Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 04:24:17 -0500
To: subgenius@egroups.com
From: "Rev. Ivan Stang" <stang@subgenius.com>
Regarding the subgenius.net situation, having met the guy in Tampa, and vented, I have a completely different attitude about it.
Rather than feeling threatened by them, I now feel more like they need our help, and that we can learn a few things from each other.
St. andreux and I talked with the fellow (who is not "RevPsych" incidentally, nor "Preacher Mike" of alt.slack) during the Tampa devival. I think that everything will be resolved with no trouble to either "side". Hopefully there won't be any "sides" after this. We can take a joke, as the X-Day Drills have proved time and again, and have no intention of messing up any original users of subgenius.net at all. "Revenge" is a stupid Pink concept -- thus best saved for using only on Pinks. And BEST performed by alien invaders from outer space, which is why we always council SubGenii never to mis-Smite anyone who even MIGHT CONCEIVABLY be another SubGenius. That's JUST what the Conspiracy WANTS us all to do.
Maintaining the integrity of our trademarks is about the only way we can keep the Conspiracy, or even Comedy Central, from popularizing a WATERED DOWN, PINKED UP version of the DobbsWord, if they have a mind to. So far, no giant Pink entertainment corporation has really given a shit THAT WE KNOW OF. But we all know, or hope, they'll HAVE to, sooner or later. And that is when the soul of the very Church COULD be ripped out by a bunch of high powered lawyers and country club judges. This won't stay college radio, Internet Sargasso, and "humor" trade paperbacks forever. (I admit there are times when I think that would be best!)
At the same time, the SubGenius Foundation must beware that it does not BECOME the Conspiracy, or rather another subtle little tentacle of it. Now, anyone who knows me, Jesus, or Philo Drummond personally -- and that's several hundred SubGenii I can think of offhand -- can tell that serious "selling out" must not yet be a big worry, else we'd be wearing much better shoes and driving MUCH better cars and living in VASTLY less populated neighborhoods. And wouldn't be MOONLIGHTING with DAY JOBS!!
I can see, however, how idealists who don't know us at all might assume that we really DID have the skyscraper in Dallas, or at least the battery of lawyers and the chorus line of hot babes. Well, we do have the chorus line of babes every few weeks. But, as was pointed out to me, the subgenius.net people are mostly not "newsgroup people." They haven't been on alt.slack since 1985, when it was started. They sure weren't spouting dogma in that trailer at Dokstok in the wilds of Arkansas in 1981. But they SAW DOBBS ON TV WHEN THEY WERE 8 YEARS OLD!! Hell, they might have seen ME on TV when they were 8 years old!
(Now THAT is TOTALLY weird to think about!)
I can see how we must look to them, threatening lawsuits and so forth. Heck, we do that all the time -- it's our job. We have to constantly collect proof that we pursued our trademarks. We have never actually sued anyone -- we never had to, BECAUSE we had been consistently vigilant. Think how many people we HAVE given permission to use the Dobbshead to, totally "on commission" (i.e. FREE). However, in the case of MCA Records, Penguin Books and a couple of other huge conglomerates, we had to push them to the point of agreeing that they'd used our mark without permission. We were LUCKY they didn't push BACK, because if they'd wanted to, at the time they could have fucked us but good through sheer lawyer power. (We didn't ask for any unreasonable money, so they were not inclined to be nasty either.)
There was a Canadian guy with tons of money -- I mean, a multi-multimillionaire -- who decided to "jam the jammers" with a fake "Bob" Dobbs who was incomprehensible, unfunny, and worst of all, he acted like he was the world's only SubGenius. Claimed to be "Bob." If we hadn't had the backing of our 5,000 Members (we've lost track of the other 10,000 or so) they could have had this guy starring in some network "Bob" Dobbs Variety Show that, believe me, would have made us all puke.
This fake Bob guy comes to devivals in disguise. He tape recorded our friends and me secretly. He tells people we ripped HIM off. He has a multimillionaire for a sugar-daddy. So far he has had zero presence on the Internet, however, so we've half expected him to finally surface in cyberspace. His motive? Far as I can tell, he actually thinks he's "Bob!"
Then there's the time the Secret Service visited in 1983, asking about our presidential assassination plans as outlined in a Stark Fist cartoon.
So you can see why we might seem paranoid and might tend to bristle when prodded. Making fun of the Grand Poobah Rev. Stang on some rogue Sub's website, hell, that's been going on for years. I've been getting roasted since 1979. I don't mind stuff like that for the simple reason that I REMEMBER BEING A PISSED OFF 26 YEAR OLD!! The very same 26 year old who typeset that pamphlet #1 with Philo as a LAST DITCH EFFORT to FIGHT BACK! Hell SHIT fire, *I* was the FIRST REAL "BOBBIE"! I had to deprogram *MYSELF*! ((WHO KNOWS if it fully worked??))
Nowadays, though... as the "high muck a muck" of the Church by default (since Dobbs is out fishing or surfing or scoring souls, and Philo is exemplifying Rewardian Slack), I and my good friend Jesus have the opportunity to take the tiny company that is the SubGenius Foundation, and the rowdy herd of rather unpredictable SubGenii, and either act like we're a bunch of miniature Napoleons with a rigid heirarchy and a real bureaucracy of volunteers, LIKE A REAL CULT or at least like AMWAY, OR, INSTEAD, to set an example by actually letting Slack come first, leaving the art project doors open and inviting ANYBODY to join in, actually being about as democratic as we could possibly be while still retaining enough of a "business" nature to AT LEAST SURVIVE and provide a semi-steady source of the word of Dobbs that could REALLY BE still the REAL THING.
That's the idea, anyway. All we have by which to measure whether we're on the right track is that we're still friends with almost everybody named in the credits of THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS (1983) and in REVELATION X. You can judge us by our friends and by our enemies -- that's something that we HEARTILY endorse. HEARTILY. We are probably the ONLY "cult" that URGES people, "GET TO KNOW OUR DETRACTORS and MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND! PLEASE!"
If we had gone Pink, would I be standing there at sales tables where any old bizarro could collar me, every two or three weeks, in cheesy bars or goofy festivals, doing my own god damn website html myself (well, mostly), posting and lurking on the newsgroups, ALWAYS there on IRC on Sunday, answering my own email and phone machine? Wouldn't we have, like, shut the doors at some point and said, "Uh-uh, no, there can be no more famous or up-and-coming SubGenii after us old timers"...? Hell no, it's more like a bubbling cauldron where they appear, get real crazed, then freak out and disappear for awhile (or retire), then come bubbling back up later, even funnier than before.
It's also natural for SubGenii to constantly fight with each other, because for every SubGenius there will always be another which is its exact opposite, and seems almost as if created just to piss off that first SubGenius.
I think that both groups have been ignorant of each others' histories. The whole thing has been blown out of proportion due to undue secrecy, snowballing suspicions (no matter how well based at the beginning) and overzealousness. I don't think hardly any of the .net SubGenii have ever actually MET any of the extremely loose community of individuals that one sees in the X-day photos, the newsgroups, SubSITE or the olden videos and tapes. (And then there's us RADIO SUBGENII who are the tiniest minority of all!)
We have always been able to resolve inter-SubGenius disputes before by communicating plainly (with the sole exception of the fake Bob jackasses... but then, they weren't SubGenii, just vampires). Having met the guy behind subgenius.net, I don't think they ever intended any hostile takeover at all; I just think they misread our extreme protectiveness of our trademark and adopted a defensive posture. Since we've been attacked before by real enemies with real money, our natural reaction was to go full red alert.
And believe me -- we're Slack Kadets, we HATE being on full red alert. NO SLACK AT ALL. So let's totally cease fire... if we're going to fire anything, let us fire up the peace pipe.
Last I heard from subgenius.net, they had some complicated conditions to discuss before re-assigning ownership of subgenius.net to us, but I can't imagine what conditions we'd object to since our interest is "in name only," and that's only to keep the few sacred all important "names." We had always WANTED to be able to afford to do a lot of what subgenius.net has already done -- which was to provide yet another hassle free place for SubGenii to DO WHATEVER. By hassle free, that means, I DON'T WANNA HAVE TO HASSLE WITH IT!! Let THEM do it! We just don't want Disney or Microsoft to be able to BUY "BOB" from somebody else and then tell a court it was LEGAL!
I've never kicked anybody or killfiled anybody, and I have never told anybody else to. It's not that I'm too old to know how to, either. I've just never been interested in control mechanisms, or even game playing. I am much more into game inventing and art-designing, so to speak. AS IF I HAD ANY CONTROL OVER THE MASS OF THE SUBGENII ANYWAY!! Gimme a break! Take one look at alt.slack or alt.binaries.slack and tell me the SubGenius Foundation exercises ANY CONTROL AT ALL, or COULD. The best thing we can do is serve as an example, and preserve enough of our own necessary Slack to spread the extra around.
The worst thing that The SubGenius Foundation does to SubGenii that it disagrees with is to IGNORE them. That's about as close to a policy as we come. You'll notice that I haven't railed and ranted against the .net on SubSITE, even though some of the .net people were posting my impassioned private emails. We really feel a sense of responsibility to maintain the integrity with weirdos that THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS and a few other successes have brought us, and we don't want to act like dipshits and abuse this all too meager power. I'll be the first to admit that we're INCREDIBLY INEFFICIENT about it all, but that also goes with the non corporate territory. Considering the uphill battle it's been just to keep the Sacred PO Box open for 20 years, we've done pretty well!
I mean, we're not a mind control cult full of answers, and we're not a humor magazine that Earth ad agencies want to run ads in, we're just... us. Something new -- yet as ancient as the mighty Yeti themselves! Dobbs left NO INSTRUCTION BOOK save THE BOOK OF THE SUBGENIUS and REVELATION X, and those are PRETTY FUCKING HARD TO FOLLOW if you know what I mean! Perhaps... perhaps that was His Inscrutable Very Point...? Ya got me.
You know that 26 year old pissed off kid I used to be? Well, now I'm 46 and I'm as disgusted as anybody at many of my own sorry peers, most of whom have become exactly as resistant to change and as stodgy as their parents got. I also have just as many solid answers as I did at 26 -- NONE. But at least I know THAT much. Some people NEVER figure THAT much out. From those people are derived PERMANENT ASSHOLES. I steadfastly refuse to GO DOWN LIKE THAT!!
So, never let it be said that old Rev. Stang couldn't still learn a thing or two, or at least fake it.
I would MUCH MUCH rather just sit and work on my OWN Dobbs graphics and audio projects by my OWN self with my OWN computer than ADMINISTRATE *ANYTHING*, but I feel like the big part of the Church is the fact that it's collaborative, and so does Jesus, and that's why we spend HALF OUR DAMN TIME doing NOTHING but trying to keep track of who did what thing and what we have to do with it and for them, and then doing it. Sure we're control freaks of a sort, but only as craftsmen -- neither one of us wants in the slightest to control any other SubGenius. My obsession is to control every single exact little detail of whatever specific media THING that I'm trying to craft at the time, and Jesus's obsession is to MAKE THE SUBGENIUS FOUNDATION MAKE MORE MONEY THAN IT SPENDS. But you would not BELIEVE how complicated those two seemingly simple things become, dealing with FELLOW OBSESSED SUBGENII -- who expect you to actually make DECISIONS, and give ORDERS, when you want to just make STUFF, and TAKE orders. Money orders, or credit card orders. Right now we are doing well just to get by and SURVIVE. Next perhaps we can get rich. THEN perhaps we can start BUYING DOWN THE CONSPIRACY! To destroy the concept of money, at any rate, is going to take money.
We are not your leaders. "Bob" is your leader. We are merely "Bob's" clerks, the salesmen of The Salesman, so to speak. Wait a minute, that sounds just like something the Inquisition would say. Or the Masons, who formed as a secret underground group to resist the Inquisition. The Conspiracy has so many twists and turns.
But we're not Them either, and we're not going to tell any SubGenius what to do with their Abnormality Potential. It is indeed our SWORN DUTY to prevent such insidious Slack Piracy from EVER HAPPENING under the Sacred Sign of the Dobbshead, EVEN IF IT MEANS DOING THAT VERY PIRACY, such as in the case of obvious assholes that everyone agrees must be Unmasked, in which case, heck, I guess it's mob rule until Dobbs himself returns. This is why we must seek Wisdom... the ability to think of something stupid to do, and then NOT DO IT.
Below is a pertinent quote that Rev. Onan Canobite of Lemuria found in an ancient crumbling document of a strange religion. This section was obviously written by a SubGenius of the distant past.
14 There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it:
15 Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.
16 Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.
17 The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools.
18 Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good.
My friends, I am a sinner, but I don't want to be that one particular sinner.
Rev. Stang
(p.s.) We haven't gotten any replies from the subgenius.net guy since Tuesday and we hope he's been getting our messages.
Original file name: subgenius.net/.com cease fire - converted on Sunday, 11 March 2001, 14:27
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