A Brief Disagreement

Comments on this entry are closed.

• John Venlet October 3, 2022, 4:58 AM

  Cutts’ animation sent me to the journals I kept while in the submarine force in early 1980s, where I had written an essay I titled “Man’s Primitive Sophistication.” His animation almost exactly mirrored the words I wrote at that time.

  ∞
• Casey Klahn October 3, 2022, 7:25 AM

  My compliments, John. I know you were keeping those fish warm for me, and meanwhile I penned a couple of cartoons while passing time at Building 4, at Ft Benning. One was a couple of grunts in a foxhole, on the Fulda Gap, looking out at the waves and waves of Soviet armies coming at them. It was a fun drawing of perspectival magic, with tanks and ground pounders receding into the distance.

  Another was a HALO (high altitude) parachute jumper free falling towards a MIG, and the eyes of the pilot and the para meet. On the para’s helmet is a Claymore mine, with the words “FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY” and in his hand was the clacker (detonator). He’s grinning.

  I guess I made another one (we had these big sheets of paper and pencils with which to work gunnery problems, and an hour of class for a problem that took me 5 minutes to complete) where the young officer is ordering his grunt to count the flash to bang time on a mushroom cloud explosion. Jump to panel two and they’re both crispy skeletons.

  ∞
• Mike Austin October 3, 2022, 1:01 PM

  I took the bait and watched not just this video but all Cutts had available on his YouTube channel. I must say, he does not have much appreciation for his fellow men. I would guess that he hates his own species. He is funny, though in a macabre way.

  ∞
  • John Venlet October 3, 2022, 1:28 PM

    While Cutts’ animations are not as enriching as Neil Foard’s videos, which Gerard recently pointed to, they are penetrating. As I watched Cutts’, I also kept thinking his work is sort of a mix of R. Crumb and Garth Ennis work, except animated. I haven’t watched all of Cutts’ animations, yet, but I probably will. I have watched all of Foard’s videos, and each of those are an outstanding short, in my opinion.

    ∞
    • Mike Austin October 3, 2022, 1:57 PM

      Robert Crumb was on my mind as well. But Cutts has a harder edge, raw cynicism more than satire. With Cutts all is reduced to its primeval elements. There is no room whatsoever for a Michelangelo—or for any beauty whatsoever—in his work. His world is bleak and terrifying. The fact that he illuminates the Id over both Ego and Superego is more terrifying still. Good God, what if he is right? What if Cutts actually see things as they are?

      ∞
      • John Venlet October 3, 2022, 3:26 PM

        Good God, what is he is right?.

        He is not.

        ∞
        • Mike Austin October 3, 2022, 4:43 PM

          True. But I was exploring all possibilities. As Paul wrote, “When in Corinth…” Cutts was showing a side of man, but not every side.

          ∞
          • John Venlet October 4, 2022, 5:47 AM

            I understand the sense of exploring all possibilities, Mike, and have explored many, as have you, but once explored and found wanting, they can simply be discarded.

            ∞
            • Mike Austin October 4, 2022, 9:12 AM

              Exactly: discarded forever, never to be taken up again. Once the Truth is found, who would challenge it again and again and again? Debate is over.

              ∞
• james wilson October 3, 2022, 1:43 PM

  On the other hand, is life worth living without war? Or sustainable, even?

  Imagine there’s no heaven, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no religion too, Utopia excepted.

  ∞
  • Mike Austin October 3, 2022, 2:00 PM

    “Is life worth living without war?” Of course not. A man is always at war with his inner demon. Surrender is an option only if the man decides that Hell is not so bad.

    “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

    ∞
    • james wilson October 3, 2022, 3:03 PM

      I’m advised that Homo Erectus was the universal model of man, Asia to Africa, for nearly a million years, unchanged. He had an 800 cc brain, defending family and tribe from animals, nature’s whims, other Sapiens; apparently with some effeciency. Then this 1300 cc fellow appears, a brain big enough to do calculus before calculus. Perhaps his calculus was in stealing fertile women and taking other things that did not belong to him, like territory. In any event, he made us, and sensitivity training is not going to unmake us but it might end us.

      Today from the internet—
      WAGNER CLEMENTE SOTO Effete men turn to the left because there they find fashionable and self-righteous justifications for their lack of manhood.

      ∞
      • Mike Austin October 3, 2022, 3:45 PM

        Most of Anthropology and Paleontology is nonsense. Man was created whole in Adam. There was no such thing as Australopithecus or Neanderthal or Peking Man or any other such silliness.

        There was, however, a Piltdown Man. Which shows of course the limits of belief in “science”. Some men will say and do anything to continue in their fantasy.

        “Sensitivity Training”—whatever the Hell that is—attempts to make men into women. Feminism, however, attempts to make women into men.

        What a marvelous world we live in! We have out-created God!

        ∞
        • james wilson October 4, 2022, 12:40 AM

          Oy veh. In that case the inbred offspring of Adam and Eve explain much of our madness.

          ∞
        • Snakepit Kansas October 5, 2022, 4:00 PM

          “Man’s natural state is war”

          ∞
• John A. Fleming October 3, 2022, 2:21 PM

  In Cutt’s world there isn’t any room for Tolkien’s sentiment via his personal character Faramir: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”.

  ∞
• TrangBang68 October 3, 2022, 9:00 PM

  Anybody who has been in close quarters combat can feel the bleakness of that and remember some barren hillside or patch of scrub vegetation spitting 7.62 hell and legless boys screaming “mama”. One day, maybe soon, it will culminate in a place called Megiddo with blood flowing to the bridles of the horses.

  ∞
• Bear Claw Chris Lapp October 5, 2022, 5:54 AM

  Animation my ass that was a 2:10 of the sociopathic side of humanity. Most do not want war, certainly I don’t. Few actually fight in war as a percentage of the population. There is free will, choose wisely.

  ∞