Apology Inc.

And now, a few words from the “Andy Rooney” of “Gen X”.

I missed the bus again for a doctor appointment. This “triggers” a series of neurotic behaviors, which I do my best to recognize and manage when they happen.

After I realized that there was not enough time to transport my physical being to the required destination by any existing method, I left a rambling, apologetic voicemail for my doctor, who is, as it happens, an attractive young woman. I added that last part because by the time I finish typing this sentence, my mind will have totally fabricated a scenario wherein my doctor shames me for fucking up something as simple as catching a city bus. Based on no evidence, potentially causing an entire day of self-loathing.

During the expected shame spiral, I often wonder if there were subconscious motivators behind not getting on the bus. I actually felt pretty good about myself this morning, which is in itself a minor miracle, and I might have balked at the extreme likelihood of a confrontation with another denizen of the region, which happens with more frequency than I’d prefer. This is why some people get stoned, to cool the anxiety that comes from traveling in a confined space with loud, unpredictable people.

Now I’m thinking, what if my doctor is disappointed because I didn’t just catch the next bus. Again; this is all imaginary; I guarantee my doctor is aware of and completely understands my issues with public transit. Nevertheless, imaginary scenes of humiliation creep out of nowhere like a venereal fungus, fueled by paucity of physical contact and poison-bitter alienation. I have to take the bus to get to the store anyway, and eventually I’ll have to use it daily for work, and really I am just a lowlife piece of shit who should kill himself.

This is all caused by not getting on a bus.

Granted, there are two hard realities in play here;

Public transit in any major city, let alone this one, is typically rather rough-and-tumble.
I have a long history of anxiety attacks, and am often mercurial and peevish in public.

Still, despite the fact that I am now farming material from the experience, the imaginary version of my doctor that lives in my head has lost all respect for me. She listened to my voicemail, heard my jabbering, awkward apology for being a no-show again, and let’s stop right here, because I’m actually fucking myself up.

But… you get the idea, right? I missed the bus, I called ahead to notify my doctor; what am I apologizing for? I’m not wasting her time, because like I said, I called ahead of it. I don’t even have to go into details about the bus; I missed it. All that matters is that I wouldn’t be able to make it. Why the performative mea culpa? Why the self-hatred?

Is it because I like my doctor, and thus being held in her esteem is something I secretly fear losing? Is it because last time, she invited an extremely beautiful young female student doctor in to observe the session, and I had to bite back comments about how of course she has a rock on her finger the size of a large object, that’s the only reason I didn’t lay on the charm more thickly? Seriously, long wavy golden hair, no joke probably a 9, and me looking like (and literally coming from) the wrong side of the tracks? Probably smelling of same, despite my best efforts?

Where was I?

Sorry. Now I’m wondering if I intentionally missed the bus out of fear of seeing that girl again and instinctively wanting to chat her up. Or if I was afraid of disappointing her too, like I imagined I had with my doctor. My fucking mind is a circus within a circus.

It all goes back to a simple lesson I learned as a child; if you make fun of someone who is alive, be prepared for them to get angry and not only strike back, but antagonize you for an indefinite length of time. If you make fun of someone dead, you risk all manner of harsh recriminations. Or worse:

You could be forced into apologizing.

On the schoolyard, that’s no big whoop, if an authority forces you to grovel before another kid who hates your guts now but will forget everything by tomorrow. But when it comes to creators of million-dollar intellectual properties, a forced public apology can be anything from a gesture of corporate submission to a full-blown humiliation ritual. The kind that leaves companies in ruin.

Because I created Bands I Useta Like in 1998, I still look at it as a “90’s strip”, despite the fact that it was published from 2002 to 2021. So, I see myself as concurrent with other entities of that decade, at least for the purposes of this article. As such:

SOUTH PARK (TV show): est. 1997
BANDS I USETA LIKE (comic strip): est. 1998
FAMILY GUY (TV show): est. 1999

Aside from all being cartoons, these things are only related by a general conceit of saying what people are thinking but are afraid to say themselves. For me, this meant calling out John Lennon as a meth-addled phony, and goofing on Tori Amos during a time when you did not do such things.

For South Park and Family Guy, especially around the turn of the century, that meant Jew jokes, and lots of ’em. For a short while, it seemed like half the shows on Comedy Central were trying to out-Jew-joke each other. Until suddenly… they weren’t. Suddenly it was a harmful practice that rhymes with man-tie-Memitism.

Here’s why I don’t make Jew jokes:

I don’t goof on anything that has its own “anti-defamation league”, and
I’m not Jewish.

When South Park makes fun of Jews, the implication is “this is how Colorado rednecks see Jewish people, and vice versa”. When Family Guy does it, the implication is the same, but with Rhode Island white trash Catholics instead of rednecks. Both shows are satires of contemporary American life, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Both shows were once known for scathing, razor-sharp socio-political commentary.

Neither show made a single joke at the expense of Joe Biden or his administration. Not one.

Neither show questioned nor did anything but shill the COVID vaccinations, lockdowns, and governmental overreach. Neither show took the side of the people. They went right into brainwashed lockstep with the rest of the Hollyweirdos. They legitimately turned on us.

In all seriousness; when was the last time Family Guy, The Simpsons or South Park related to you, rather than something in the mainstream media that month?

Family Guy, in recent seasons, has repeatedly treated anyone who questioned the COVID narrative (or refused vaccination) as a despised enemy worthy of public scorn. There have been endless cheap shots at Trump that might as well have sprung from Facebook circa 2017. The Simpsons made a “special short” about Trump being chased around the White House by the “Squad” of professional imbeciles like Ilhan Omar, who recently said “World War Eleven” in front of the press (presumably meaning “WWII”). Omar’s little gamer-buddy “AOC” once cried in front of an empty parking lot, for a photo op reacting to a “detention center”.

These are not people whom you’d expect to be treated with kid gloves by your favorite scathing cartoon satires, yet here we are. The only bit on Family Guy about “AOC” that I can recall involved a background simp exclaiming unprovoked, “she’s hot, but we have to pretend she’s not!”

Feel that cringe? That means you’ve seen more than five women in your life, and you recognize that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is a 3 on a good day. Any man who professes affection for that person is a compromised quisling with the political acumen of a deer tick. Christ alive, have some self-respect. You might as well tell people you want to fuck a moldy pineapple.

-Oh right right, someone is invariably gonna bring up my thing for Lauren Boebert. Let me tell you something; if there’s anything I appreciate in this life, it’s a goer. I’m not saying that’s what Boebert is, but I’ve been around the block a few times, and my instincts are pretty solid. The odds that I will ever meet and/or bang Lauren Boebert are nil, so my feelings for her are purely evanescent. Does that mean I don’t occasionally think about fondling her titties in a movie theater? No comment.

The key here is relatability. For the first ten seasons of each show, The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy were relatable, from the characters, to the context, to the unpolished (at first) aesthetics. All three pushed the envelope in their own ways, and all three went on to become corporate juggernauts that grossed millions in DVDs, toys, and video games. All three sacrificed their integrity in the process, and currently exist as pusillanimous mockeries of their original selves.

The Simpsons decided that Apu (voiced by the legendary Hank Azaria) was offensive after being one of the most beloved and multifaceted characters for 20 years (based on one jerk’s complaint), so they memory-holed him. Family Guy decided they felt guilty about paying a white man to voice (the black) Cleveland Brown, so instead of Mike Henry impersonating his college roommate, now we get a kid who grew up watching the show impersonating Cleveland Brown. Progress! (All due respect; I can’t tell the difference between the two voice actors.)

I get my information about South Park second-hand, because I don’t care for the show. I don’t like the Team America movie, and I don’t like any of the other stuff those guys have done. They are like the twin Tarantinos of animated comedy, and I don’t mean that as a compliment; I mean I’ve never gotten the impression that there’s any passion in anything they do. Plus they’re every bit as sold-out, if not more so. They’re like Dave Chappelle; they’d literally blow you for a million dollars. They hate the show that made them millionaires, but they know it’s all they have, and it shows.

Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh famously said “I like beer”, while the mainstream media did its best to harpoon his career before it even started. Biden-appointed (or autopen-appointed, depending upon whom you ask) Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson literally asked the question “what is a woman?”, despite presumably being one.

Which one of those two public figures do you think Family Guy spent an entire episode goofing on? Who do you honestly feel is more worthy of ridicule? (No points for guessing which Justice is depicted as a superhero in the same show.)

When Trump was first elected in 2016, the South Park guys famously took their ball and went home, claiming that the world was crazy enough on its own without their Emmy-winning cartoon show lampooning the White House on top of it. They reneged on this cop-out when Trump was re-elected in 2024, using the exact same shopworn playbook as Family Guy:

Trump has silly hair, orange skin and tiny hands
Trump suggests grabbing women by the vagina, something Harvey Weinstein actually did, but he’s Jewish so let’s ignore him just to be safe
Trump is butt-buddies with Vladimir Putin, who secretly controls him like a puppet, because that wall Trump put his lips on while wearing a yarmulke was totes in Russia you guise
All Trump supporters are white supremacist neo-Nazi domestic terrorists, without exception, identifiable by their red baseball caps and chanting of “MAGA”, who openly threaten gays and anyone with brown skin

South Park even rolled out the most impotent canard in the deck of mockery; repeatedly claiming that Trump has a little dick. First of all, that’s how scorned whores argue. Secondly, this is supposedly two of the highest-paid comedy writers in television history, now employed by Paramount, whose show has won four Emmys. You know, that show where people shit out their mouths and fourth-grade boys suck on each other’s scrotum. The show where both a gerbil and disgraced socialite Paris Hilton are crammed into human rectums on-screen. Where kids are traumatized by a movie featuring Steven Spielberg and George Lucas repeatedly and violently ass-raping Indiana Jones. Yes, that amazing cartoon show.

Remember the hilarious and unfortunately named Whitest Kids U’Know? Funnier than The State, not quite as funny as Kids In The Hall? Trevor Moore, the genius frontman of the group, ~~was killed~~ died suddenly under mysterious circumstances, so there’s nobody with the balls to defend their most controversial sketches. Now there’s a hacked-to-pieces “remastered” version of WKUK‘s series you can buy, where surviving members Zach Cregger and Timmy Williams did the right thing by cutting out all the “mean stuff” that might “trigger” more sensitive viewers.

Golly gee; why would they do that? The mind reels.

“Presidential Props” (2009) [the sketch where they have a presidential debate and each candidate is allowed two props]

Starring Williams as an idealistic senator at a presidential debate intent on discussing issues like fighting poverty and ending America’s latest war, the sketch takes a turn for the absurd (or so it seemed at the time) when the other candidates begin using props to distract each other as well as win over the crowd with cheap entertainment. This sketch gives insight into how people like Trump get elected president. Of course, after Trump’s performances in the 2016 and 2020 debates — where he indulged in “braggadociousness” (his own word) while disingenuously denying doing so and, in the first 2020 debate, repeatedly interrupted former Vice President Joe Biden — the sketch’s central joke seems more like a slight exaggeration.

“I don’t think we knew that we were on this trajectory,” Cregger said. Both this sketch and another one “are about that tendency of American culture to blend entertainment into its politics. And I think that 2016 was sort of the logical outcome of that sort of innate desire in all of us. It sucks because you then end up with a f***ing moron reality star as your president.”

“President Trump is a symptom of the disease, not the start of it,” Williams added. “So I think that those things were already there when we made those sketches, our tendencies toward worshiping celebrities and distracting ourselves with shiny objects. And it’s only gotten worse.”

“It’s just not funny anymore,” Cregger mused. “Everything is ruined. You could kind of hint at it and poke fun at it because society was kind of sick this way, but now we’re f***ed.”
^{_{-from a November 2020 Salon article highlighting that publication’s typical even-handedness and lack of political bias}}

Zach Cregger is the writer/director of the recent hit films Barbarian and Weapons. I guess that’s a big step up from the turkey he made with Trevor Moore back in 2009. He’s also behind the upcoming Resident Evil reboot.

See how that works? You’re not supposed to notice.

Influential person or celebrity becomes infamous for causing an offense of some kind within the media.
The media ~~fabricates a public humiliation ritual~~ grants the influential person the opportunity to humble themselves and apologize for their misdeeds.
The influential person fights for and defends the media, often with psychotic, animal fury, even if they’re defending literal child-traffickers and pedophiles, while they enjoy the lavish, pampered lifestyle of a celebrity.
We get another condescending lecture about global politics from yet another champagne-socialist Hollywood jizz-jar, who’ll be totally forgotten when they inevitably lose their status as a “useful idiot” (a better/dumber one comes along, or “gets martyred”).

If Saturday Night Live was a regular comedy/variety show, it would’ve been cancelled twenty years ago. But SNL is far too valuable as a form of leverage. Not only does the program feature an enormous and profitable archive of material from dead beloved comedians, it has a long history of celebrities and politicians embarrassing themselves live on stage. Musical groups, too. The possession of this material has made Lorne Michaels one of the most powerful producers in entertainment history.

Since you won’t remember the names of the actresses who blabbed to the press about Lorne Michaels’s sexist attitudes and practices back in the 1990’s, it’s Julia Sweeney and Nora Dunn. At one time, both were very famous; Sweeney even headlined a movie based on her now-problematic character “Pat”. Seriously, Ween was in it. I think Nora Dunn had a bit part in Southland Tales, which makes her the clear winner in this situation if you ask me.

Lorne Michaels once told cast member Kate McKinnon that he never would have hired her if he’d known she was a lesbian. I wouldn’t have hired her because she’s gratingly unfunny, but my point is, neither was harmed in the slightest by this remark. The lugenpresse made sure that the idiots who still watch SNL were distracted by climate change or Trump’s tiny penis or some such nonsense. When you control the right media, you control the media itself.

This is why you’ve never heard Lorne Michaels apologize for anything. He’s in the elite; he makes you apologize. In public, for something you didn’t do, so he looks better at your expense. This is literally how everything in the Hollywood power structure works now. This is how it is when unionized agents endlessly game the system for their own considerable benefit.

Every single celebrity you can name has an agent, a manager, and a publicist, all of whom live like celebrities themselves. All four belong to unions, which means they all pay dues and answer to whomever is higher on the totem pole. If you don’t belong to an actors’ union, you will never, ever appear on screen with anyone who does in any meaningful capacity. You are an illegal loose end, with nothing to offer, even as a useful idiot. You haven’t debased yourself in public nearly as much as the elite class have, and no one likes a goody-two-shoes.

You think they ever missed a bus for a doctor’s appointment?

You think they’ve ever ridden on one?