CONSPIRACY THEORY ROCK

Not being a viewer of Saturday Night Live since around 1981 or so, I completely missed this clip the one and only time it aired. That's the thing about SNL: they can still be sublimely funny from time to time, but you have to wade through great mounds of crap in order to get to the rare good sketch. Here's what the website Milk and Cookies has to say about it:

"Conspiracy Theory Rock" by Robert Smigel was shown on "Saturday Night Live" during the March 14, 1998 broadcast but edited out of reruns.

The title and the style of the animation are a takeoff on the educational tv series, "Schoolhouse Rock," which was shown as a public service in-between network entertainment cartoons on Saturday mornings in the 1970s. "Schoolhouse Rock" would teach about grammar with a song which asked "Conjunction Junction, What is Your Function?," for example.

"Saturday Night Live" is broadcast on NBC, which is owned by General Electric. GE let them broadcast this cartoon just once. GE also partly owns MSNBC.

What's amazing about this animated short isn't that it's funny, which it is, but that it's very much close to being dead-on in describing the overall corporate news media environment in which our society is currently drowning. Definitely one of those "funny because it's true" things. But then, you've got to wonder why GE allowed it on the air in the first place. GE is a big part of what President Eisenhower once called "the military-industrial complex," and NBC's running of a cartoon that directly attacks the mega-corporation's usage of its own entertainment and news media divisions to sow support for policy that makes use of its war-making products is at the very least confusing. Maybe it just slipped by, which explains why it hasn't been broadcast since it first aired. Maybe it's clever disinformation, "the old double bluff" as CONTROL agent Maxwell Smart might have put it, which kind of makes sense because the cartoon ostensibly seems to be ripping on left-fringe conspiracy nuts. Or maybe it's doing what Noam Chomsky has always suggested the news media should do with him: present far-left views without any explanation or context so that viewers have no choice but to dismiss them as lunacy.

At any rate, lots of weird post-modern ironies going on with this thing. Check it out here, via Throw away your TV.



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