Read The Televisionary Oracle Online
Authors: Rob Brezsny
“I am the lowest of the low,” I swear I telepathically “heard” during our last gig from a forty-ish hippie dancing near the front of the stage. “I abandoned my childhood friend on her deathbed,” he beamed towards me. “Let this be my dance of atonement.”
Meanwhile, back at ground zero, I’ll be stretched as far as I can go: at the limits of what I can do with my muscles, my stamina, my concentration, my creativity, my precision, my everything. As each song demands, I’ll sing beautifully or archly or with the savage power of a warrior in the heat of hand-to-hand combat, straining to remember to feel—not just
pretend
to feel—the meaning of the lyrics I’m channeling (even if they belong to imaginary characters portrayed in the songs rather than to myself) and to coordinate them with the gestures and dance moves that are possessing me, all the while remembering to inhale deeply and to interact authentically, not just automatically, with my bandmates. Between each song I’ll decide whether we’ll move on immediately to the next number or else wait for me to deliver a poetic rant that might either be a set piece I’ve rehearsed or an improvisation I invoke in response to some mood or current I sense in the crowd.
It’s hard fucking work.
At 2
A.M
., when I stagger off the stage, I’ll sigh to myself again, as I have so many other times, that this is the feeling I most want to remember about my stay here on Earth; that when my body dies and my will-o’-the-wisp soul is negotiating its way through the Bardo planes, I will treasure most the exquisite blown-out sensation that comes from blending kamikaze release with practiced discipline.
Slicing a path now through the sweaty, smoky, boozy crowd, my four helpers and I are approaching the front of the stage. Gratefully, I drink in the welter of images flailing from the TVs on-stage. On the big screen, the huge feminine hand of God, sporting crimson nail polish and a sparkling silver band-aid bearing cartoons of snake priestesses, is reaching down out of the clouds to feed the crucified Eleanor Roosevelt a bite of a gingerbread boy. Meanwhile, the smaller TVs sport a documentary on Kandinsky’s paintings, Disney’s
Fantasia
(the scene where the mushrooms dance), the local 11 o’clock news (the funeral of a police dog), an educational video on childbirth, and a looped sequence that keeps repeating the scene of the guy in the film
Dr. Strangelove
who rides the falling nuclear bomb through the sky like a bucking bronco.
My helpers slide me and the cross to rest horizontally on the stage, which is maybe six feet higher than the dance floor. Then Daniel and George pull themselves up to join me and lift me and the cross to the vertical position. They lean me against a stack of amplifiers and drift out of the spotlight, where they take up their instruments and start playing an almost subliminal drone. I’m not hanging from the cross, though my arms are suspended from it. My feet are firmly on the ground. Pausing to make a panoramic gaze, I address the throng.
As of now, dear audience, you’re being entertained by a hostage crisis.
As of now, you’re experiencing a ransom note—a
designer
ransom note—which is also a major news story and a healing advertisement and a ticklish manifesto introducing you to the strategies by which you can prevent the global genocide of the imagination.
As of now, we, the peaceful soldiers of the World Entertainment War, have kidnapped ourselves and are holding ourselves hostage until you meet our demands. And we do mean
you
. We don’t mean some friendly tyrant or criminally innocent celebrity. We are holding ourselves hostage until
you
meet all eight hundred eighty-eight of our demands.
Here are our first demands:
DEMAND #1: We demand an immediate three-week global boycott of all media. Consume no television, Internet, radio, movies, newspapers, or magazines! Return to the primordial silence for three days or else!
DEMAND #2: We demand that the word “asshole” begin to be used as a term of endearment rather than abuse.
DEMAND #3: We demand that the average length of an act of heterosexual intercourse in America—which is now an appalling four minutes—be required by law to be a minimum of twenty-two minutes.
DEMAND #4: We demand that all anchormen cry every time they report a tragedy on their nightly TV news shows.
DEMAND #5: We demand that
People
magazine do a cover story on “The Ten Sexiest Homeless Americans.”
We have eight hundred eighty-three more demands, but there’s plenty of time for them later. First we want you to know more about who we are and what we offer.
We are the World Entertainment War, sacred saboteurs dedicated to helping you learn the difference between your own thoughts and those of the celebrities who have demonically possessed you. Our purpose is to save your imagination from the poisons of the entertainment criminals.
On
their
televisions, the televisions of the entertainment criminals, crude storytellers called “journalists” terrorize you with nihilistic yet sentimental myths that seem to prove the lie, “If it isn’t ugly, it’s dishonest.”
But on
our
televisions, on the televisions we control, aspiring bodhisattvas tell you funny stories about how to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction. In
our
movies and websites and radio shows, holographic reruns of your happiest memories repeat continuously on instant replay, freeing up your libidos to become telepathically linked with thousands of psychoactivists who’ve already learned beyond a doubt that they are geniuses! Just as you are!
DEMAND #6: We demand the production of a major feature film based on our life stories. Also, a best-selling book,
a weekly column in
USA Today
, and an appearance on the David Letterman show.
DEMAND #7: We demand that brilliant genetic engineers create a mutant bacteria that causes people to hate opinion polls.
DEMAND #8: We demand that you all live up to your full potential.
DEMAND #9: We demand that God be referred to on all future TV shows as a big black lesbian woman. We demand an end to the molestation, exploitation, and torture of God by the world’s major so-called religions.
DEMAND #10: We demand an exposé of so-called nice people who cynically use honesty, cheerfulness, and openness to manipulate others into doing things their way.
We, the peaceful soldiers of the World Entertainment War, are supreme patriots! And when in the course of inhuman events you discover as we did that entertainment criminals are pouring trillions of dollars into making the world safe for America’s most dangerous images, it becomes necessary to learn very intimately how everyone and everything worth loving—including our native land—is an inextricable blend of divine revelation and idiotic bullshit.
Therefore we hold these truths to be self-evident:
that everything we behold with our five senses composes but a tiny percentage of the twenty-six dimensions of ecstatic creation that God and Goddess freshly fuck into being every second;
that while there may be, for all we know, such a thing as “objective reality,” it most certainly does not consist of the endless streams of pictures in our imaginations, which our arrogant egos mistake for the external world;
that therefore every “truth” you and I embrace with such certainty cannot possibly be more than a little bit correct, and to pretend otherwise is the only original sin;
that like docufiction movies and every nightly TV newscast ever done, like life itself, fact and creative storytelling
are always blended together so seamlessly that there is no honest way to tell the difference; and that therefore our imaginations are our most sacred organs which create every story we see and believe in;
that we have the right to believe in any story we conjure up or believe in, but not to the point that we would hate or kill people who don’t love our stories as much as we do;
that when an elite group of human parasites with obscene amounts of money and technology at their disposal try to trick us into believing that their stories are truer than everyone else’s, it is our patriotic right and duty to become trickier than they are.
We therefore do uproariously declare World Entertainment War against all evil advertising geniuses, disinfotainment peddlers disguised as journalists, simulation experts specializing in the rape of our memories, fraudulently immortal celebrities bent on haunting our dreams with their empty souls, cartels of friendly father figures hawking pretty media viruses, and all other genociders of the imagination.
To defend our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, we pledge to fight the entertainment criminals in such a way that we don’t become like them.
DEMAND #11: We demand an affirmative action program that will make a majority of all Americans celebrities within five years.
DEMAND #12: We demand foreskin reimplantations for men who associate sex with violence because they suffered the trauma of circumcision within hours after they first came into the world.
DEMAND #13: We demand that brilliant American engineers create a machine for measuring emotional pain. We demand that moralists of every stripe use this technology to try to prove that their favorite victims suffer more than the favorite victims of other moralists.
DEMAND #14: We demand that you experience global warming in your pants.
DEMAND #15: We demand that somebody come and cut me down from this crucifix so I can teach everyone the fine art of kicking their own asses. NOW!
At this cue, Darby and Amy glide onto the stage, each armed with a black Navy Seal knife, and slice through the ropes that have kept me tethered. Meanwhile, the rest of the band breaks into the juju trance rhythms that launch our song “Kick Your Own Ass.”
As Darby and Amy scurry to their microphones, I turn my back to the audience and begin demonstrating the proper technique. First I take both hands and rub the area that will soon be impacted. Next I thrust my arms up over my head as if preparing for a high dive, then wiggle the area below my belt, careful to give the gesture a masculine cast, like a male rather than a female stripper. Finally, in tune to the beat, I jump off the ground with both feet and thrust my heels forcefully backwards into the target area. Mission accomplished, I propel my feet back down, landing in time to avoid crumbling to the ground.
Meanwhile, Darby and Amy are singing and chanting:
Your body is bread in a holy war
Change Change Change Change
My body is love in a holy store
Change Change Change Change
Your body is God and I want some more now
Change Change Change Change
My body is money and I’m spending it now
Change Change Change Change
Kick your own ass
NOW! NOW!
Kick your own ass
NOW! NOW!
When they reach the lines commanding the audience to participate, I repeat my lesson with a twist. Facing right this time, I administer two boots to my rear end in quick succession, matching their explosive NOWs, then quickly turn the other direction and make two
more stabs as they unleash the second set of NOWs.
As the song evolves, I show off every conceivable permutation of the holy gesture. By the end, all the band members except Squint join me in illustrating the technique. I’m ecstatic to see that well over half the crowd has joined our cause. It’s amazing to provoke this much audience participation, but then that’s our specialty.
“Now that you’ve disciplined yourselves,” I proclaim to the audience as the song ends, “you have every right to ask for the world.”
Amy switches the settings on her Korg keyboard to simulate a harp sound and begins playing in a hymnal vein. Soon she uses her other keyboard to add the reedy eddies of a snake charmer’s flute. Meanwhile, Squint summons a sinewy rhythm, making his maracas sound like a rattlesnake tail. He’s joined shortly by Daniel, who somehow makes his bass sound like a throbbing didgeridoo, and then George, whose churning guitar reminds me of a vat of chocolate cooking over an open flame.
Amy, Darby, and I sing in a whisper at first, chanting the same refrain over and over.
Give me what I want
Exactly when I want it
Forever
Now
Once upon a time
Steadily the volume swells, and as it reaches ripeness, Squint pounces on his snare and bass drum, kicking the groove into overdrive. Now our chant becomes strident, an exultant cry for liberation. Many members of the audience have added their voices to the plea, even as they dance with abandoned minds, like those whose lives have just been saved.
When I sense the climax is complete, and the mood is ready to shift—and I hate to brag, but reading a crowd is one of my most infallible talents—I signal to the instrumentalists, who manage to pull off an impeccable ending followed immediately by the launch of the next song on the set list. It’s a funky, percolating tune on which I sing lead:
I dropped out of kindergarten
to explore eternal youth
I talked back to Mr. Science
to defend eternal truth
I saw angels in my playpen
They taught me to kiss the sky
I unlocked all nature’s secrets
Cross my heart and hope to die
I bailed out of Daddy’s airplane
Fell to earth like angel dust
I broke into Caesar’s Palace
looking for eternal lust
Every time I found a goddess
we had sex by accident
No one even tried to stop me
when I fired the government
I don’t need no paradise
Living here is twice as nice
I don’t need no therapy
Free of freedom
Free of me
In mid-song, I crane my head around to monitor the big-screen TV behind me, checking to see what scene is playing. Huge bulldozers driven by teenage girl ninjas in clown make-up are scooping away the cars full of the television-headed human skeletons. A gaggle of witches in conical hats is tenderly removing Eleanor Roosevelt from her gnarled crucifix.