall hat, and that’s what gives him control of the church. (Now print this out a thousand times and give this to all your friends so that they can know the TRUTH about Christianity!)”

No. No. Not at all! Fundies like Chick are Protestant, and hate the pope. They often don’t even like ritual, and think that it’s stupid.

You seem to have missed the fact that the bit about spitting into cheesecloths was an intentional misrepresentation — for humor purposes (a.k.a. a joke) — of Christianity done in precisely the same way Chick misrepresented the theory of evolution. There would be no use in specifying a particular type of Christianity, because that wasn’t the point. The point was to illustrate how wrong Chick was via a parodic and ridiculous misinterpretation of a relatively well-known religion.

It’s way too big a number, and I think many of them have this fear that if they stop and realize that the Bible was written back when the primary counting system for most people was “fingers” and (for the advanced mathematicians) “toes”, and the idea of “millions” was completely unfathomable a concept since “thousands” seemed itself practically infinite, or if they even approach questioning their Holy Doctrine at all, they’ll go to hell.

Not true. There was quite advanced mathematics in Mesopotamia at the time the Bible was written, and even much earlier.

I’m well aware that advanced mathematics existed. It’s just that… well, let me put it this way: Is everyone in the world Stephen Hawking just because Stephen Hawking is very intelligent? Just because there are intelligent mathematicians during any given point in time doesn’t mean that all people are mathematicians. And in general, people two thousand years ago were substantially less educated and less knowledgeable about the workings of the world, and there were a greater number of illiterate and innumerate people than there are today. Anyway, the bit about “for advanced mathematicians” was exaggeration for humor purposes.

Point is, as far as most were concerned, “thousands” seemed a good enough guess for the age of the planet as any other number. I mean, there are also some other influences thrown in there, like humans’ tendency to be unable to imagine a point in time before their existence, which can easily be translated to something that can be thought about humanity as a whole, but people were far less “experts” back then on the functioning of the observable world than we are today. And we’re still a pretty ignorant and idiotic bunch.

And you still didn’t really refute the fact that — particularly in light of all the evidence we’ve since gathered — six thousand years is almost certainly inaccurate (unless God’s playing some hilarious joke on everyone, in which case he’s kind of a jerk; also, in that case, it’s equally possible he created everything last Monday and made it seem like it’s all much older), and it’s rather stupid to cling to it as a definite and literal Born-On date for the universe.

I’m sure Josh is perfectly intellegent, just ignorant of this issue. And of course you realize that I have no interest in converting him to anything. I just think that he were a bit more informed, he would be a bit more tolerant.

He can still laugh at ignorant American fundamentalist Protestants, though.

It’s not that I’m intolerant — go ahead and believe whatever you want to believe. Believe in God, believe in Satan, believe in Jesus, be Jewish (Orthodox or otherwise), be a Gnostic, an Agnostic, an Atheist, a Buddhist, believe that there’s one holy moose somewhere in the remotest part of Canada that can only be killed with a gunshot and that once it dies the universe will end with it. Just don’t be evangelical about it, is my primary concern. Particularly, keep faith out of the law books for the general public (but feel free to abide by your own faith-based laws as an individual or as a group), and out of general government. And don’t think that because you (not you, specifically, but the general “you”) have a belief system, it somehow makes you the authority on morality, especially the morality of people other than yourself. (I’m working on a couple essays about this concept, but they’re not finished yet.)

And, I guess more pertinent to this discussion, just because someone takes their beliefs seriously, or the idea of belief in general seriously, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to or that I should be expected to. If you do believe in that moose, I’m probably going to mock you for it, whether you take it seriously or not.

Jabberwock

Well we’re movin on up,
To the shoreside.
To a deluxe apartment on the sand.
Movin on up,
To the shoreside.
We’re finally gonna walk on the land.

Another one about evolution, this time really stretching every far-fetched, contrived argument well beyond any point of credibility. If I ever discover there was a single person in the world who was convinced by any of the ludicrous arguments put forth in this Tract, I… well… I’m not sure what I’ll do. I think I’ll spend the rest of my life crying.

He’s really outdone himself this time. This one… it’s… it’s just the worst.

The art isn’t terrible, but the message certainly is. This is going to be a ranty/lengthy Dissection, but hey — I haven’t done one in a while.

(more…)

Jabberwock

I’ve been meaning to revisit some of the earlier Dissections, since I did them long before I got much of a feel for them, and it seems like there are a few things missing from them. So in light of Gary Gygax’s recent demise, I figured we’d pay a kind of tribute by going back and taking a look at the subject of the very first Dissection: Dark Dungeons.

[nepphie] That’s us, honoring the creator of one of the greatest games ever by re-trashing a tract that completely misrepresents said game.

Since nepphie has done all the work of tagging all of his lines with [nepphie], we’re going to ditch the usual convention. My lines will be the unprefixed ones.

(more…)

ascendance

Chester thought he didn’t need God. But when the ship began to sink, he learned how wrong he was.

No he doesn’t. Chester never realizes that he needed God until after he croaked. False advertising, Jack.

J: Jack Chick? Bending the truth? Never!

J: You can probably already tell from the title, but this week is a Guest Dissection submitted by reader DaAICh. As always, my text blocks will be prefaced with J:.

(more…)