CHAPTER 1 Don't Laugh "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person I'm preaching to." "Bob" in 'Newsweek' "We believe the planet is being led to destruction by a race of inferior creatures who place blind trust in their own culturally dictated concept of "intelligence." Look, you guys, you know as well as I do... they may be smart, but they don't have good sense." --"Bob" to the Senate Subcommittee, 1956 Dear Querent into the profundities of This Twisted Randomness We Call Reality: "IS THIS SOME KIND OF JOKE?" Well, if you thought this Church was a joke, then you'll by God NEVER 'GET' THE PUNCHLINE. Oh, we're the first to admit that we deliver far more laughs and yuks per dollar than Scientology, the Unification Church, or any other religious group, except possibly the Southern Baptists. But they are for Braindeath. We are against braindeath. That would put a damn bounty on our heads except that we tread the thin tightwire of the jokes just enough not to have been covertly killed Or Bought. MY GOD, look what they did to any of our pred- ecessors that kept straight faces. No, this is NO joke, NO parody. Only the foulness of your programming keeps you from believing we have thousands of members, nationwide revivals, radio shows, and so on. But we do. Not only are we not kidding, but we'll even Piss You Off. Indeed, that's our JOB - our CALLING - our MISSION. We're going to shock the hell out of every man, woman, and child on this planet. It's a big job, and we only have until 1998 to do it. Still, it's enough time for the Church to be infiltrated and made evil if we don't watch ourselves. YES - BEWARE - the biggest danger this Earth faces is The Church Of The SubGenius becoming POPULAR and turning into one big CHEAP JOKE. The Conspiracy has a way of doing that to damn near anything that comes near it - i.e. tries to make a buck. And when this Industrial Church, this Final Organization, takes full power over the entire globe in '98, it just better not have been tainted and cheapened by such Normal Armies as Pinks(1), Punks, False Prophets, Hippies, right-wing Nerds, obnoxious would-be hepcats, Nazis, Commies, Glorps(2) or, as the Prophet Hypercleats dubbed them, Mal-Aligned Normals. The teachings of "Bob" are NOT universal. For the Pink at heart they simply won't work. For the evil they'll backfire. And they'll even be DAMN HARD TO FOLLOW for ignorant Subgeniuses. But we must NOT water them down: the Conspiracy will assimilate them, twist them to fit Their plans, and sell them back to us in CRIPPLED, USELESS condition. 5 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh UNBELIEVABLE No, only the truly abnormal, those who are abnormal inside, in their eternal, ungainly souls, not just maladjusted, ONLY THESE must wield the relentless POWER of "BOB" on July 5, 1998, X-Day, when the Angelic Host from Planet X descend in glory and terror. UNSPEAKABLE Sensationalism is just the lure we use in order to communicate in all sobriety certain awful histories and secret fate for the Earth so unspeak- able that it may take several books to prepare you just to read it. Because if you are reading this in the late 20th Century, EVERYTHING YOU KNOW REALLY IS WRONG. You are an uncivilized, ignorant, BARBARIC peasant that will be looked back upon by future generations with every bit as much pity as you regard the plague-ridden wretches od Downtown Medieval Europe. Your "civilization" got off so heavily on the WRONG FOOT, is so far OFF THE TRACK, and will keep going SO FAR from where it is "meant" to be, that YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT SLACK IS and the only way you can reopen your primitive mind, your buried gene-memory of SLACK, is to roll up your sleeves and GET DOWN with "Bob." If you're worried about getting your hands dirty, DO NOT ENTER. If you want to keep thinking "science" is right, DROP THIS BOOK NOW. UNBEARABLE!! If you want to remain agnostic about The Forces, GET THE BOOK OUT OF YOUR HOUSE. If you don't like the cold, get out of the freezer. If you are, say, a hopelessly intellectual Conspiracy dupe (or "Judge- Head") with just enough verbal skills to think this is "funny" but lacking the intuitive scar tissue that lets you see where it's ALL TOO REAL, then your naked, tame soul risks getting SCALDED by the white-hot Truth of "Bob." If you THINK you're a Christian, but AREN'T, then you're going to see DEMONS in this book. Your belief system is paranoid, so it whips up reasons for paranoia. You see what you want to see. So you have to pay to know what you think. You pay Them. They've got you so closed off from what you're REALLY SEEING, and have made your most instinctive hopes and desires seem so "impossible" or "impractical" in the quote "real world" unquote, that you're still looking where they're pointing rather than just looking around. You can SEE what CAN lie ahead if you'll just slow down. Don't pay them to know what you really think. Pay "Bob." It's much cheaper. Besides, you owe "Bob" a living. But then, the entire WORLD owes YOU a living. YOU ARE OWED SLACK. YEAH BUT... 6 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh Right. You want to know, "JUST EXACTLY WHAT IS THIS CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS?" That question is asked a thousand times a day, every day, some- where. And it's a good thing, because that's the most pertinent question to ask in this modern age. There is no description. Words do not suffice; one must "SEE." We let you see a little at a time until you are led gradually to TOTAL CLARITY. It is the Nameless Mission[3]. The true mission is always nameless. To name it is to doom it....and alert the enemy. THE SUBGENIUS MUST HAVE SLACK! But as the million-legged Church crawls around inside your cranium, there is one point it keeps returning to. It the the very point of the Church. The point is "Bob." "Bob" is, was, and ever shall, "Bob" is you, "Bob" is me, "Bob" is the Kama Sutra, the Id, the light that glows in the heart and mind of EVERY free-thinking SubGenius. And "Bob" is a man. It's "Bob." It always comes down to that. Because "Bob" is SLACK. And SLACK is what you want. SLACK is what you need. As the Pope of All New York[4] told the multitudes, "With the FULLNESS of Slack a CHANGE will come; Slackness will ENTER your life, Slackness will MAKE YOU SEE, Slackness will SET YOU FREE! Slackness IS! Slackness LIVES, Slackness WAITS FOR YOU and YEAH! send $20." Slack is what was taken away; Slack is what "Bob" gives BACK. That's as simple as we can ever make it. From here it just spirals off into stormier and stormier complications but in the MIDST of that storm there are two anchors you can always get back to, and those "Bob" and Slack. Now, you do not just sit and wait for Slack. You do not "work" at it either. This is an exact science of ways to achieve Slack through "seeing." You will be taught by someone you can trust completely. By "Bob." The fact that you have gotten this far - procuring this Book - indicates that you haven't been completely "asleep." You haven't been totally taken in by Them. Not yet. But they can still trick you. As bait they feed you too much of the wrong kind of Slack - the FALSE SLACK of The Conspiracy. The "Conspiracy" is Them. It was They who took away your real Slack. THEM. 7 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh YOU are not one of Them, and never were, not even when They made you want to be. In fact, that's why They wanted your Slack. It's why you had Slack in the first place. They did manage to steal most of your Slack. But they obviously haven't got it all, and they haven't got "Bob," and as long as there is ONE FREE MAN among us their system cannot be complete, because it is by nature a closed system, and if we can keep their system incomplete, it will close down of its own accord. By Their own Law. Their Law of Normalcy. Yes. They wanted you to at least want to be "Normal." Well, you may look normal. You may Act normal. But you aren't normal. YOU JUST AREN'T NORMAL. And it is the POWER of your abnormality that saves you, that causes their system not to have a place for you, that makes you a SubGenius. The Conspiracy system burns humans as fuel. SubGeniuses aren't humans. They gum up the works. If you're a human, you've read too far. CLOSE THE BOOK! "There's a whole market, a type of person there's no word for. I want 'SubGenius' to be that word." -- "Bob" on Board Room Tape Number 668, verse 17. You may have heard the term "SubGenius" sometime before, but you might not be able to quite put your finger on it - almost as if it were some dim racial memory, some archetype from neanderthal times. That may very well be the case. Now, the Church was not founded until 1953. And it was 1979 before Dobbs created The SubGenius Foundation as a vehicle to bring the teachings to the public. But SubGeniuses have always existed... even before Dobbs. In all the cradles of civilization - Sumeria, Egypt, Atlantis - clues have been found which prove the existence of the Conspiracy and of the SubGenii who fought to subdue it.[5] The wisdom of those ancient SubGeniuses was never lost. Carried down by secret oral traditions, it lies latent in many living people, waiting only to be triggered by the Abnormality Revolution. perhaps, even as you read this, you can feel those ancestral powers and arcane memories surging up from within your dankest brain gutters. Ask yourself - don't you feel different at this exact moment than you ever did before? Isn't it because you feel some vague but momentous force emanating from this very piece of paper? You didn't just wander into a bookstore and happen to notice this Book. You were led to us, and we to you, by powers much greater than Man, and yet, seemingly, more random than Fate. But the ways of the great Manip- ulator in Space, Jehovah-1, only appear random. YES! Our paths crossed because it was planned - plotted out aeons ago, by alien minds more 8 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh bizzarre than your wildest nightmares, as part of a "WorkNet:" a cosmic scheme woven into such a complex web that not just human history, but the fabric of cause-and-effect themselves was disrupted. FACE IT - the very fact of your eyes moving across this page at this moment is inevitably and subatomically decreed. You are locked into the machinations of a Cosmic Puppeteer who works your strings so skillfully you never knew they were there. UNTIL NOW! The Church can't cut your strings - you wouldn't want us to, if you knew what they can mean for you - but we can show you where the strings are attached and how to 'sync up' with the Puppeteer...how to stay one jump ahead of the other puppets by assisting the Puppet Master: by following the Path of Least Resistance. Remember, Jehovah-1 - or Wotan, or Shiva, or whatever you want to call Him - is not God. He might as well be, as far as we're concerned, because he has powers of creation and destruction that Man has mistakenly associated with God throughout history. He is merely a bit player in this vast Movie which God is apparently leaving unedited. Nevertheless, His galactic goals - it makes no difference what they are - can be achieved sooner if He hones a few special tools to aid in the task. As the trance dictation of Dobbs tells us, SubGeniuses are those tools, and Jehovah-1 needs our help. In return, we Chosen are rewarded with Slack as He tips the scales of cause-and-effect in our favor. Indeed, WOTAN-1 can "cheat" your Karma for you, much like a tax expert greases your way through the I.R.S. You can beat the system if you have the right connections. The space god can literally make coincidents and accidents happen to favor you. Think what this means in the areas of love, sex, finances, and social standing. It isn't WHAT you know, it WHO you know. "Luck" simply means being in the right place at the right time. If you pay Him enough lip service, JHVH-1 can 'fix it' so that you will constantly find yourself stumbling into that right place at just the right time. This "deal" is called The Covenant. HOLISTIC HEROIN -- PERFECTLY LEGAL! SOUNDS CRAZY?YOU BET. The early Christians sounded so crazy to the Romans they were used as lion fodder. Modern-day Christians seem to have forgotten that; plenty of them would like to see us thrown to the bull- dozers. Oh, sure, we blaspheme like crazy against the gods. But that's exactly Why this is the first religious text in history that doesn't take "the Lord's Name" in vain. For once, there's a reason. GOD HIMSELF CUSSES!! He's MAD! He's being falsely represented on Earth! Jehovah-1's pretentions would be bad enough, but now all these human preachers have gotten into the act, doling out notions of "right" and "wrong" as if their peabrains could even BEGIN to sort such things out. They've cornered the market and set things up so that enlightenment in Their churches consists of four basic stages, each more torturous than the last, and when some poor devil finally does get Illuminated he just reenters the world and goes back to basically normal behavior. SubGeniuses are Born enlightened and so may remain in the world "acting normal" (it's all relative). They already KNOW the Big Secret of most 9 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh Mystery Schools: that "divine ecstasy" is arrived at just as easily with a backrub, or a good screw, as it is through 20 years of ascetic self- flogging in a cave - at least, AS LONG AS THERE IS SLACK. By now, the average False Christian reader will assume that this whole Church is the Devil's work. But we're much too unpopular for the Devil. He's strictly big time and doesn't mess with marked underdogs like us. He uses those already in seats of power. The power of the SubGenius is that WE DON'T NEED POWER. We don't even need brains. We have "Bob," we have a deal with JHVH-1, we have our own capacity to blunder creatively. We're too disorganized for the Devil. If he's anywhere, he's where you least expect him. We may attack your beliefs. But only those who believe blindly, greedily, or half-heartedly will be bothered by our brand of mockery. To question their beliefs threatens them; it makes a secret part of them ashamed, and they get riled up and start smiting. Of course, SHEER STUPID HATE isn't the only thing that keeps people away from the SubGenius Church. You may simply have more important things to spend your time and money on - things like albums, going to the movies, a new tape deck for your car - things you'd much rather possess than, oh , say, life after death, reincarnality, psychic powers, immortality, invisib- ility, nirvana, communication with Higher Intelligences, SLACK, and so on. If those things are meaningless to you, by all means, just give this Book to someone else. We're sorry you even bothered. You see, we're not trying to sell this to everybody. There are many we don't want, and there are plenty we can't save because it's too late. Hard- sell recruitment for this Church is too much trouble to bother with, because by definition True SubGenii are not "Joiners." They're rightfully suspicious of herds. They don't want to be "members" of any organization. It's a miracle that we've gotten this far. Between the cult's tendency towards secrecy and the one Law that the laws change from minute to minute, it's not surprising that there's no man-on-the-street soliciting and proselytizing. Even our biggest revivals are spur-of-the-moment, bacchan- alian brawl-party affairs. The Telephone is used far more than the altar. Because of demand From your....We Now Offer "STYLE OF THE MONTH CLUB" CAN'T QUITE PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT? well, divine obfuscation has a purpose. "In order to experience this correctly, you have to be smarter than your normal self. In order to become that way you must first experience this correctly. Thus we screen out those False Prophets who would be wrongly Illuminated. The knowledge must not be abused." -- Iwade Stanglings, 1891 10 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh Wotan works in mysterious ways, and this serves to keep the unattuned of His business. The only way you're going to get truly, metaphysically high off this material is to snort BETWEEN the lines. (But what you read between the lines must be taken Literally. DO NOT read your own message into it. There is only One True Interpretation." "BOB" IS NOT A FAN CLUB Most people totally misunderstand the term "SubGenius." Look at the word. What does it mean? It means NOTHING! It's utterly ambiguous. All-purpose. It sure as hell doesn't mean "just below genius level." To "Bob" and his mighty friends in The Council of None, one happy idiot is worth far more than ten A-Bomb inventing geniuses. We throw most so-called "geniuses" OUT. They're too nervous, they take themselves too seriously, they're Snide. They do not truly 'know' Slack. Praise "Bob," there are as many idiot SubGenii as "smart" ones. Most prevalent, however, are smart-asses. It isn't brains, but an intuitive, anti-Pink, anti-cute Attitude Mutation. The Conspiracy has proved that you can have "high intelligence" but still not be able to Think. No, yes, SubGeniuses are merely The Chosen People - the class which cannot be classified, those who are different not only from others but from Each other. If any two are the same, ONE MUST GO! We band together only for strength, and only temporarily. The Conspiracy used to KILL people who displayed Subgenius traits. Thanks to the countless martyred evo-and dev- olution cults that paved the way, nowadays you're merely penalized finan- cially, socially, and sexually for weirdness. But at least we can come out and admit that there are people mutating ahead, and they are US; and, because mutation is so unpredictable, there will inevitably be unguessed other steps Beyond SubGenius... but only if WE fulfill our genetic DESTINY. Ultimately, it isn't Smart Vs. Stupid or Cool Vs. Uncool, but The Good Guys Vs. The Bad Guys. The free men against the robber barons. Franken- stein's Monster against the Villagers. Of course, it's our definition of "Good Guys," so if we aren't careful we'll end up as a bunch of Hitlers instead of Robin Hoods. So BEWARE - THERE MUST BE NO STEREOTYPES. Not all SubGenii act and look wierd. Many must encase their Weird Thoughts inside a Guise of Normalcy just to survive and infiltrate. Why, some of the main Saints of the Church look just as pink as the day they were born. Some have had to become so intensely, weirdly "normal" that they come full circle to achieve High Unpredictability, ripping their hearts out for "Bob" and stomping them into the floor, kicking the remnants off their bloody boots so that they can do the same to a million unsuspecting Con-Dupes. AIIEEEE! 11 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh ?SEE HOW EASY IT IS? The ones to be avoided - yet the hardest to get rid of - are those who behave as weirdly as possible but are really insecure closet Normals, doing it only for attention from the opposite sex or something equally inconseq- uential. SubGeniuses are not just the super-cool. Why, EVEN CHRISTIANS can be SubGeniuses, believe it or not. "Wide-open-minded" sure doesn't mean Punk or "New Wave" or Liberal; that's all fashion slavery financed by Them. The hippies were easy enough to buy. They sold their cultural fringe to the Normals cheap! And soon the norms will consider us fashionable. That's why we owe NO loyalty to Right Wave, New Wing, or anyone else. We must trans- cend style through nonstop style metamorphosis. The Sub-subculture must always be one step beyond cool. You think that's easy? Although the publishings of this Book is a key event in Dobbs Prophecy leading to a tumping of the Con's Foundations, it nevertheless will produce the first sickening wave of "Token SubGeniuses" or "Bobbies." You will see "Bob" bumberstickers and T-shirts on the cars and torsos of Pink Boys. As Dobbs said in a letter to L. Ron Hubbard, "Sure, they're Pink, but their money is green." Still, this means that the Real Church of the SubGenius will always remain a secret society. There will always be that massive public face, but when the time comes the true cult will disappear and come back under another name. The problem is that although Abnormals are the only truly "free" bipeds, they often don't know just how FREE THEY ARE. They take it for granted too easily; they fall into ruts. Being of "Bob" doesn't mean you have to identify with a guy with a pipe and a shit-eating "I know more than you do" dog-grin all over his homogenized face. In fact, if you aren't already sick and tired of the buzzwords "Slack," "Pinks," and, yes, even "Bob," they by god YOU have a PROBLEM and had better start looking for a new escape route. While this pith-ridden religion may be perfect for quote-heavy persons like college students, it's risky for them too. It can turn whole tribes of them into dogma-replaying assholes. Ask yourself: did you buy this book because of fear of group pressure? if so, STOP READING NOW. You will injure yourself with this material; you'll use it as a high-faluting excuse to become infantile to the point of senility. We KNOW the power of the Dobbs. We've seen it happen, All Too Often. A major secret that "Bob" learned from the Conspiracy is that deep down inside, everyone, even the SubGenius, craves authority. It's from having Parents. But a SubGenius shortcircuits this urge. He appoints himself Pope or Raja or something, and he believes it. But it's easy to fake that belief, even to yourself. Therefore, in his Church our "Bob" has included many built-in Alienation Devices to prevent false Pink interpretation while encouraging the real, down home SubGenii to start their own damn religions. "Bob" is not a fan club. The Teachings constantly contradict each other and yet remain equally true and false. Dobbs makes outright worship impossible by suddenly, unex- pectedly changing the basic dogma just to forcibly "disconnect" the mind- 12 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh less zombie-in-a-rut. The confusing Church deliberately pulls the rug from under the preconceptions of "Follower" types, thus separating the wheat from the chaff. It uses Shock Value; we're often, praise Dobbs, too sardonic for those smug hip ones who thought they were already as sardonic as you can get. The sacred rule of "KILL BOB" and the related doctrine of "OR KILL ME"[6] are two of the main built-in fuse breakers designed to prevent the ego- overloading that eventually gelds other faiths. They are reminders of the Church's promise that it will, in the long run, accept NO SUBSTITUTE FOR SLACK. There is a Hierarchy of various flamboyant characters in the upper echelons of the Church, which, despite your liberal programming, is how it should be. However, thank God, "Bob" is the only real "star." In this society, stardom destroys. It subverts and it waters down. But "Bob" is immune to that, which is why he is so incomprehensibly important. He gave his precious obscurity for his charismatic but susceptible Priesthood, to deliver them from temptation. Thus you are ON YOUR OWN. It's between you and "Bob." Just remember, this is the religion that canonizes, bribes, and enslackens its most REBELLIOUS HERETICS and CHEATS those who presume to be its most DEVOTED MONKS. Those who 'Kill "Bob" ' always return to the fold triumphant, CHANGED from pupils to Teachers. We can't stop ninnies from buying the Word of Dobbs, nor can we prevent you from spreading a watered-down version of yourself in our name. All we can do is warn you: DON'T BE A "BOBBIE." The curse will fall on YOU. As Rev. Emile O'Day told the poor wretch who lay in the hospital bed with radiation burns from trying to smoke the True Pipe, "A little Dobbs'll do you." Yes, the love of "Bob" can kill Normals. "Bob" is too good for them... and baaaad for them. (For this reason we urge you not to leave this Book lying around your house for the uninitiated to see, unless of course, you have mastered the impossible art of "explaining" the Church and are eager to challenge the diseased, superstitious world. Because of the potentially dangerous Power Shell that each copy of The Book possesses, we suggest you keep it in the most holy and private sanctuary in your home, which is usually the Chamber of Excremeditation or bathroom. There, at the Throne of your own Holy of Holies, you and the Spirit of "Bob" can be alone together, safe from Conspiracy distractions.) Once the wrong kind of person gets into the Church, it's torturous business getting them out. The power of SubGenius is unarguable, and they keep coming back for more and more not matter how much we abuse and humil- iation we heap on them. Anyone who gets heavily into the cult finds his Luck Plane suddenly leaping out at him. And the coincidence level... "Bob" is everywhere, friend, and at times it can be weird. Once an entire, all- new Church Pamphlet jus materialized in the dead of night, burned right onto the plates of the printing press; the machine turned itself on and in the morning we found 10,000 new booklets sitting there along with the glowing heel of "Bob's" shoe. 13 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh Obviously you don't want irresponsible people tangling with such forces. So how does one know? How can one tell whether his friends are ready to walk the Path of "Bob?" Surely not just by the Dobbs T-shirts they wear... If you yourself are Pink, you'll never really be able to tell. But if you are a true Child of "Bob," you'll soon be able to 'whiffread' or intuit whether another is for real or not by his...by his...Well, there's no human word that describes the 'personality-within-a-personality' as the SubGenius recognizes it. "If you haven't been there, I can't tell you how to get there. But you have been there, I can show you how to stay there." -- Dobbs, in 1965 Sales Lecture One does not 'become' a SubGenius. If you haven't already been liberated from false sanity, you never will be. If this begins to sound like empty promises, it's because you have no faith. You are of this faithless generation that demands proof of miracles. Oh, look to your heart, friend. Is that not the only source of truth for you? Can you not see the glowing core of Bulldada that shines within each latent SubGenius, just waiting for the right stimulus to EXPLODE? To offer "proof" would be to insult the Isness of "Bob;" indeed, con- crete evidence would deny you the great Test of Faith that "Bob" demands. If you believe, it will work. If you secretly scoff, it will fail you - or, rather, you will fail the universe. Those who demand logical, scientific proof of Dobbs' good-luck power will never understand. They are permanently "asleep." We call them "Gimme-Bobs" and the True SubGenius can have no pity on them (particularly because they are the least likely to donate money to the Church). Ours is a ferocity of faith that can move spoons or bend mountains, depending on the degree of developed fanaticism. Yes, to some extent this is like deliberately going insane. So what? That's what all gurus, followers, hobbyists, drug users and other seekers are after. HELL, the reason "Bob's" Sacred Luck works is because it is crazy. This is magic - REAL MAGIC. Proof? We'll let others provide that. Two years from now, you'll be trying to escape those who would burn your off yabbering their rapid-fire tales of miracles since they "found Dobbs." (Actually, no one find Dobbs; Dobbs himself does the selecting. If you are not born naturally Of "Bob" then your ignorance is permanent. It's the indefinable, ineffable Essence of the Eitherness of The Dobbs.) If you have not faith, it is because you don't own yourself. You let someone else decide how you're going to get screwed. Decide for yourself how you're going to get screwed. DON'T MISS OUT EVOLVE! 13 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh If, because we seem to preach that everyone is going to get screwed no matter what, we seem like total cynics to you, you're WAY OFF. If we were that cynical, do you think we would put our literal asses on the line, dangling our "sins" in front of the Conspiracy? We wouldn't do it if we didn't think there was HOPE. We know America is still worth saving. We know enough people out there will understand this to make us rich. When the Xists arrive in their illusory ships of light, and after the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Comings, this planet will no longer belong to the humans OR the SubGeniuses. That puts this beyond politics and religion; it points out that an entire mind-set has to be erased. Idiots think that politics can supply an answer. Bullshit. Politics are abstract constructions: false, oversimplified coloring-book versions of life. They can't have any effective bearing on your concrete daily grind; they're just different ways of looking at the same things. We want to stop looking at those things entirely. They've become sterile and ineffectual because they long ago became rote activity conditioned into a society that was moving too fast for its own good. We're like the wheels of a bogged- down car, spinning deeper and deeper into the mud as our panic at finding ourselves stuck increases. To get OUT, we must SLOW DOWN. If we calm our- selves, step out of the car and look around for some old, flat rock that just happens to make a perfect ramp for wheels, we can stick that sucker down there, climb back in, and gently rock the car back and forth until we pop right out of the rut. Thanks to aeons-tested Conspiracy False Slack programs, however, most people, when faced with trouble, spend more of their time abjectly staring at the problem instead of looking away from it for the obvious solutions that are everywhere. Now, we can't do anything about people who are born without imagination. But we can sure as hell KICK ASS on those who are just too lazy - or too harried - to use it. They're sitting there, letting their most precious quality rot when they should be sitting there pumping iron with it. GOOD GOD, it's not like we're asking them to get up. We just don't want "getting up" to be outlawed. We don't need to know what kind of government we'll replace the Consp- iracy with. Our forefathers fought for independence first and then sat down to figure out exactly what the "United States" was going to be. In their primitive way, they tried to opt for less government. We should know by now that the next step is NO GOVERNMENT except by the laws of SLACK. (Coninfiltrated 'Anarchist' political groups are STILL POLITICAL.) Politics is a dead end. Don't revise the rule book - throw it out. A couple of decades back, we'd have been hung for saying things like that. But today, in the 1980's, we'll make a million dollars off of it. That, perhaps as much as anything else, indicates the depths to which this nation has sunk. This is a crooked and perverse nation, friend. People are more worried about the economy than ecology. JESUS! The lack of money makes life diff- icult alright, but the presence of radiation and deathkulture chemicals is the very antithesis of life itself... and people run around arguing about the price of god damn pantyhose. 14 The Book Of The SubGenius Don't Laugh One thing we MUST prevent, therefore, is letting the Church become a soporific, a "drug" that lets us accept the death of all life on Earth. Yeah, THAT'S funny, HA HA! This better not become some god-awful End Times PORN for those who can only "get off" on fear-and-laughter. The Church should make it easier to conceive of the humans' inconceivable threat to themselves, but ONLY IF THAT MAKES US DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. THAT is the whole point. Our twisted Hell Shit that tall those poor saps send off a dollar for has to do more than merely put an uglier slant on what started out ugly enough. SLACK? YEAH, you'll laugh all the way to the fully-equipped survival shelter when "Bob" lets you in on the joke. "Bob" can handle the Aliens, but we must police ourselves. For: LOOK what the Conspiracy has done to 95% of our heroes, your religious leaders, your rock stars, all your once-faves. It has taken them and hammered them into the ground with promotion and money they know not how to spend; it broils their brains in TV lights and saps from them all time needed for their true calling while turning them into mere self- parodies. It starts with the leader and from there infects the hierarchy, then the followers...ultimately, the planet itself. EEEYAH! Oh "Bob" we now pray to know what we really think and that you prevent us from turning your sweet name into some jargon-infested in-joke. Spare us thy servants from, uh, complete temptation and deliver us from Pop Acceptance yet somehow let us keep turning a profit that we continue to SPREAD THEY SEED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS. Amen. Without Remorse. 15 The Book Of The Subgenius CHAPTER 1: DON'T LAUGH FOOTNOTES 1. PINKS: (Colloq) Slang corruption of the formal SubGenius derogatory term PINK BOYS, meaning any sheeplike status-quo normalcy dupe, living in terror of making his or her own decisions, usually possessed of an unusually 'blank' facial expression, characterized by mental temerity masked by physical self-assurance. Term does not refer to skin color, sexual identity or proclivities, or age, though it does derive from black slang for "suburban white man." What is "pink," in the Subgenius definition, is their outlook. 2. GLORPS: The same thing as Pinks, but even more consciously pro-Cons- piracy. Typified by complacent suburbanites who don't mind chemical dumps as long as they're "across the tracks." The term derives from Arkansas SubGenius backwoods medical dialect, popularized by the head-launching musical group, Doctors for "Bob." 3. THE NAMELESS MISSION: named by Puzzling Evidence, and anti-Conspiracy intelligence agency originating from a secret base somewhere on the West Coast and spreading out to influence all SubGeniusdom, militarily, for better or worse. Keeps of the Archive of the Ears of Unibrow. Commander-in- Chief Well Manhead, Disemboweler of Conspiracies Nankar Phlege & Security Officer Sensitive Leaf have been assigned to act as impartial Arbiters of Just for the SubGenius Foundation in case Dallas is nuked. 4. The Pope is Rev. Dr. Dr. (Mr. M.D.) David N. Meyer, III, D.D., B.B.T., who holds his revivals ONLY in the evillest, most lucrative New York night clubs. Performs healings by sheer vocal intensity alone. 5. For more prehuman SubGenius history, see Ludwig Prinn's shunned 'De Vermis Mysteriis', and 'The Babylonica' of the diabolical Hermes Mortius, if you can find the three or four existing copies. 6. Both key Death Requests were discovered by Doctor's for "Bob." They are two unsettling answer to stupid demands made by Pinks; they are also the only two steps to rebirth available to modern Seekers. END OF CHAPTER 1 16