Thursday 4 July 2019

Is This Really the End of Mad Magazine?

Only in a "Clown World" Political Climate of Leftist Insanity does an Irreverently Liberal Publication like Mad Magazine Ironically meet its Fate!

by James Albert Barr 





Holy shit! Coincidentally, being that I included, with a cheeky little post on Facebook recently, a classic pic of Mad Magazine's iconic mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, I literally JUST heard that Mad Magazine, itself, will cease publication and disappear from newsstands by the end of this year, thus ending their 67 year long run!

I first discovered Mad Magazine way back in grade 5 at my elementary school. I read several issues that were consistently available among the variety of magazines in my home-room class, and read it, off and on, throughout my adolescence. The importance of Mad Magazine in the development of my sense of humor and my sense of. and appreciation for, satire, irony, wit, sarcasm and cultural lampooning in general, was IMMENSE to say the least! What a colossal drag to hear that this iconic publication is coming to an end.

... And I gotta be honest when I say that it seems rather suspicious - or at least awfully coincidental - that Mad Magazine should be cancelled in an era, and "hyper-sensitive" cultural atmosphere, where such irreverent content, and attitude, is not only frowned upon now, but outright "de-platformed" because it hurts the precious feelings of SO many of whom have nary a sense of, and appreciation for, said satire, irony, wit and sarcasm, because they collectively perceive a "one-dimensional world" that MUST cater to one's fragile emotional and mental state (which I firmly believe has been systematically and deliberately socially-engineered) to the detriment of a logically-determined, maturely-apprehended (without having to vapidly say, "I'm adulting") understanding, or at least acknowledgement, of the real world, society, culture, human behavior (and its time-honored foibles and volatility) with - to quote Marx - "sober senses, [the] REAL conditions of life".



It's seems so ironic that the once celebrated Mad Magazine launched its cheeky and irreverent first issue way back in 1952, during a decade in American culture where there was rampant conservatism and prudish, even neo-Victorian, attitudes and sensibilities being bandied about while the Republicans had the White House, and American minds, for the most part. The UFO craze was in full-swing; the Feds were busy with "the Red Menace"; German (rocket) scientists were "recruited" by Operation Paperclip to help America get into space before the Russkies did (it backfired, interestingly enough, though the Americans did get to the Moon first, ultimately,... and "allegedly"); and Philip K. Dick began writing his mind-bending sci-fi novels such as 1959's Time Out of Joint , a novel whose concept of temporal disturbance, and altered reality, packs quite an ironic and contemporaneously relevant wallop now.

Moreover, it's doubly ironic, and spectacularly tragic, in my opinion, that Mad Magazine should cease further publication beyond this decade-ending, "foul year of our Lord" (to evoke the memory of Hunter S. Thompson, aptly enough) that is 2019, when the current political and cultural climate are so irrationally and egregiously being held hostage - in a fashion - by a bat-shit crazy Left (despite a Republican, yes, buffoon, President currently in the White House) intent on utterly destroying everything in its mentally and emotionally-deluded wake, for the entire sake of never being offended nor having their collective "feelings" hurt ever again, to the extreme detriment of any discernible logic, reason, maturity, tenable polemics, and reality in general. 

Meanwhile, the real culprit behind the utter madness of our present world and society, and its accompanying semiotic chaos, in terms of what has happened to language, identity and the "symbolic economy" that linchpins the superstructure of everything we've built over the respected epochs and ages, has been conveniently ignored (via cultural propaganda and social-engineering, which ultimately "created" the SJW and unbridled political correctness) while it suffuses the very ether and atmosphere we all breath: neoliberal late capitalism, or what the late Mark Fisher called, Capitalist Realism. Also, the suspiciously impending Singularity and the ushering in of the alleged "post-human age".

Stay tuned, fellow zombies, and members of both the "bewildered herd" and "phantom public" (to cite one Walter Lippman, appropriately enough) because, as Cypher said in The Matrix, which I'll paraphrase here: "Kansas, and the rest of the world you-once-thought-you-knew, are going bye-bye!"  

Hmm, Mad indeed!








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