Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Put me down for $10 on the Rams.

WARNING #1 - These pages contain satire.

WARNING #2 - "Satire is wasted on fools and lost on knaves."

WARNING #3 - Should you be offended by any of the satire in these pages, refer back to WARNING #2. Only you can determine if the satire was wasted or lost. (I just don't know you that well.)

WARNING #4 - Reading can be a mind-expanding and addictive activity. Do so at your own risk.

WARNING #5 - The bathroom and the kitchen are the most dangerous rooms in the average home. Reading satire in these rooms could increase your risk for an accident.

WARNING #6 - The Surgeon General warns that "Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide." Satire does not, unless you attempt to smoke it.

WARNING #7 - Reading WARNING statements will increase your blood pressure and the general level of stress on all major body components. (Sorry, I probably should have made this WARNING #1.)

     It is a melancholy object to those who attend this great school or those similar, when they see the desks, the tables, and the lockers cluttered with textbooks of literature, often accompanied by a rather thick notebook, and importuning all with the reminder of wasted hours in that dreaded classroom. This class, rather than filled with the teachings of unique and worthwhile lore, instead is saturated with utterly boring and useless information. This class, when one has finally settled in life, has no effect on the outcome of his important decisions. This class leaves a horrid impression on the poor child; so horrible that he may never properly recover.
     I think it is agreed by all that this infinite number of books in the arms, or on the backs, or in the lockers of their respective student owners (and, in my own humble opinion, the classes too) is in the present a very cruel injustice. Therefore, anyone who could find a fair, cheap, and easy method of correcting this incredible pain would deserve so much as to have an international holiday established in his honor. My intention, however, is very far from being confined to aiding the institution of literature and contributing to its expansion. It is of much greater meaning, and shall take the whole number of classes and textbooks, which are condemned to provide for the very problem to which they are the cause.
     In the hope for wellbeing for all mankind, I make the following proposal. That, instead of the literature classes aiding the failure of many young ones to join society on account that they cannot skillfully master the art of penmanship, the literature texts should constitute a bonfire stack, thus contributing to the eradication of the expansion and instruction of literature. There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will bring the divisions of race together as one for one great moment in the history of man, and the rebirth of human enlightenment, as the destruction of literature, shall be looked on as the pinnacle of human existence.
     The number of books of the literature mold in America is usually reckoned eight hundred million and a half. Of these I calculate there may be about eight hundred million texts whose intention is merely entertainment and therefore are no threat to society. This being granted, there will remain half of a million books; from which I subtract forty-two texts that do not focus on prolonging the meager existence of literature in schools and may actually be of respectable quality. I prospect that there cannot be so many, but let it stand that there are only five hundred thousand minus forty-two books which may remain in circulation.
     I am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed which shall be equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual, but no such proposal exists. It has been said by the wisest of men that by strengthening the methods and material of teaching the literature that it may improve one's ability to function in society, when quite the contrary is true. The mind is cluttered with much useless information - quotes, definitions, and the like - that it has no time to process the thoughts that are necessary for survival in the consumer world. Another commendable proposal involved reducing the amount of literary technique and such, teaching only the basics. This can never work, for any foundation with nothing to build on is merely a scapegoat for those who will later wish to rebuild the institution of literature, and will only cause confusion at catastrophic levels.

     I allege, from the depths of my human consciousness, that I have no personal interest in the execution of this scheme; I have no other motive than the common good of my fellow Americans by advancing our general knowledge in all fields and ridding the world of a redundant pest. There are no profits to be made, no awards to be delivered, and I am already free of the grand deception of literature.

     I am just the man; I've realized that now. By the way, I now have a girlfriend, and I'm a very happy boy. Her name is Emily. Then again, 95% of you that visit this page know that by now. I shall have a picture of my beauty for all the world to see - that is as soon as she "finds one she likes." :-)
     Earth to the dead, ZACH is SEVENTEEN! *the heavens sing* Happy birthday bubba! You can't rent porn now! You realize that you would be God to a younger sibling if he/she wanted porn or something else only 17-year-olds could get. Think of the possibilities! Hrm...

     Jack took a long look at his speedometer before slowing down from 73 mph in a 55 mph zone. Fourth time in as many months. How could a guy get caught so often? When his car had slowed to 10 miles an hour, Jack pulled over, but only partially. Let the cop worry about the potential traffic hazard. Maybe some other car will tweak his backside with a mirror.
     The cop was stepping out of his car, the big pad in hand. Bob? Bob from church? Jack sunk farther into his trench coat. This was worse than the coming ticket. A Christian cop catching a guy from his own church. A guy who happened to be a little eager to get home after a long day at the office. A guy he was about to play golf with tomorrow. Jumping out of the car, he approached a man he saw every Sunday, a man he'd never seen in uniform.
     "Hi, Bob. Fancy meeting you like this."
     "Hello, Jack." No smile.
     "Guess you caught me red-handed in a rush to see my wife and kids."
     "Yeah, I guess."
     Bob seemed uncertain. Good. "I've seen some long days at the office lately. I'm afraid I bent the rules a bit - just this once." Jack toed at a pebble on the pavement. "Diane said something about roast beef and potatoes tonight. Know what I mean?"
     "I know what you mean. I also know that you have a reputation in our precinct."
     Ouch. This was not going in the right direction. Time to change tactics. "What'd you clock me at?"
     "Seventy-one. Would you sit back in your car, please?"
     "Now wait a minute here, Bob. I checked as soon as I saw you. I was barely nudging 65." The lie seemed to come easier with every ticket.
     "Please, Jack, in the car."
     Flustered, Jack hunched himself through the still open door. Slamming it shut, he stared at the dashboard. He was in no rush to open the window. The minutes ticked by. Bob scribbled away on the pad. Why hadn't he asked for a driver's license? Whatever the reason, it would be a month of Sundays before Jack ever sat near this cop again.
     A tap on the door jerked his head to the left. There was Bob, a folded paper in hand. Jack rolled down the window a mere two inches, just enough room for Bob to pass him the slip. "Thanks." Jack could not quite keep the sneer out of his voice. Bob returned to his car without a word.
     Jack watched his retreat in the mirror. Jack unfolded the sheet of paper. How much was this one going to cost? Wait a minute. What was this? Some kind of joke? Certainly not a ticket. Jack began to read:

     Dear Jack, Once upon a time I had a daughter. She was six when killed by a car. You guessed it - a speeding driver. A fine and three months in jail, and the man was free. Free to hug his daughters. All three of them. I only had one, and I'm going to have to wait until heaven before I can ever hug her again. A thousand times I've tried to forgive that man. A thousand times I thought I had. Maybe I did, but I need to do it again. Even now. Pray for me. And be careful. My son is all I have left.
                        Bob

     Jack turned around in time to see Bob's car pull away and head down the road. Jack watched until it disappeared. A full 15 minutes later, he, too, pulled away and drove slowly home, praying for forgiveness and hugging a surprised wife and kids when he arrived.
     Life is precious. Handle with care. Drive safely and carefully. Cars are not the only thing recalled by their maker.

     An intelligent young man sits in front of the TV, clutching a PlayStation controller and screaming in horror as his alter ego crashes to his death off a pixellated cliff. He bitterly shakes his head and mumbles, 'just one more go'.
     He doesn't want another go. He knows he should be doing creative and positive things, but instead he feels about nine years old, and part of him wants his Mum to come in and tell him to get up those stairs and tidy his room.
     Hitting the Start button again is a crucial 90's experience. It's the pivotal point between enjoyment that comes from wanting to continue and enjoyment that comes from not wanting to stop. From here on, the buzz he gets is from the knowledge that he's wasting his time and spoiling himself. You tell yourself you'll play till you get another hi-score but you know that even if you stop then you'll still get annoyed with yourself for not stopping earlier.
     This 'once you pop, you can't stop' attitude applies equally well to another 90's phenomenon, Pringles potato snacks. Like computer games, Pringles are fine when diluted by company, but if it's just you and the tube, you're in trouble.
     The first third of them are genuinely lovely, and you can try and decide which way round you prefer to eat them. Eat them like an 'n' and they fit round your tongue in a satisfying way - harmony and balance; eat them like a 'u' for that feeling of crushing them against the roof of your mouth - domination and conflict. Half-way through the tube, you really don't want any more but you imagine the licentiousness of letting yourself just finish them all anyway. Doing something so obviously unnecessary affirms, in a ridiculously tiny way, that you don't always do sensible - you can also do reckless and spontaneous.
     MTV works in the same way. You've enjoyed a few videos, and now it's time to watch some real television, but you're still there four songs later, saying 'let's just see if the next video's any good'.
     It might seem pathetic that much of our enjoyment from these wonderful new things comes from getting to the stage where we hate ourselves. Either we should enjoy them till we've had enough and then stop, or do something really spectacular if we want gluttonous overindulgence. Finishing a tube of Pringles isn't exactly a Bacchanalian orgy.
     People have always enjoyed being bad, and the 'just one more' syndrome has been around as long as chocolate, but the real lesson to be learned from Pringles and PlayStations is that the overindulgence they demand from us is impersonal, fleeting and mass-produced.
     These epiphanies of consumerism are just shadows of real excess. Like rollercoasters, they offer cheap thrills in complete safety. We risk nothing in eating a few too many potato snacks, or playing an extra game of FIFA football, and yet we feel like we're bold transgressors. To be really rebellious, you have to eat Pringles only until you've had enough. Once you pop, you can stop.

     The visual world, the world as we see it, is a world populated by colored objects. Typically, we see the world as having a rich tapestry of colors or colored forms - fields, mountains, oceans, hairstyles, clothing, fruit, plants, animals, buildings, and so on. Colors are important in both identifying objects and in re-identifying them. So much of our perception of physical things involves our identifying objects by their appearance, and colors are typically essential to an object's appearance, that any account of visual perception must contain some account of colors. Since visual perception is one of the most important species of perception and hence of our acquisition of knowledge of the physical world, and of our environment, including our own bodies, a theory of color is doubly important.
     Despite much thought, over thousands of years, by philosophers and scientists, we seem little closer now to an agreed account of color than we ever were. The disagreement is reflected in the fact that some theorists believe colors to be perceiver-relative; that dispositions or powers to induce experiences of a certain kind, or to appear in certain ways to observers of a certain kind. Others take them to be objective, physical properties of objects. Among the latter group, some take these properties to be physical microstructures, while others regard colors as irreducible properties of physical bodies, and yet others take them to be dispositional properties to affect light. Finally, there are even some who deny that there are colors in the world at all: there are none of the colors, it is claimed, that we naturally and normally and unreflectingly attribute to objects.
     The major problem with color has to do with fitting what we seem to know about colors into what science, particularly physics, seems to require of physical objects and their qualities. It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold a common view: that the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess, are such that physical objects do not actually have them. Oceans and skies are not blue in the way that we naively think, nor are apples red, (nor green). Colors of that kind, it is believed, have no place in the physical account of the world that has developed from the 16th Century to this century.
     Such a view is clearly paradoxical, given what was said above, about the ubiquity of colors in the perceived world, and about the importance of colors in the identification and re-identification of physical objects. Physicists were aware of the paradoxical nature of their views. While some clearly welcomed this consequence, others thought it possible to mitigate the paradoxical character of the doctrine by drawing a distinction between two concepts of color: (i) color as a sensory quality, intrinsic to our sensory experiences; (ii) color as a power, to induce sensory experiences with color, understood as a sensory quality. On this account, color terms have a systematic ambiguity. Provided we take account of the ambiguity, no harm is done, and much benefit derived. According to this view, then, in one sense of color, physical objects have colors, for they have the power to induce experiences of color, but in the other sense, they do not. The paradox of this position might be resolved by claiming that, when we enjoy visual experiences, then in some sense we project the sensory quality in our experience on to physical objects.

     Neo enters the living room of a small, over crowded, run down apartment. The room is filled with young children. An Asian boy sits quietly reading a text in a foreign language. Two girls sit in front of a television, seeming to make play blocks hover and move in the air above their hands. A young boy dressed in the robes of a Buddhist monk sits quietly on the floor with a collection of radically bent and twisted spoons arrayed on the floor in front of him. Another spoon is in his hand, twisting and writhing in the air as he looks at it.

     "Do not try to bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon. Then you will realize that it is not the spoon that bends, only yourself."

     The landscape of The Matrix is absolutely littered with references begged, borrowed and stolen from across the Western consciousness. Neo is awoken from this false reality by Morpheus, appropriately named after the Greek god of dreams. Morpheus borrows heavily from the imagery of Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass." Visually the film borrows heavily from pop culture and other films and genres - be on the lookout for the subtle nod to Star Wars and the classic western standoff between Neo and Agent Smith in a run down subway station with blowing newspapers substituting nicely for tumbleweeds.
     But what is most surprising is the sheer number and range of Biblical references made, references I would imagine were entirely intentional. Morpheus fills the role of John the Baptist to Neo's Jesus. Neo undergoes a literal death and resurrection. There is an obvious Judas figure. Morpheus' ship is named after King Nebuchednezzar. The last surviving human city, the entire hope for the future, is named Zion. The references fly fast and thick and it's hardly surprising that elements of the church have been hailing the film as a Christian allegory. A closer look, however, suggests that if the imagery is Christian it comes from a heavily gnosticized view of Christianity.
     The spiritual core of the film comes in the sequence when Neo visits the Oracle - a seer who prophesied the coming of someone who would be able to remake the Matrix as he saw fit and would rescue humanity - in her dank apartment. The Oracle tells Neo that he needs to "know himself" and the key conversation with the spoon bending boy in her living room (Neo is heard repeating "There is no spoon" at one key point later in the film) both suggest that the solution to the human condition lie in specific pieces of knowledge. This stands in direct opposition to the Christian contention that the human problem is one of nature and being, but fits perfectly well with a gnostic understanding of things. The ancient gnostics believed that the world we lived in was an inherently evil place, created by a malicious god and that humanity was trapped in this reality. The key to a spiritual freedom from this physical world was believed to be in gnosis - Greek for hidden knowledge. The world of The Matrix fits this view of the world nearly perfectly: the machines fill the role of God - creators of a hostile, imprisoning world; freedom comes through knowledge hidden from all but the elect few - in this case, Morpheus, Trinity, Neo, the Oracle etc.; the gnostic disdain for the physical world carries through in the resistance fighters willingness to kill indiscriminately within the Matrix.
     A "Christian" film? No, probably not, but The Matrix does show a willingness to explore and integrate religious themes in a way that very few film makers will do in the mainstream, and The Matrix deserves full marks just for raising the questions. Beyond that, it's just a great ride.

     "This is a construct."

     The duo explodes into action, moving so quickly the eye finds it nearly impossible to follow the flow. The movements are precise, acrobatic, even artistic, as fists and feet fly and the duo flip and spin in and out of combat. One leaps, hanging impossibly high in the air before crashing down and driving his knee through the floor where, moments before, his opponent had lain. The other runs up a vertical beam, taking several steps up the span before flipping off and landing on the far side of the room.
     "Do you think that my being faster or stronger has anything to do with my muscles in this place? You think that's air you're breathing now?"
     This is the world of The Matrix: a world from which reality has been stolen from the human race and replaced by a complicated virtual world who's purpose is to keep humanity enthralled and enslaved; under the power of a race of intelligent machines harvesting the electrochemical and heat energy from their human slaves to feed themselves. The Matrix tells the story of a computer hacker, Neo, who is freed from this false reality and expected by his liberators to in turn free the rest of the human race from their slavery. The scene described above is taken from an early part of Neo's training regimen, in which Morpheus, the leader of the resistance, is teaching Neo to "bend" the rules of the virtual world to make himself more powerful within it.
     As might be expected with a premise such as this, the effects are absolutely stunning. To film the kung fu sequences and insure a genuine feel, the film's four principal actors (Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, and machine Agent Smith) gathered on site a full three months prior to filming for martial arts training. Well-placed computer generated effects mesh with incredible physical effects to create a world both completely believable and totally immersive. As an action film, The Matrix is simply first rate. As science fiction, it is very likely the most convincing and best realized vision of the cyberpunk dystopia to ever reach the screen within the mainstream of the American film industry. But, appropriately enough, there is a fair bit more to The Matrix than what simply meets the eye.

© 1999-2000 j.p.mccord, iii.