Zero - Nazis in no time flat.
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I think it’s OK to celebrate the successful conclusion of a life. Most people die from illness or accidents over which they have little control, and would have preferred to avoid. The notion that people have some obligation to live as long as possible “just because” I have always thought was weird and rather imposing.
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Who’s offended? They’re all dead. Stop trying to play saviour to nobody, it’s putting in motion ridiculous culture shifts.
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Yes.
It’s easier if you’ve drunk the KoolAid.
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Which are filled with problem-drinkers in need of social-intervention.
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There are still members of this cult around, and certainly those who died have left behind family. But mostly I’m thinking of everyone else on this planet who’s lost a loved one to suicide, and I don’t want this to be a place where you can mock the dead and not get called out on it.
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A few years back we debuted this music video:
It’s Go Outside, by Cults. It’s a clever and technically accomplished production: the band members are digitally added to archive footage of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, as if they had been members of his cult in the lead up to the 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.
I thought that it was intriguing but also tasteless. Now I’m a big fan of bad taste, and this looks in bad taste at first blush. But I felt this was really just tastelessness veiled in fashionable irony (or perhaps framed unironically as fine art or profundity).
Granted, there is a lot of space there for culture jamming and the like–in this particular case, though, I found it an interesting and cool video but one whose conceit and offensiveness was rotten rather than revealing.
My original idea for our “Presented By” bumper before the video was felt to be a bit on the nose, as I recall, and I instead made something that wouldn’t color the band’s work with my own reflections.
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I was just applying the brakes to some predictably boring nit picking internet dickery.
You know, the kind where someone makes a point and someone else sees a word or concept used incorrectly and decides to jump on the poster for making a mistake on the internet while willfully ignoring the intent of the message no matter how on point their message may be.
That then.
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I don’t know, maybe the other option was Tallahassee.
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How unhappy all those people must have been, to disregard all that their society had taught them on the hope of sending their imaginary self to a comet, of all places.
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Maybe they were driven to a different perspective because of unhappiness, most people are. But there’s no reason to know that they were unhappy in their delusion. AFAIK, unlike Jones-town, they ate the pudding under full awareness.
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icy what you did there
Mass suicides aren’t any funnier than singleton suicides. That’s my $0.02.
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I don’t find it yuk yuk “funny” but tragic, however I’m also fascinated by the trappings of cults.
I’ll keep that patch with my collection of vintage Scientology manuals.
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True. The real joke could be on all of us.
How many comets have you visited?
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You can rely on people to interpret this fascination as mockery–but also to express that objection with the same insincere detachment and sarcasm they perceived in it.
It’s a metacognitive rubber band, easily exploited by people who like making the internet worse.
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It wasn’t clear at first, whether the patch was being sold by Heaven’s Gate members themselves, or by an unrelated third party. But looking at some of the other items for sale removes all doubt, these are outsiders trying to profit from tragedy. The “mission patch” is arguably the least offensive item for sale on the site.
I don’t think it’s really necessary to characterize the events in '97 at all, in order to pass judgement on these products. They may well triumphantly enjoy their succesful ascension to the comet even today, and the stuff for sale on that site would still be pretty gross.
The only problem I have with your post, is that its pretty hard to ironically respond to something which itself is meant to be ironic. Like a double negative, irony on top of irony is an invitation to sincerity.
I’m sincerely grossed out by what happened in 97, and also by vultures trying to capitalize on it,
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One of the things I remember best about this event is that the good folk of Rancho Santa Fe wanted to make it very, very clear that the Heaven’s Gate people were renters.
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So. Much. This.
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