Put them all together they spell Mofo

I used to be a huge fan of The Simpsons, but somewhere around the tenth year or so it really lost its way. After several years wandering in the wilderness, it has returned from the abyss, though it still has not reached the lofty heights of satire and wit of its heyday in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, The Simpsons Movie was well done (I half suspect they were saving their best material for the film) and it still occasionally makes me laugh out loud or remark on its cleverness. I don't watch it as religiously as I once did, but I still try to catch it.

Yeah, yeah. Kushibo needs to stop explaining what he watches and why (PBS's Newshour: your best bet for comprehensive and objective news coverage in America). Anyway, my point (and yes, I do have one), is that in the season opener, "The Falcon and the D'Ohman," The Simpsons had their guest flashbacking (it's a word now!) to when he was forced to write musicals praising the Dear Leader.

The flashback includes the opening of the musical, which starts with a young and vibrant Kim Jong-il (not sure how back the flashback flashes) getting off a bus in Pyongyang on his way to the palace, where a bystander tells him he's too benevolent to be the leader (said bystander is now making eel wallets for export in an undisclosed camp in North Hamgyŏng Province).

But Dear Leader-to-be proves he is by no means too benevolent, as he presents a chorus to sing his praises, as it were. To the theme of "M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World To Me)," here are the lyrics:

"K" is for Korea, just the north part.
"I" is for the Internet he bans.
"M" is for the millions that are missing.
"J" is for a human-tasting jam.
"O" is for "Oh, boy, we love our Leader!"
"N" is for the best Korea, North!
"G" is for "Gee whiz, we love our Leader!"

And the cringe-worthy but cleverly satirical lyrics cut off right there, segueing into a bit about whether Mrs Krabappel should be dating Principal Skinner or Ned Flanders ("Twilight" for Gen-Xers, I guess).

If I got a bit creative, I could finish it with, "I" is for the idiots who fund him, and "L" is for lost family we mourn. Okay, so that is a bit of a downer ending, but in my defense, it is North Korea.

...

A fun little conspiracy theory centered around The Simpsons

Well, fun or alarming, depending on how seriously you take this.



I found this here, and I am putting this up solely because I love The Simpsons and I am tickled by this odd merger of the show with real-world events (after 9/11, the 1997 episode centered around the World Trade Center was heavily discussed at the Simpsons list I have moderated for most of the last decade), and the notion that some writer(s) on the show is warning people about false-flag attacks.

No, I'm not one to go in for conspiracy theories and I believe there is so much television out there that there are bound to be some coincidences. And terrorists thinking up new and innovative ways to shock the world might easily be thinking along the same lines — and about the same high-profile targets — as Hollywood writers who think up disaster films.

Nevertheless, these coincidences are just plain eerie. Now eerie doesn't mean there's some there there. It could just be eerie. Our neighbor back in Compton was eerie, but he wasn't the axe murderer that we kids had feared he was. (Petey was the most convinced. But after he decided to confront Old Man Beckman that one January evening, Petey must have been so embarrassed about how wrong he was that he never showed his face again. Just disappeared, that's how embarrassed he was. Hey, wait a minute...)

If they had just left it at the 9/11 stuff, I might have been a little more shaken by this, but the program that showed signs of Hurricane Katrina months before it happened... if they're trying to suggest the guvmint had something to do with it, well that has crossed the line into the fantastical. Coincidence.

But I will note that after the 9/11 attacks, Fox decided to permanently pull the World Trade Center episode of The Simpsons (as well as censor the one where the Backstreet Boys save it from a terror attack N Sync try to save Mad Magazine headquarters, which looks kinda like the WTC, from a non-terror attack... thanks to television, I can't remember what happened eight minutes ago). It seemed odd to us Simpsons fans, who thought the episode would be an appropriate homage.