The ever versatile monkey is today’s Falstaff, and I of course am using monkey incorrectly to include apes such as chimpanzees as most Americans do.
Dennis Miller’s new conservative talk show on CNBC will feature a “monkey,” according to David Bauder of the Associated Press:
The show will feature interviews, a rant on a selected topic, a ‘Weekend Update’-like comic newscast and a pundit panel he calls ‘The Varsity.’ And a monkey. You read that right. Miller wanted a simian presence, believing a monkey occasionally scampering across the studio floor will keep both guests and viewers on their toes, he said. (Yahoo News!)
Are our attention spans so shot that it takes the natural unpredicitability of wildlife to “keep on our toes”? Or isn’t having an animal cavorting around the set, unless it’s a typically-sedate housecat, just asking for stimulus overload? Isn’t it an easy-out if the guest sucks?
“Hey, President Bush, I’m not going to ask you any tough questions because I ‘take care of my friends.’ Wanna see the monkey color a picture of Howard Dean using feces and urine?”
“Whole continents and whole races do not take well to imaginary roles, roles assigned to them by minds they find it difficult to understand, and which look quite strange to them. Thus they finally insist, if necessary with violence, on asserting what is least imaginary–and least acceptable to our collective imagination. ‘Here,’ they say, setting fire to a building, ’see what you can make of this!’
We do not make much of it. Or else, perhaps, we decide it is a Terrorist plot . . . Thus we dispense ourselves from the need to think, and convince ourselves that there is only one way: to go into action with weapons.
Thus we drive them all into the arms of the Terrorists, since we have left them nowhere else to go!”
These words were penned over 40 years ago by the Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton. I have taken the liberty of changing only the word “Communist” to “Terrorist” in the two instances in which it appears.
On January 6, 2004 · Comments Off
“Better paint your house your own complexion: let it turn pale or blush for you.”
–Walden and Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau laments the division of labor that prohibits man from building his own dwelling. By the personal investment of constructing a house “the necessities and character of the indweller” become revealed in its timber, and the house becomes imbued with a personal virtue. Beauty then, he reasons, is derived from a self-sufficiency and practicalness that no pretty architect nor pretending painter can replicate.
No doubt potters who eat with their own dishes are excused from such clownish characterizations. I would that I could paint my door as red as a big, round nose. Or that house colors really did reflect the complexion of physiognamies. But this is not for exteriors and facades to accomplish is it?