Said Terry Gilliam, quoted in "Terry Gilliam: How I was squished by cancel culture/In his first interview since the Old Vic axed his musical, the director and former Python gives his side of the story on transgender rights, black lesbians and #MeToo" (London Times).
And there's this, about the 1960s and these kids today:
"It was expansive, exploring and exciting, the world had all these possibilities. And now it’s going in the opposite direction, imploding. It’s ‘any thought that makes me feel uncomfortable I have to be protected from’. That’s terrifying... At universities when a lecturer comes in the ideas are so disturbing that the students have to go into a safe room, where they can hold hands and recover from these ideas. When universities say we want our students to be comfortable, what the f*** are they talking about? University is about expanding minds."
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28 comments:
Saints don't need to go to church...
I bet Terry Gilliam has hardly been to confession in 40 years. Holy Grail, Brian, Meaning of Life....1
Does it occur to Terry that the anarchic surrealism that Python introduced to comedy had its intended subversive effect, but created a cultural vacuum now filled by left wing ideology? We are now ruled by the Judean Liberation Front, having wiped out The People's Front for the Liberation of Judea. Python was merely a Menshevik wave, useful in its demolition of the bourgeoisie, but now overtaken and extinguished by the Leninists.
Was that predictable? I dunno.
"It was expansive, exploring and exciting, the world had all these possibilities. And now it’s going in the opposite direction, imploding."
At the end of the day, most people don't actually care about freedom, possibilities, or intellectual openness. They don't care about systems of oppressing as systems.
Most people just want to be the oppressors. Once they overcome the previous perceived oppressors, they enact the same limitations as before based on their hold of power and dogma.
The same people who expanded, explored, excited in the 1960s are the very people in charge now, and have appointed their successors to continue their patterns.
It's not anti-religious, it's still very religious, fundamentalist in dogma, only there's no avenue of redemption, just condemnation.
Nobody expects the Woke Inquisition. Amongst their weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to Nancy Pelosi, and nice gender fluid uniforms.
Plus, there's all those blowjobs you get as an 8-year-old. Of course, you have to give them too. Nothing's free. Least of all Heaven.
When universities say we want our students to be comfortable, what the f*** are they talking about? University is about expanding minds."
No, universities are about indoctrinating people into the Left wing ideology, nothing more.
And when they get wiped out, they will be entirely to blame
I'm a great admirer of his movies. Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys are among the few movies I will watch repeatedly.
It's The Fisher King for me. Such a lovely film. He's made movies ranging from not-so-good to great, but it's hard to imagine anyone but him making any of them.
Buckwheathikes: more the 12-15yrold range, I’d say.
Pederasty.
The world over- shit’s gonna happen. People are human and humanity is flawed.
I will wager it’s happened in every religion. Hopefully, we can root out evil. Wherever it is…
Him and John Cleese, both taking end-of-career speaking tours decrying the cultural disintegration they agitated for in their salad days. Was it Gilliam who said that the object of 'Python' was to see how far up their fathers' noses they could get?
Sacraments are a source of grace. But reading scripture frees one from the monopolists selling the sacraments.
Gilliam’s description of college life in the 1960’s triggered some strong memories for me of when I was a student at Indiana University in the 1970’s working on a student petition started by Crazy Leon Varjian to get the campus TV station to carry Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The combination of watching Python while interacting with Leon was quite the experience for this young college student!
'Plus, there's all those blowjobs you get as an 8-year-old. Of course, you have to give them too. Nothing's free. Least of all Heaven.'
Now do public (government) schools...
It's a sad civilization that can be brought down by a posse of intellectual pratfallers--even a posse as brilliant, creative, and FUNNY (remember funny? I guess you had to be there) as Python.
We need more of that Python spirit now. Badly.
Trying to understand wokiness. Here comes a theory.
If you are very young 20, 21 you belong to a group of friends who actually are of all races. You are trying to keep the group together although the forces of competition tear at its unity. There's no really good shows about such a group although it is actually the norm in your age group. It wasn't the norm even twenty years ago, maybe not even ten or twelve years ago and so there aren't experienced writers who can present comic, daily and tragic situations as they are in such a group. There's no Cheers, no Friends, no Sex and the City, no Mad About You, no Archie Bunker, no Cagney and Lacey. Current shows and writing show the sort of mixed group you belong to but they invariable present such groupings as a perfect, problem-free, situation-free stage set. So you present to others and require from yourselves a certain kind of outward conformity. Requiring this is one thing in your group which has special difficulties and is struggling with a brand new social situation in your country and culture, but it's QUITE ANOTHER thing when you try to impose your kind of conformity on all other age groups. Within your group there's a lot of unspoken understanding. Outside your group you are REALLY, REALLY angering people whose jobs you endanger by requiring them to act in accordance with your group's unspoken, unknown norms which are experienced by all other groups as bizarre yet humorless demands. Your unspoken norms are backed by threats of branding norm-breakers as "racists" and are therefore experienced as danger arriving suddenly like lightning strikes. But your own situation is so new and it's occurring in a group that's so young, so hidden, so "eyes wide shut" ...
Maybe something like this is going on? I really don't know - I'm uncomfortably trying to understand people three generations away from me. It ain't The Sixties but what is it?
IIRC most saints didn't become one because it was easy, but because it was an acknowledgement of suffering for the faith.
Anglicans in search of God are their own Monty Python sketch. The Anglicans are perhaps the most respectable religion, but their religion was founded by a serial murderer to facilitate his divorce and to pick up a few quick quid by confiscating monastic lands....The Anglicans tried to convince themselves that they were the true Catholic Church, that they had gotten rid of all that Papal corruption and returned the Church to its true beginnings. It worked for awhile. The trick was not to use too much linen and flowers on the altar during Sunday services. That way lies Papistry....Nowadays, I understand that there are more, a lot more, practicing Catholics in England than Anglicans. All that fuss, and they're back to where they started.
He’s right. Wokism and CRT both have that major defect in that there is no forgiveness, no mechanism to earn it either.
Does it occur to Terry that the anarchic surrealism that Python introduced to comedy had its intended subversive effect, but created a cultural vacuum now filled by left wing ideology?
Do you really have to ask?
Between Monty Python and the Muppets, the youth of western civilization have been drained of their precious bodily fluids and set adrift in the Godless void of surrealist anarchy. It's a fair cop.
Paddy O . . . Woke Inquisition . . . very nice.
JRoberts at 8:38 PM: I was a student at Indiana University Bloomington from 1970 to 75. I lived in Wright Quad.
"No, universities are about indoctrinating people into the Left wing ideology, nothing more."
Never been to college, I take it?
The mass affluence of the 1960s was something new and unprecedented. It was bound to produce something new in life and the arts. Old barriers came down. New things were created. Since then, the culture industry has been trying to maintain that feeling of novelty. They don't have anything really new to say, so they knock down what they see as barriers.
"Irreverence" was a big word in the 60s. It's lost its punch. There isn't that much to be irreverent about, and as others have noted, the kind of people who were irreverent and rebellious then are the kind of people who are running things now. They've figured out that the way to do so is to present themselves as a liberating force. "The Man" or "The Establishment" now tells us that the way to "fight The Man" is to "obey The Man."
On the one hand, the 1960s were marked by great concern for civil rights, equality, and human dignity. On the other hand, well-off men and boys used the talk of "liberation" to exploit women. Young radicals weren't above using crude stereotypes of outsiders of the wrong, unfashionable sort, and assumed that the minorities they claimed to care about wanted the leadership of young White guys.
That didn't last. It was already coming apart in the 1970s. Radicals were already having struggle sessions with their white privilege. You aren't going to recapture the idea that suburban White kids are going to be great rebels by joking about sacred cows, when all the sacred cows are gone or replaced by woke ones.
wildswan's speculation makes a lot of sense to me.
"Cultural Vacuum" would be a good name for a band.
And Heywood Rice's at 638am is excellent.
This may be the earliest Saturday morning comment I've ever made.
I find it interesting that comedians by trade understand human nature better than the average person. As a result they see manipulations of people more clearly. Doesn’t make them better people but it does make them a bit clearer on what’s going on in society.
"Him and John Cleese, both taking end-of-career speaking tours decrying the cultural disintegration they agitated for in their salad days. Was it Gilliam who said that the object of 'Python' was to see how far up their fathers' noses they could get?"
Transgressives are rarely able to understand the reality of things they transgress against; if they did, they wouldn't be transgressive in the first place.
I enjoyed Monty Python. As a kid. As an adult, I look at all the mockery of everything "Establishment Britain", and I have to wonder: What the hell were they thinking would replace the things they were mocking, once they successfully demolished it all through satire?
One marker for a failed revolution and failed revolutionaries is what happens after the revolution: If they're sitting around, a generation later, bemoaning the conditions obtaining after their little revolution succeeded, decrying the extremes that their ideological successors have come to...? Were they really trying for revolution, or just trying to replace the old set of bastards with their own?
I find it really hard to take any of these clowns seriously, because that's all they ever were--Clowns. The japes were fresh and entertaining, once upon a time, but now they are trite and stereotypical. Having won the revolution and torn down all that existed, we now come to the denouement and its implications: They really had nothing to replace that which they destroyed so gleefully.
I would laugh, I would. However, I've always been cursed with an ability to work out implications, see effects before causes. I'm with Chesterton and his Fence: Leave things alone that you do not understand, and only change those things you can change back. Monty Python et al. spent the 1960s and 1970s vandalizing the cultural commons for larfs; I find them today decrying the fairly obvious extrapolation of their efforts being played out before us, which is both hypocritical and even more hilarious in a very dark way.
In a way, it's as if some jester of the French court managed to call up the French Revolution, and is now out of work and starving in the streets, oblivious to the fact that as a parasite who killed his host, he was doomed. That's Monty Python and crew, I'm afraid: They were all part of the tapeworm parasitism that killed the body politic of that which was England, and now they're regretful that their host is dead.
Ya wanna be a successful parasite, you have to leave the host alive. Johnny Carson was probably a better exemplar for successful social parasitism than Monty Python, in the end.
Look, it's Prigs on Parade!
Strike up Colonel Bogey and carry on, chaps.
Any system that can be satirized into extinction isn't much of a system to begin with.
Never is the word saint used of a special group of believers who serve God better than others. Scripture is clear that all Christians are saints. You don't get nominated and then voted in to become a saint, scripture discusses saints over 60 times in the Bible and never references anything other than being believers in the gospel of Christ. In scripture a "Christian" is one who is led by the spirit of Christ. Romans 8 :14 Every follower of Jesus Christ is a saint,,All other is sinking sand.
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