Com Jong-Il

I’m sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday. You can thank the Comcast high-speed internet service of Middle Tennessee for that. When we lost the connection I called Comcast and got an automated recording. At first it said my wait time would be 3-5 minutes. Within a minute the recording came back to say my wait time would be over 10 minutes. Then it came back on to say that internet service was down for all of Middle Tennessee then went on to list every affected area: East, South, Southwest, West, Northwest, North, Central Nashville; Donelson; Hermitage; Inglewood… I started to think it wasn’t a recording but an actual person speaking like a robot. I was expecting her to say, “Your curr-ent wait time is now be-tween 10 and in-finite min-utes. Please hold the line as your call is ver-y import-tant to us. Un-fortu-tunate-ly we suck ass at our jobs…”

It royally sucks to be cornered by a behemoth cable/internet service provider monopoly with such a high level of incompetency. I can only imagine this must be what it feels like to live in North Korea only worse.

I was actually going to try to make some elaborate analogy about how we, as internet service users are like Smurfs while Comcast is Gargamel, the ruthless yet incompetent ruler of the land. But then I did something I rarely do – fact checking, and realized my memory of the Smurfs and their interaction with the old bag is not very accurate at all. As it turns out, Gargamel was an old sorcerer, not a ruler, and his only interest in the Smurfs was to either eat them or use them is some bizarre alchemy potions to produce gold as if even a 5 year-old is to believe a Smurf is the one missing ingredient in a recipe to make gold. “Azrael, we almost have it! I started with 8 cups of water, added 6 ounces of St John’s Wart, 5 large rose petals, and a drop of ammonia. Now the recipe says all we need is a small blue creature the size of three apples. Wait, a small blue creature?!? Now where in the fuck am I supposed to find something like that? I don’t even think Wal-Mart carries small blue creatures. Blasted! We were so close!”

In my research I came to find out that the Smurfs originally appeared in a comic strip in Belgium back in the 50’s. Back then they had similar ridiculous adventures as the Hanna-Barbera cartoon version we all know, with a few notable, and pretty fucked up exceptions. If you recall from the cartoon, the Smurfs used the word “smurf” to describe just about everything, using it as both a noun and a verb. “We’re going smurfing in the meadows looking for smurfberries!” Or, “We’re going to get our smurf on at the smurf club!” Or, “I’m about to get smurfed up on some smizurfup then I’m going to smurf my smurf-iotch and hope she’s on some smurf-after pills.” Or whatever. In the Belgian version, the Smurfs were actually divided into two separate factions, the north and the south, and their primary dispute was over whether the word “smurf” was a verb or a noun and it damn near resulted in a civil war. Are you smurfing me? The original Smurfs were a metaphor for ideological cultural wars? You’d think that’d be a pretty easy dispute to settle. “Ok, listen up Smurfs. I know we’ve had our difference but let’s just agree to disagree on this whole “smurf” thing because if you look around, we are the only smurfing small blue people on the planet and pretty much everyone we know wants to either eat us or turn us into smurfing gold, so let’s just call a cease-fire here.”

Furthermore, things in the cartoon weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Clearly the Smurfs lived in a sort of utopian communal society where each Smurf contributed a certain skill set to the overall group – Handy (building), Brainy (problem solving), Greedy (cooking), Smurfette (exotic dancing???), etc. But was it really all it appeared to be? I mean, why was there only one Smurf for each trade? Why didn’t any Smurfs have redundant skills? Like, what if there was Mechanic Smurf, Plumber Smurf, and Electrician Smurf then all the sudden this pompous asshole, Handy Smurf, comes along billing himself as a jack of all trades. Suddenly the Smurf community is like, “Hmm… he’s so handy. He can work on cars; he does plumbing; he knows some electrical stuff. What do we need the rest of these jokers for? They’re just three extra mouths to feed…” Then next thing you know, Mechanic, Plumber and Electrician Smurf are exiled to Australia, never to be seen again. And what are they going to do? Appeal to the brutal theocratic dictator, Papa Smurf? That dude was a fucking quack. You never saw Journalist Smurf, did you? That’s because Papa Smurf controlled the media. You never saw Petrol Smurf, did you? No, because Papa Smurf ran the oil companies. And everyone remembers the ethnic cleansing of ’84 when the Shiite Smurfs were nearly eliminated, all at the behest of Papa Smurf. Some conspiracy theorists say the reason he only had three fingers is because he lost the rest making homemade pipe bombs when he was just a teenager.

Whatever. My point is, the Smurfs, like so many of the cartoons from our youth, really raised more questions than they answered but as kids, we were so stupid we just let ourselves get brainwashed into actually being entertained by them. He-Man? Clearly on steroids. The Snorks? Yeah, right. Now we all know what those spouts were for. Space Ghost? More like galactic illegal alien smuggler.

All I’m saying is, you need to open your eyes and start getting savvy to the real world around you, which I’m going to do right now as soon as my internet is back up and running.