Tom Renshaw is a middle-aged white guy living in Seoul, Korea. According to his Korean wife, who is a born-again evangelical, fundamentalist Christian, "He's a mediocre hack who thinks the sun shines out of his ass. He's also a self-centered, shiftless dipsomaniac who never helps out with the housework, doesn't read the Bible, and needs to get a job. Far from ever coming close to achieving his delusions of grandeur, he deserves instead to be buried alive in a writhing pit of moray eels and alligator snapping turtles."
Thursday December 1, 2011
MISSION STATEMENT
Everything and everyone is interconnected. I hope to demonstrate this fact by means of humor, word play, bloggerel, irony, metaphor, whining, and satirical jabs at nominal authority figures.
At the risk of sounding preternaturally pretentious, my goal is nothing short of global transformation, the revolution of values spoken of and aimed for by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and also alluded to in the music of the Beatles, the subversive idealism of the Smothers Brothers, and the reductio ad absurdum of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "The Simpsons."
Perhaps most important of all, beyond rescuing civilization from its own suicidal excesses and repairing our relationship with the natural world, I mean to revive the great traditions of art and literature, to encourage a love of learning for its own sake, to worship nature above all else (with the exceptions of poison ivy and deer ticks), and to choose not hate but love, not war but peace, and not lies but truth.
I believe that if enough people around the world embrace these humble yet sturdy values, we may yet survive our perennial embrace of folly and learn to live in a paradise that provides economic justice for all, a place to play and work creatively, where technology is in balance with ecology, and in which a healthy harmony of opposites prevails, heralding both a celebration of the individual and the beloved community Dr. King spoke of.
Or else, if you prefer, we could just keep on wiping one another out with handguns and trade agreements, pillaging the planet, and turning the oceans into a vast, acidic, uninhabitable waste dump devoid of fish, plankton, or coral reefs.