Nearer my Templar to Thee: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, BECKETT and THE BLIND DEAD

I never thought I'd be glad that parental over-protective hysteria is so rampant in this country, but thanks to widespread anti-Catholic demonstrations and the recently released documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (dir. Davis Guggenheim), a chronicle of America's embattled educational system which finally and succinctly (I haven't seen it, so I'm just believing the hype) there's finally some good affirmative answers to "Won't somebody think of the children!?". Hopefully the protests and awareness will spread amongst the uppity parents of the nation and gain force in showing up these protectors of incompetent, dangerously apathetic teachers, papal pedophiles, and other abusers and saboteurs of our children's welfare who hide behind (teacher's union-enforced) tenure and other outdated legalities that protect the guilty and champion the mediocre.





And another thing: none of it's at all new! Let's take a look at BECKETT (1964, above), for example. Richard Burton is the jaded intellectual pal of Peter O'Toole's happy-go-lusty King Henry. Henry appoints Beckett (Burton) the archbishop of Canterbury in hopes he'll let the king continue his lascivious ways unhindered by marital rigmarole, but it all boils to a head real fast when Beckett gets all pious, giving away his fancy clothes and then protecting a pedophile priest! O'Toole wants to do right by the locals and send the priest out to be tried by lynching or whatever is the style of the time, but Burton insists the priest go to the Vatican, for 'um', whatever amount of rosary-related penance the pope sees fit to assign.

Time for a quick personal anecdote: Of my 'group' from college, friends of friends who have since gone on to become doctors of psychiatry, professors of social work, professors, etc., a good portion of them were total flakes in undergraduate college, and it's hilarious to hear them solemnly and sanctimoniously preach the same stuff we used to make fun of... ala Burton in BECKETT. I'm not saying I'm any better, but if I was Peter O'Toole I wouldn't trust them to screw in a light bulb and yet they're the one's with the degrees and certification higher than mine... and I'm jealous! Kill Zem!

Tomb of the Blind Dead (1971)

Hey, another reason I'm not a doctor is that I hate studying and going to class, but I know something about the embattled world of academia, and the difference between real thinkers and idealists vs. professors who just protect their little niche: a lot of times they just sort of follow in some deep thinker's footsteps (see my "Kill All Jonesers"), who in turn followed in another's, until the originality is drained to hell. They appoint themselves 'experts' on people like Wordsworth and Whitman, who were they to meet them in person, said profs would probably run away in disgust (Whitman I bet you smelled really bad). I used to see these types in AA, touting how program-perfect they are and while no, they never actually got drunk or liked to drink, they're sure they would have had a problem had they ever started down that road to ruin! So now they're fucking experts on sobriety and so glad their "nightmare" is over!" Dude, what nightmare? We used to joke about how leaving behind half-full beers was alcohol abuse, and on that level only were these punters ever 'problem' drinkers. All they are is itching for a captive audience. They're the ones who would jump onstage when our band was playing, grab the mike and say anything at all, just to get the attention. Now they have an even more captive audience which they've done even less to earn. 

A lot of this problem could be solved by taking the status and dusty immunity of academic, medical and religious positions away, and adapting a broader socialist system, like Argentina's.  Last I heard, a doctor made around $400 a month, A MONTH, in Buenos Aires. A cab driver, maybe $125 a month, a teacher, $250... and they get by. Here we're blessed with a capitalist system, wherein doctors and lawyers are supposed to be robbing us all blind; we're supposed to not be able to afford our rent. In Argentina, the doctors make house calls! They come over to look at your tonsils, have a mate', smoke a cigarette with you in the kitchen, use your phone to call in, get the next address of a patient in need, and they're off like firemen. Imagine if your house was on fire but you had to go the firehouse and fill out forms and show your insurance before they'd go out to your house? Absurd, right? Imagine if before a cop would come investigate your robbery you had to show him your police insurance card? Why is that more absurd to us than hospitals where patients die in the waiting room or are turned away to bleed to death in the streets?






Now let's move over to the priesthood and the issue of celibacy. I understand the motivation behind the vow of celibacy angle, but the celibacy thing should just be a natural result of being close to God, sex falls away like a booster rocket, but only if the subject is truly dwelling 24/7 in the conscious grace of God. Being called a priest does not automatically lift you beyond sexual desire, anymore than graduating college means you're an intellectual. For example: as a child I had a lot of trouble learning to tie my shoelaces. I heard other kids and adults say that everyone knows how to tie their shoes by the time they are five years old, so on my fifth birthday I actually expected I'd just miraculously know how to tie them. I ran into the bathroom, propped by untied shoe up on the closed toilet seat and viola!!

Needless to say, I had been hoodwinked. I was so confused, but I 'got' it, I laughed it off, one thing I did learn was that you can't think that a socially-conferred title actually has any 'real' power to change you. Being five doesn't mean you can tie your shoes any more than being chosen as a priest means you are miraculously free of all sexual desire. If you have said desire and repress it, then look out, because all the praying in the world is only going to prolong the pressure cooking of your libido, like thinking you can hold a Nerf ball under water for 30 straight years and its never going to pop up and smack some poor kid in the face.


Now it's easy in retrospect to forget that plenty of children grew up going to Catholic school without being molested. There are plenty of great humanitarian doctors and excellent teachers, and teachers' unions are a good thing as far as assuring reasonable pay rates and so forth, but once in place, the union should be ready to get out of the way and let bad teachers be fired, unions should not be championing incompetence, or forfeiting across the board raises in favor of being granted more control over hiring and firing practices.

Now most teachers who have tenure are awesome in every way which is why they get tenure, but a very small and certain few got it by chicanery, string-pulling and just applying every year for decade after decade until a dean is just to tired to refuse, or they get tenure but then caught up in union delegating and so forth, and let a little taste of power turn them into litigious, self-righteous grudge-carriers, kind of like old BECKETT. He was great as a teacher/drinking buddy but turn him into an archbiship/union rep and he's a menace to the public interest. Huffington's Kelli Goff writes about this in her review of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN: 

In a scene that will make every person's skin crawl, Guggenheim interviews a former superintendent who recounts attempting to fire teachers who were caught on video reading the newspaper as their students sat waiting to learn, and another who placed a child's head in a urinal. After firing the teachers in question -- like any normal person would -- the superintendent and district were forced to rehire them -- with back pay -- due to tenure. (Kelli Goff, Huffington Post, 9/28/10)

In BECKETT this is reflected in Burton's conversion from a lusty brigand to a protector of the clergy, from Norma Rae to Norman Bates, decrying that the molesting priest must be tried by the church, which is to say, given perhaps a scolding and six hail Marys instead of hung, good and proper!

Peter O'Toole's Henry is pretty sure old Beckett's just fallen in love with his new sense of power and is not actually believing all that holier than thou bullshit. But he's wrong, Burton's Beckett has bought into the rigmarole hook line and sinker. And that's the problem with power in the wrong hands, in Beckett's, in the tenured faculty, the clergy, the unions. O'Toole's nutty king is worthy of power because he wears all his evil up front: he's good inside with an evil shell, like a New Yorker. Burton's Beckett hangs back and looks pious, but he's the real danger in the realm: he's evil inside and pious/good outside, like he's from LA. Give him a title and he'll be crazy enough to take it seriously. Such people are dangerous to all concerned, blind to their own self-importance, dead to the compassion their role demands, afflicted with what Lacan might call "signifier-blindness" (1) - BLIND DEAD, in fact!.

The first of a trilogy, TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD involves ghost-zombies of old Portuguese Knights Templar chasing and killing all the sinful locals who trespass around their old Malta stomping grounds. Basically unstoppable, the zombies just keep coming, wrapping their skeleton hands around all the lovely ladies and gigolo boyfriends, all of whom behave in such a dumb, unassuming way as to be ridiculously easy to kill. It's a perfect metaphor for our current situation; we may be aware that these zombie killers are out there, slowly shambling towards us on their slow mo horses, but unless we stop behaving like easy prey and start rising up en masse to demand radical reform of the tenure system, unions and the church, we'll be slaughtered by Templars, Draconians, and Freemasons, and our children will be abused systematically until the last spark of life drains from their dewy eyes. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!??

Until we take drastic steps like the above and/or failing that, getting out the torches and pitchforks, we're like those vice-engorged Portuguese in TOMBS, jetsetting ourselves and our children up for a royal trimming by the Templars. The idiocy of the humans in this movie is appalling. They're all alone out there and surrounded by zombies, and the guy goes: "Honey, you wait here. I'm going to go check out that weird screaming noise out there in the dark," leaving her of course completely vulnerable. Is this not what we say to our families, still trusting in the decency of the status quo to protect us?

Why does every man think the safest thing to do is tell the women and children 'wait here' while they go off into the darkness, unarmed, to check out a noise? Now you know that the answer is: they're too afraid to face the real enemies: the church and tenure system! Tax them! Tax them and kill them! Except of course, the good ones. How you tell the good from the bad? Sorry, got to go.





NOTES
1. Like snow-blindness, rather than like being blind to signifiers.