I’m a fan of mythological metaphors. Hence, Kali–lily.
In a piece that begins, “I love chimeras,” today Maureen Dowd ends her rant about GOP chimeras opening Pandora’s Box with:
The Republican Party is now a chimera, too, a mutant of old guard Republicans, who want government kept out of our lives, and evangelical Christians, who want government to legislate religion into our lives.
But exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education, even in the blue states and blue suburbs of Maryland; a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a “culture of life” than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Even as scientists issue rules on chimeras in labs, a spine-tingling he-monster with the power to drag us back into the pre-Darwinian dark ages is slouching around Washington. It’s a fire-breathing creature with the head of W., the body of Bill Frist and the serpent tail of Tom DeLay.
And then there are the wonder-full American anarchist Muppets, who have been sucked into Disney’s insatiably blanding maw.
Of course, the possibility of a culture clash between Disney and the Muppets always seemed quite obvious. Until recently, let us not forget, Disney would not employ anyone with a beard at its theme-parks. One look at any picture of Jim Henson and the 1970s creative nebulous of The Muppet Show, on the other hand, reveals a group of hairy hippies, most of whom look like Robinson Crusoe at Day 405 on Treasure Island. The Muppets are essentially joyous and irreverent — their currency is pigs loving frogs, caterpillars smoking hookahs, Dr Teeth and His Electric Mayhem having “bummers”, and a disgruntled Statler and Waldorf trying to assassinate the whole cast. It’s hippies parodying reactionaries, bread-heads, divas and bores. It’s hard to see how they will fit, intact, into Disney’s cleaner-than-clean, carefuller-than-careful corporate world.
We’re surrounded by ’em –the moneyed right-eous. It’s the Crusades all over again, but this time on an even more spiritually destructive and global scale.
(Heh. Were you beginning to think that I was so wrapped up in my Little Picture that I wasn’t interested in the Big One anymore??)