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From Cecil's Mailbag by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
Dear Straight Dope:
I consider myself pretty hip. I'm fairly in tune with my
generation of
fellow twenty-somethings. I know the difference between Beck
and
Montovani.
So why is it that, when everytime I run into one of these "Church
of the
SubGenius" sites on the web, I have absolutely no clue as to what
the
hell its getting at? What's the deal with these kooks? I can
fathom the
put-up of sci-fi doomsday cults, but the overall tenor of weirdness
just
boggles me. You've managed to debunk Dungeons and Dragons for us.
Now how
about putting these specimens under the microscope?
--bergevb@bsk.com
SDSTAFF Euty replies:
If you're just running into this kind of stuff on the web, you
haven't been paying attention. Ever watch "Pee-Wee's Playhouse?"
Take a look at his bulletin board usually right before he hops on
his bicycle at the end of the show. You'll see a black and white
picture of a grinning, pipe smoking man, That's Bob. Watch
"Rugrats?" Catch the repeated references such as "as Bob is my
witless" or "children are a gift from a Bob." It's much more
prevalent
than you may think.
If the church doesn't have a real leader, it at least has a logo,
and that logo is the face of "Bob." His full name is J. R. "Bob"
Dobbs; the "J.R." was dropped later because, as the church said,
they didn't want to get in any trouble with Larry Hagman. And it
has a mission; the pursuit of "slack." Slack is difficult to
define. In a way it's like what Louie Armstrong said about jazz, if
you have to ask what it is, you'll never know. It can be
interpreted in the same way as the term "slacker," but to the
Subgenius it's more of a way of getting through life without being
brought down by the "normals."
The Church is full of doomsday prophecies, endless rants, and
shameless appeals for your money. And it's all pretty much a
joke.
The Subgenius foundation was actually begun back in 1979 by a
Dallas filmmaker named Douglas St. Clair Smith, who now goes under
the name Ivan Stang. He, along with Philo Drummond (possibly also
a pseudonym) put together the first pamphlet announcing the Church
and then published the "bible" of SubGeniuses "The Book of the
Subgenius." Stang had always been interested in fringe and weirdo
groups, a lot of which he lists in his book "High Weirdness
by Mail." Although it's unclear as to whether this is what he had
in mind at the time, eventually, the Church began to become a
clearinghouse for a lot of these groups. Thus, the rather
unspecific theology of Subgeiuses; that one must merely be
"abnormal" to be a member.
Philosophically, the church owes it's origin to the Discordian
movement of the late 60's and 70's. The first pamphlet of the
Church ("The World ends tomorrow and You may Die!") reads a lot
like the "bible" of Discordianism, "The Principia Discordia." In
fact, as Stang wrote in an e-mail to this author, "The only
difference I've been able to see between Discordians and
SubGeniuses, is that SubGeniuses get laid."
Sadly, though, there are some who believe that Stang has gone
around the bend and has started really believing his own joke. To
be fair, he does state that he really didn't ever believe that the
Church would ever have gotten as big as it has. He figured on a
shelf life of a couple of years and it would have all been over.
But these things do have a way of taking on a life of their
own.
--SDSTAFF Euty
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
Cecil's Mailbag is researched and written by members of the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board, Cecil's online auxiliary. Although the SDSAB does its best, these articles are edited by Ed Zotti, not Cecil, so accuracywise you'd better keep your fingers crossed.
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