A Geek History of Time - Episode 45 - Dark Crystal Israel Palestine Part II

Episode Date: March 14, 2020

While Ed is on assignment working with the Wisconsin Trade Federation, Damian invites in a trivia host, Ashley Sanders, in the hopes that someone will have the patience to sit through an entire viewing of the Henson classic, The Dark Crystal. Damian then compares it at even greater length to LSD, New Age channeled writing, and the escalating conflict in Israel and Palestine. Not only does Ashley discuss Aughra’s thicc-ness, but also Santeria; as Damian tries to make sense of how 7 Deadly Sins fit into 10 Skeksis. Sponsored by this-should-have-been-your-chance-to-shine-business-with-money-but-you’re-being-shy..

Like they they advertise one match when crashing a car into one of the wrestlers. Not a total victory of Russia, which now we're seeing. He goes on. He's a gigantic bag of flaccid dicks. Sorry, contidence. Which when you open them up you find out that they're all cockroaches and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if anybody else is ever going to laugh this hard at anything we say.

We can actually both look out my window right now and see some very pretty yellow flowers that I'm going to be eradicating. This is a geek history of time where we connect Nerdery to the real world. I'm still not Ed, I'm Damien. My name is Damien Harmony. Ed Blalock is a way on assignment this week for a second week in a row. I am a Latin teacher. I am a history teacher. I am the proud parent of a seven and a half year old who is starting to get into Kung Fu movies and of a 10 year old who finds Lego video games to be the highest art that there is. And across from me, who are you? Hi, I'm also not Ed. I am Ashley Sanders. I am a trivia host. That's probably my favorite thing right now that I am. So

we're not gonna get into the other stuff. And I host a weekly pump quiz at Yola Brewing Tuesdays at 7pm. Nice. So last time we talked, we were getting into the philosophical underpinnings of the dark crystal, the famous Muppet movie from their early 80s that was not the Muppets. Which is interesting because I just realized that there was the Muppets, but then there were also the fraggles. Were you ever privy to the fraggles? I am not, but I recognize them as a staple of Gen X pop culture. Yeah, they are. They really are. They were essentially the Muppets on acid. And they lived in a wall and it was really cool actually. It was really fun lessons.

They had like a moral to the story. As I recall the fragals were on HBO, but I might be mixing that up with the Muppet show. Either way, I didn't have access to it growing up. Unless I went to my grandma's house, but then I found discs somewhere. So I have all of Fraggle Rock on disc somewhere in this house. Is that on your Tinder bio? I don't have a Tinder bio, but if I ever did, you're going to help me write it. All right.

We're going to leave the Fraggle Rock out. Oh, no, we'll put it in. Maybe not. Oh, I don't know. Okay. All right. You know, wanting a partner like a Muppet's not a bad idea. I mean, the Mell is open really wide. Their hands jerked back and forth really fast. They dance. They're open to suggestion. Exactly. You know, I can't see my feet. You can't see Muppet feet. Like, it all, I don't know. To me, it works. It's

Fechler Rock, Jim Henson. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So Jim Henson did the Muppets, right? He did the Muppets show. He did Sesame Street, which is more Muppets. He did Fraggle Rock, which was like working class hippie Muppets. He also did a show. I can't remember the name of anymore. So, Geek Folk, please tell us what the name of it is. We're like, it was a guy who found death, but he also found a magic bag and he had the magic bag jump into it. Like,

if you said, what is this and a person looked at and said, it is a bag, they'd have to get into it. And so then he found death and he, he at death came for him. He's like, oh, what's this? And death's like, oh, that's a bag. And he stuffed death in the bag. And then he ran around the world and death didn't exist. And so like nobody's dying and it's getting overpopulated and he realizes the value of death. And it was like this guy telling a story

to a muppet dog by a fire. I don't know how many episodes it was even, but he did that for a brief time, and then he did the Dark Crystal, which was kind of in some ways his Muppet Magnum Opus, because again it was a movie that was entirely live-action Muppets. Like there was no human in that movie. Like the whole world was devoid of humanity. Sadly, it also meant that the characters were largely one-dimensional. But last time we talked about, like I said, the physical underpinnings of the dark crystal. I

want to really dive into the the historical context in which it was written because it's kind of a hallmark of what we do on this show. Are you ready to get really, really depressed about the state of the world? I am. Awesome! Because nothing ever changes, ever. So, it's 1975. You might remember that Jim Henson is snowed in and writing a 25 page treatment of the dark crystal.

Also in 1975 there's a hotel attack in Tel Aviv. It's called a hotel attack, like specifically. And you know where Tel Aviv is? It's... It's a no. Okay. So it's kind of the commerce center of Israel, okay? It's their version of New York. And so it's on a coast and Palestinian fighters take over a hotel on the coast and they took hostages. Israeli soldiers storm the hotel to end the situation and this occupation. Five hostages were freed, eight died. And that's the thing I kind of want to point out early on. In most of these, bystanders get killed. It's not like, and they manage to save everyone.

No, very often at least two or three people are gonna die in the process. And it becomes like this weird attrition of like, well, it was still successful because we killed all the bad guys from the Israeli point of view. And for the Palestinians, it was still successful because we made the world pay attention to what's going on.

Well, when both sides are walking away from a conflict where people died going, well, that was a success. I wish we'd gotten more. It's not going to de-escalate anytime soon. So, three Israeli soldiers died. The Palestinians fighters were all killed except for one who got put on trial. Later on that same year, a Palestinian refrigerator bomb on Ben-Yahota street, it was a main street, killed 15 Israeli civilians and injured 77 more. So you have a hotel attack, you have a bombing, okay, and it's not a, I'm throwing a bomb at you,

it's, I set up a bomb and I walked away from it, so you don't know where in the environment the bomb's coming from or anything, which means at any moment this could happen. It really is a form of terror, but it's a politically motivated form of terror by a people who 30 years previously had their own land and now they don't. Cafe Nave, and I might be mispronouncing it, on Jaffa Road was bombed in 1975 that killed Sevenous Railies and it injured 45 more. And this was three days after United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which was

a really important one that stated that, quote, Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Are you aware of what Zionism is? Zionism as in Judaism being both a nationality and a religion. Kind of, it's more the idea that there is a home land that is partly the goal and the possession of it and protection of it is paramount. And if I'm understating it or if I'm misconstruing it, somebody please correct me. But the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 also stated that, quote, international cooperation and peace require the achievement of national

liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid, and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their rights to self-determination. Now, as the United Nations, of which Israel is a member, of which Palestine is not a full member. They are an observing member, they were given special status right around this time, but they're calling out apartheid, which at that time in South Africa was a real thing too. It's rare that you see resolutions like this get past or get done because of who sits on the UN Security Council and there are five permanent members of it who always have a veto and they can just cancel anything.

Which at the time the UN was created, it was a good idea, but in practice, it turns out it kind of nerfs what the United Nations is therefore. But they got that through, and it called out those things specifically, which is a real good thing for Palestinians because they're getting recognized and what's happening to them is getting recognized. At the same time, three days later, there's a bombing,

which it's very easy for people to think of these as two monolithic groups. There is a political party in Israel who want to go way further than they're going even currently. There is a large contingent of Israelis who actually think that we need to actually be good to the Palestinians and give them their land back. There's plenty of different people across the spectrum there. Same things true in Palestine. There are people who are doves, who are in favor of peace.

They keep getting murdered by people who, well in 70s, they especially kept getting murdered by people who said no peace. So there's a lot of variables on both sides, which makes sense. These are people. And people are going to have different responses. That's the year in which Hanson wrote the first part of his dark crystal story. Those things are going on in that place. Now I don't know that he was looking at the TV and going, I'm going to use, okay, now we're going to make a mup it about that. But that is in the ether. Okay, it is a big deal. Okay. On June 27th, 1976, the Palestinian fighters hijacked Air France flight 139. Have you heard of this? No. Okay, so I think Chuck Norris was in a movie about it once. I have not seen any of the Chuck Norris. You are better for it. They're the same movie over and over. I think

there was another movie about it. I remember watching when I was like 12 and it was a little upsetting. Air France flight 139, going from Tel Aviv to Athens, George, not Athens, Georgia, what the f- They're going to see an R&M concert. It was great. The B-52s were opening for them. It was wonderful.

Goddamn. Athens, Greece, that's the place. Now, the Palestinians got on in Athens because a Palestinian getting on board a plane in Tel Aviv is going to go through four or five hours of security screenings. There were over 200 passengers on this plane, including four Palestinian hijackers and twelve crew members.

The people who make the plane go. Most of the passengers in the crew were Israeli and or Jewish, and I do make that distinction because the Palestinians ended up separating people according to religion, and I'll get into that. But first and foremost, they are from the state of Israel, therefore they are Israeli citizens. Now, the PFLP, which is called the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, was aided by two West German leftist revolutionaries in the effort.

So they weren't acting alone. They got these West Germans. Okay, so West, at this time, it's 1970s, Germany is divided starkly into two places, East Germany and West Germany. And Berlin is divided by the Berlin Wall and to East Berlin and West Berlin. And there are West German leftists, people who want communism to take over in West Germany, even though West Germany is held by Americans, mostly by America, but with British and French help as well, like the Europeans on the West. The East is held by the Communists, right? And so there's a lot of back and forth stuff.

There's a lot of spy movies about this stuff. It's fascinating and interesting, and it's just layers upon layers of just like people playing very deadly games, unfortunately. But there are these two West German leftist revolutionaries that helps these Palestinians. They diverted the plane from Athens because I think it was supposed to go from Athens to France, Paris. They diverted it to Benghazi Libya. Okay, now at the time Libya was under the control of Moamarkaddafi, a man who is fairly hostile to the British and to the United States because of their policies in the Arab world.

They refueled there and they went to, I'm going to probably butcher the name and Tebe Uganda. At and Tebe, they were joined by four more hijackers and got support from the dictator of Uganda at the time, Edie Amin. You've heard of him, yeah. They got moved to an unused terminal on that airport and Edie Amin would visit them daily so he's visiting the hijackers and the prisoners Okay, and he kept telling the the passengers who had been hijacked that he was going to negotiate their release So he's kind of puffing himself up as a hero now he himself is Muslim he himself is very sympathetic to the Palestinians, very anti-British, very anti-American,

which is very interesting because he was actually trained by the British growing up. That's why, and he was kind of a bigger dude, and that's why he got to be so brutal, was because he had British training, and he's promising to negotiate the release, okay? So, this is like a four-day Thing, okay, I I've had layovers that were like extended from three hours to being a day And I was really cranky and I got to go sit in a hotel and take a shower I didn't have people point guns at me or anything. I know I did have a bunch of teenagers with me and that's its own personal help, but people point guns at me or anything. I now I did have a bunch of teenagers with me

and that's its own personal help. But I wasn't being visited by EDM mean. I didn't have people who wanted me to die sitting, oh, maybe I did. I don't know, I ate a lot of strip waffle lead day. But I can only imagine what these people were dealing with. Now like a lot of hostage takings of this type, the whole point of it, and this is actually

in some ways what led to 9-11 happening the way it did. Hostage taking and hijacking was a somewhat new thing in the 70s, but by the 1990s and 2000s, there was a handbook on how to deal with it practically, and it was just what they want. Just let them land the plane, then we'll negotiate, do not resist, don't do anything, just go along with it because most of the time they take you hostage so that they can get their friends released. And that's what they were doing.

These Palestinians were trying to get the release of other Palestinians being held by Israel's government. Also, ransom. If you're an insurgent group, you need money. They get the help of Ugandan soldiers, which I mean, he's supposed to be negotiating their release and he's sending in his soldiers to help out these Palestinian hijackers, and they start separating people specifically based on citizenship and religion. You can do that when you have everybody's passports. And if I'm correct, this was the one where there was a stewardess who, while they were flying, she gathered as many passports as she could and flushed them down the toilet

because she was trying to save people's lives. Now, I might be mixing it up with another time where that did happen, but one of these times there's a woman who she was a badass. Israelis go to one group and everyone else goes to the other. But they also added to the group of Israelis two ultra orthodox Jewish couples who are not Israeli and a French resident who had citizenship in Israel, but he was living abroad in France. Amongst these people who were added was a Holocaust survivor. So again put

yourself in that position, you are 30 years removed from the Holocaust. You are going to what is now a safe haven homeland for your people who were, they tried to eliminate you and you end up getting hijacked and separated for the amount of fucking trauma that that must have induced. Like it's just people were made of much stoner stuff than I. They did miss a couple however, which again you know when you're hijacking you can't sit there with a clipboard and I did it did anybody's name start with A again you know was it you know. Now on now all of it started on June 27th. On June 30th, they released 48 non-Israeli hostages from there.

And a couple days later, they released another 100 non-Israeli hostages. And they told the Air France crew you can go to. And the Air France crew said no. They're gonna stay with these people. Yeah. Meanwhile, Israel had been, they had connections because Israeli contractors were, there were some construction workers doing work in Uganda, and they were well aware of the layout of

the airport, and they consulted with the Israeli government, and they created a mock-up of what it was going to look at, look like, and they conducted exercises and trained up an entire group of Mossad soldiers. Mossad is like the special forces, special, they're like the Delta Force of Israel. And they came up with a very well-planned, well-coordinated raid that they unleashed on the hijacking. One of the leader of this group was a guy named Jonathan Netanyahu. Does that name ring about? Oh, yeah. Yeah, Benjamin Netanyahu's brother, which is one of the reasons why Netanyahu was such a hard

liner on Palestine and on Israel, because his brother died in this raid. He was a colonel, I think, at the time. And he was like this poet, fighter, legend, like by the time he was 28. Like, he was just the sion of badassery. His parents were intellectuals.

I mean, he was, I mean, just like everything that Israel wanted to be was encapsulated in that man in a lot of ways. So he was one of the only Israeli soldiers to die in the rescue effort. They rescued 102 hostages and only 10 of them were wounded. Pretty good. Three were killed in the crossfire. Again, there's always an attrition right here. One of them, one of the people that wasn't saved was neither killed nor wounded. Her name was Dora Block. She's a British citizen and she got left behind in Uganda. Because I think what it was was she pretended to have a UTI or something like that or she should pretend

to have a diabetic stroke. I forget exactly what it was. It pretended to have a UTI or something like that or she should pretend to have a diabetic stroke. I forget exactly what it was. Seems to have had something to do with urine though because I just named two things that PP has a lot to do with. But she ended up getting taken off the plane and attended to. So she's in a hospital while all of this raid happens. So she doesn't get rescued. And she's like said, a British citizen, but she has family in Israel. Amin, Edie Amin, was pissed that Israel conducted this raid and in revenge, he killed her. Oh.

Yeah. And he killed some of her doctors and nurses because they were like, no, dude, you can't do that. This our patient. Blow them all away. He was angry, not so much that they conducted the raid, but that they did it without his permission, but they couldn't really trust him. Now, this murder of Dora Block was a catalyst

that leads to the British cutting off relations with Uganda until after the EDMine dies. Because they're like, okay, that's it, we're done with you. That leads to EDMine, of course, his response is he called himself the conqueror of the British Empire. You can't fire me, I quit, you know? And also the King of Scotland, which is why that movie... Yes. Yeah. Have you why that movie, yes.

Yeah. Have you seen that movie? I have. It is some disturbing shit. Yeah. It's obviously it's a fiction. The author put himself in the story. I've seen a Reagan biography go the same way.

Reagan's less of a shit than EDM mean was, but only by degree. But yeah, it's like that, that hijacking is what led, and that was late in EDM mean was, but only by degree. But yeah, it's like that, that hijacking is what led, and that was late in EDM means life, or in his, sorry, in his tenure, because a few years later, he'd be ousted. Anyway, that's most of July in 1976. The Dark Crystal is, yeah, crystallizing, Crystal is crystallizing, in Henson's and Odell's minds. In 1977, Israeli Special Forces killed PLO representatives, Palestinian liberation organization. So you have multiple groups of Palestinians trying to liberate Palestine. The PLO is kind of the main brand. One of them was in Paris, France and he gets

killed by Israeli special forces. So Israel is going overseas and killing people without due process and without trial. Okay. Most of the time they're they're killing small groups of activists, fighters, what they would call terrorists. Sometimes there's kids and women that they get in the way. In 1978 you start to see splinter groups besides the popular front and the PLO and there's some internacine killing amongst these groups, so now they start fighting each other. Did you ever see the life of Brian? I didn't know. Okay, so this is wonderful scene in life of Brian where it's the people's front of Judea and they They want to get the Romans out of there and then there's also the Judean people's front

Which they want to get the Romans out of there and then there's a popular people's front of Judea And they want to get the Romans out of there the one thing they hate more than the Romans is each other and the whole time They're just fighting amongst each other Instead of fighting against the Romans. And to the point where they both conduct a raid on the Roman villa, and they notice that they're both there and they start fighting each other. And somebody's like, no, no, we should, you know,

they're the people's front of GD and the GD and people's front. They're fighting and they're like, no, no, no, we should fight the real enemies. They're like, the popular front? Fuck them. And it's like, no, the Romans. Oh, right, right, right. So you start to see where the

money Python's getting their jokes, too. Some people didn't take too kindly to Yasser Ereffat, you've heard of him. He had an olive branch that he extended in 1974 as a policy. So at that time, he was considered somewhat dovish. Now because of this splintering, groups are starting to outdo each other now. They're starting to escalate the killings. They're starting to escalate the targeting. And they're starting to escalate the frequency. March of 1978, there is a bus attack by a group called the Fata or Fata. That's a branch of the PLO that preferred deadly efforts. They hijacked a bus, they killed 38 Israelis, one American, I think he was a photographer, and they wounded 76. It's a big goddamn bus. But they had public transit, so it must be nice. Among the dead were 13

children though. The Israeli government's response to this was a couple days later, they invaded part of Lebanon, straight up invaded in the neighbor country because Palestinians were on the border and they were getting help. They were specifically, those Palestinians were helping Fata in Lebanon and so this creates about 100,000 Palestinian refugees. So as a bus that gets blown up, 13 children die, 38 Israelis and an American die, 76 are wounded. I can't imagine the amount of terror that this is. But like the response of the Israeli government is to invade a neighboring country. And again, they saw a very real threat there. They killed at minimum 300 Palestinian and Lebanese

fighters and civilians. And they made a hundred thousand refugees, like three days later. So, I mean, there's so much scarring going on on both sides. There's so much escalation. There's so much. And like I said, this is, what you're going to say, this was a 70, 78. Yeah. It's not, peace is nowhere in sight. Now, amid all this, Minachem began, he is the Prime Minister of Israel, an Anwar Sadat who is the dictator of Egypt. We're trying to back channel some negotiations. So in 1967 there was something called the

Six Day War. I don't exactly remember why something about how long it lasted being near six days or something. But when Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq attacked Israel, Israel whooped them hard in six days. Some of it was because the groups didn't get along and then there were guys that were corrupt in each of their armies who were selling off parts of the, so by the time we got to the front it was unloaded, it was just insane. Israel took the Sinai Peninsula, that little part between Egypt and Israel. They took the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and Golan Heights. So when I was growing up, that was largely all Israel holdings, but those were all named areas that were, they trying to resettle and and get things going. It was a huge embarrassment to the Arab world because they four of them jumped in and got beat back so bad. They not only got beat back, but

they lost all their land, not all their land, but a lot. In some ways that 1967 embarrassment led to what happened in Munich. Now also, Unionic was, was started by, you know, there's the PLO doing it, but it's like, we gotta do something. Like Israel just beat the crap out everyone. We gotta keep on people's minds what's happening to the Palestinians. The Yom Kupur War that I'd mentioned,

and everything else the PLO was trying. Some of this is just in direct response to what happened in 1967. And the PLO was being funded by those same Arab states that would rather not lose a war so badly and lose more territory. Like they learned their lesson. Like, oh shit, Israel plays to keep and they expanded after having been attacked. And there's some question as to whether or not they provoked the war because you've got two groups that hate each other, they run right up to the border

and start yelling and just conflagration. But those four Arab states definitely attacked Israel. Israel definitely in six days took a bunch of territory from them. So Sedat wants that territory back. He's the guy that's in charge of Egypt. He wants the territory back and he's trying to talk to begin but they don't like each other at all. And so they're in semi-secret negotiations with Jimmy Carter going in 1978. Now Jimmy Carter was president when I

was born, okay. Who was president when you were born? President when I was born. That would be a daddy Bush. Okay. First Bush. Um, so two presidents before him. Okay. Um, did you hear that Ed? She, she was born when, when Bush was president. So that's what he gets for being on assignment. I'll replace him with somebody younger. So that's what he gets for being on assignment. I'll replace him with somebody younger. But so Jimmy Carter, he's a one-term president. He actually kind of told the truth about what was going on. He had this famous general malaise speech where he's just like, the state of our union is not strong. He said that. Like, you're not supposed to say that. We like our illusions. And he was like, no, no, it's fucked up around here and he was right the world was a

fucked up place he also put solar panels on the White House which Reagan took down yes I used to I used to have a picture of Reagan sitting up there with with a sledgehammer or with a pick I forget exactly what with a bunch of CEOs behind him and I think Leia Coco was one of them who was the head of I think GM or Chrysler who famously said shit like we need to think about how much fresh air we really need though. It was a quaint time. Oh well I mean yeah. It's better than today. Yeah that's that's the worst part. But yeah Reagan took those down. Jimmy Carter was a very...

Jimmy Carter owned a business, and he realized that if I'm president, I don't want anybody even thinking them and to benefit from this business. So he sold his family farm that had been his family for like three generations. He's a peanut farmer from Georgia. He sold it, rather than let people think

that he was in any way going to be corrupt about, you know, a business holding and using the president of the office of the president to enrich his businesses. Like, yeah, what a notion. Right. It was a quaint time. It's a simpler time. Ah, dying inside. Oh, man. So going in in 1978, Jimmy Carter brings Sadat and Beguine to Camp David. Okay. Not Mar-a-Lago. Mar-a-Lago was offered to Jimmy Carter and he said no. The person tried to leave it to him to make it.

I don't quite remember all of it, but they said, oh, we want it to be like the camp David of the South and he said no. Straight up no. No, no thanks. But he did his mini version of Shuttle Diplomacy. I think it was called one document diplomacy. Because I remember listening to an interview with him talk about it. It was, I think it was on the anniversary of it. And what he would do is he would get this document. And he, he mostly talked to their advisors, by the way, and, and froze the two of them out, because he's like, no, no, you're on time out. Fuck off. Because they couldn't even be in the same room together. So they're in different bungalows, right? And he is walking this document back and forth. He says, here's what Sadat wants.

Do you agree to this? Begin would say, I agree to this, but not these three things. And he, okay, you cross it off. What do you want, right, them in? He would then take that to Sadat. Here's what Begin is agreeing to. Here are the things that he wants. Here are the things that he doesn't want.

Check, yes, no, maybe. Do you like me? Yeah, he's going around with the kuddy, no, maybe. Do you like me? He's going around with the Kudy catcher, basically. And he's going back and forth and back and forth. And his national security advisor, which was a big new Brazinski, I think, Mika Brazinski's dad. He told him like, Hey man, don't waste all your political capital on this because if it goes bad, we're gonna look bad. America's gonna look bad. You're not gonna get reelected. And Carter was like, no man, don't waste all your political capital on this. Because if it goes bad, we're going to look bad. America is going to look bad.

And you're not going to get reelected. And Carter was like, no, we got to do this. This is a thing that's important. He cared less about the political effects of it to his own presidency than he cared about getting it done. It is crazy. I know. This is the quaint time.

It is a beautiful time. The two men hated each other so much, like I said, they couldn't be in the same room. Carter was a third party that both men could agree upon and respect. He also had the added bonus of the fact that neither of them wanted the Soviet Union to get involved. So back then, we didn't work so closely with the Russians to give them territory in in Southwest Asia And he also told them though flat out if you don't get along

I'm gonna take away all our aid that we give you and the Soviets can have you I'm gonna tell that you know like it's that kind of thing um And like I said he he barely even dealt with them. He actually took them to Gettysburg at one point though. He just walked around the grounds of Gettysburg with them and that was enough. And they're like, okay, we get it, dude. You had a Civil War, it tore you apart.

We get it. So he goes back and forth to most of the people on their staff and then he goes to them for final approval on things, right? Sadat and Bagan are also noticing that there's an increased extremism and increased anti-Israeli sentiment in the Arab world and Sadat realizes that that's actually bad for him too. Because if he's not extreme enough, then he's under threat. I mean, he's a dictator. He's a military dictator. He's a Colonel most military dictators are only colonels. They're hard to ever generals That's well, that's not true in the Arab world. They're mostly colonels in South America. They're mostly generals just a weird thing

But Israel obviously didn't like the anti-Israeli sentiment for existential reasons, but Sadat was worried, which was, he was probably right to be worried because two years later he got killed by extremists while he's on the parade ground. Like they jump out of a convoy truck as it's going by on parade and they shoot them and they throw like 10 grenades at them and yeah it's it's bad. So the agreement that they signed gave back the sign Ipenn insulate to Egypt and it also recognized the right to self-government for the Palestinians on the West Bank and on the Gaza Strip. So Israel is giving back

what they took and they're recognizing and I think in some ways is the first time that they're recognizing the Palestinians, any Palestinians, right to self-government. Okay. Yeah. Now, technically, this is in the West Bank of the Jordan River, so it's in Jordan. It's on the Gaza Strip, which is also in Jordan, but there's occupied territories that they took. Actually, I think Gaza Strip might be in Lebanon.

Someone please correct me. In exchange for this, they got the agreement that Egypt would not jump in ever again. So even if all of Egypt's allies jumped in, Egypt would stay out. And if you look at a map, Egypt is a big country and then you got a bunch of little countries and then Israel has got another thing to deal with on the other side. So they're eliminating a front. They agree. And the United States would give

both of them lots of aid. Like long as y'all don't attack each other. Cool. And by the way, they still haven't attacked each other. Like, ever. Like, that is a centerpiece of very interesting diplomacy. No matter how bad it's gotten between the two of them, no matter how bad it's gotten between Israel and everyone around them, or how bad it's gotten between everyone around them and Israel, depending on your point of view. Egypt and Israel have kept the peace, and they're both kind of proud of it. Jimmy Carter doesn't get reelected. Begin, his party, it's called LeCude,

they continued to encourage Israeli settlers in Lagaza, strip, and on the West Bank. So even though they said that Palestinians could live there, they're still sending more Israelis to live there. And if you're, I mean, you know, in American history, we sent a certain type of person west to settle the West, settles a wonderful word for invading other people's territory, but it takes a certain type of personality to say, yeah, I want to go there. Same thing when you're sending people to these Palestinian, formerly Palestinian territories, or formerly Lebanese or Jordanian territories to go live there.

So they continue to send a certain type of person out there. Now Islamic Jihad is the group that killed Sadat in October of 1981. Okay. Islam and Jihad is a very important group in the history of terrorism that America has had to deal with. There's a lot of stuff going on, but also they did this under Fatwa. Do you know what a Fatwa is? No.

Okay, it's a holy order. It's basically it's a hit. That's reductive on my part, to be honest, but it essentially becomes a holy order. It's basically it's a hit. That's reductive on my part to be honest But it essentially becomes a hit piece, right? So did you ever hear about Salman Rushdie and the satanic verses? Yes, okay, so there's a fought what out for him, right? So it's essentially you by you're not supposed to kill people in Islam. That's, that's bad. Don't, don't, don't fucking kill people. Uh, but sometimes it's okay to kill people. Like if there's a fatwa about it,

then it's like kind of a holy duty to do it. Y-yawda. Um, and, uh, Ed is actually, uh, he teaches middle school. So he's really well versed on Islam because it's part of the curriculum that he teaches. Uh, I teach high school, so we don't teach so much about religion once the kids are actually capable of understanding another world. So, you know, that's when we stop teaching it. But Sadat gets killed by Islamic Jihad,

there's a Fatwa that was initiated, I guess, I'm going to use, by a guy named Omar Abdel Rahman. Initiated, I guess, I'm going to use by a guy named Omar Abdel-Rachman. Does that name ring any bells? No. Okay. You remember 9-11? Yes. Do you remember that there was an attack on the World Trade Center prior to 9-11? No. So in 1993, there was a truck bomb in the garage basement of the World Trade Center that went off in 1993. Now, 93 that happened. I

think in 94 we had Waco, might be in 95. There was also Oklahoma. Oklahoma was in 95. I think Waco was 94. You just have bombing after bombing after bombing for a little while in America and we're like, oh shit. But one of the reasons that they thought that Oklahoma was done by Muslim terrorists was because of what happened to the World Trade Center in 93. Well, Rockman was the guy who was behind that attack. Egypt also got kicked out of the Arab League for making, because remember there was the Cartoum Resolution, right? They got kicked out of the Arab League for that. So all of that in 1981, right? All of this is just happening. There's so many parts, but you ultimately have a piece made

between two people that are existing mutual exclusivity to each other. The Palestinians are still not fully recognized, but they even got some recognition. Meanwhile, Jim Henson has been filming and editing the Dark Crystal. So the final parts of it are being put together and the studio is wanting to release it when all of this is happening. And then there's a lot more attacks outside of Israel and Palestine too.

So now let's look at the movie itself. So I fed you a lot of water from a firehouse, right? There's a lot going on in Israel and Palestine. And there's, again, you had the philosophy of the 1970s feeding into what he's doing. And you get these two things mixing together. And we followed Jen. Jen, who is a gulfling? And as I recall, he's the last of was kind, right? It presumably in the beginning.

Right. Yes. Yeah. And then of course he meets the only other one, which turns out they were just one neighborhood away. Now he's been raised by the mystics. You're not the only one who had a really long hair when you were younger. So when I was younger I had really long hair.

Really? How long? Like imagine a Irish Jesus that never walked anywhere, so just kind of chubby, but it was like probably down here. I'm pointing to essentially the mid part of my back. Okay. So pretty long. Stylistic choice? Uh, same in some ways, but also how to put, um, the same reason I have my haircut the way I have it now is they both come from a intense love of practicality. Like when I had really long hair, yes I had to brush it, yes I had to shampoo and wash it, but then I would just tie it back and call it good. I never did anything with it or anything like that. Although when I was in high school, there's plenty of girls that would play with it because it was beautiful here. I'd gorgeous ginger hair. I bet. Yeah, it was

lovely. I'll show you my yearbook. I got best hair in my senior year. It was wonderful. But what do you call it? I had really long hair and I would sometimes I'd let it down. And every once in a while, if I was hanging out with my friends, with the right friends, I would just let my hair down. I was awww. It was a lot of fun. To the point where a buddy of mine ended up in a, what are those schools where they send you away, a boarding school, right? For troubled kids out east and like Connecticut, he went there and he did an impression of a mystic. And another guy at that school turned to him and goes, now this is in Connecticut, turned

to him and says, do you know Damien? It was weird. So, yeah, my my my bicostal mystic impression was quite something. Now there's only 10 of the mystics left too, because as we talked about before, they're the mirror opposites of each other, right? And then there were 9, because it starts with... By the way, did you like the effects of like where his master told him about the the crystal shard and you just like pulled it up out of the water? Um, I thought that was some cool shit right there. I you know It's a case of side field is unfunny. I just I just wrote in the wrong time to appreciate

So how groundbreaking that was and spoiled by my neuroflex that's fair. No, that's fair Okay, that's okay. And also, Seinfeld was unfunny. Well, I mean, I'm not saying that Seinfeld is unfunny, but you're familiar with the trope. Seinfeld is unfunny. No, but I just don't think Seinfeld was very funny. Oh, well, Seinfeld is unfunny is a trope that describes

the way that we look back on things that were groundbreaking at the time and they seem cliché to us now because they set the tone. They set the tone. And so they were, you know, so many things were inspired by the source that somebody who wasn't there at the inception would think now that's tired. Because it is just part of the world that they grew up in. Yes.

Because everything is derived from that. Yes, yes. So some people, modern viewers now kind of look back at Seinfeld and say, look at these tired jokes, but when really everything now is kind of inspired by the works of the past. That's a whole trope, that's just a whole Seinfeld is on funny.

Oh, I just thought that that was a true statement. Hey, Ed, did you hear that? She brought up a bunch of tropes too. So Ed's like TV trop? He's the trope machine. Oh my God. I, okay, I never meet anybody else who really likes TV tropes.

Oh yeah, that's like half of our episodes is him pointing out tropes to stuff like that. Please introduce us so we can be friends. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll have you back. And then the two of us will nerd out. No, yeah. And then you'll have you back and then the two of us will nerd out. No, yeah.

And then you'll have the member of this group that you really wanted to hang out with. Thanks. So, Jen's Master is the wisest of the mystics. I don't think he had a name. I don't think so. Yeah, they've kind of retconned names. They're all the mystics names start with Er, which I think is kind of interesting because that's where Gilgamesh came from. Kind of cool. And all the skeks his name start with skek.

And then when they combine their Er skek, like, okay, now you're not even trying, but cool. But he dies. Right before he dies though. Do you remember what he tells Jen? Uh, he tells me about the prophecy. I get the shard. He's gonna go to Agra. Yep.

And uh, Whole time he was raising him, it could have prepped him for all this shit. Yeah, I'm just, I could have taken him there. Decised to say it all with his dying breath. Yeah. My grandma and I went to go see Lavoim.

And the Mimi's got her dying. So I've never seen Lavoim. I don't know what it is. Have you seen rent? Parts of it. OK. No, I saw. I think I don't know that I saw it all the way through.

I think I might have fallen asleep. Sorry. Sorry. It's based on what I fell in love with. Yeah, I fell asleep right before it got sad. So to me, it's a very cheerful movie. Oh, so this is the mild, not mild, but it's just nice. Yeah.

So, so Mimi dies in the end and she's got her big her big piece. Okay. I'm sitting in the audience with my grandma and you know not a dry eye in the room except for my grandma who very loudly says I thought she was supposed to be dying why she's singing so much. Anyway I had the same thought as the master is like, with this dying breath saying, oh yeah, by the way, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr use the shard to heal the dark crystal. Yes, yeah. Which is weird that like there was no chipping off or no rounding out after like just slide it in. It'll all work perfectly again. The seams will line up.

It'll, okay. A terrible sex ed talk. It's not how it works. Oh Lord, yeah, no. You gotta push it in multiple times. It's just some loops, the system. Yeah, you gotta try from the other end. Like all of. You know, you stroke it around the side. It just yeah Make it go

Not so much oh no Well, because if you look at the color of the essence, it's, you know, uh-huh. Anyway. Okay. So, hey. Well, he, you know, someone thought it would be a good idea to drink it and then turns out it was not a good idea.

I thought it gave life. This might be just a gender divide thing. You know, I fooled myself into thinking that it's life-giving, but and good for people. So yeah, we don't teach sex ed in California anymore, so this might be people's only exposure to that. We don't teach sex ed in California. No, well I think they just put it back into the biology framework actually, which is good because biologists ought to know uh, framework actually. So, which is good because biologists ought to know how that shit works. Yeah, I used to hold secret sex ed classes when I was a biology teacher. Oh wow, oh, because you taught in Texas though. I did teach in Texas. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, there were two times when we had to shut the blinds and that was for sex ed and evolution. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh. God dammit. And like, okay, so like my, I've got this weird fascination with Calgary, Canada. Alberta, specifically, right? So Calgary is where the heart family came from, a big wrestling town, okay. And somebody pointed out to me, like, Damien, you do realize that that's the Texas of Canada. And I was so disappointed. Like, that's how much antipathy I have for Texas and education in Texas.

Yeah, well deserved. Yeah, yeah, Jesus. Okay, well, so we've got the hero's journey, right? Yeah. Now that I'm thoroughly depressed. But there's also the Scexis, too, right? There's 10 of them. And then there were nine.

Oddly, at the exact same time that the old man mystic dies, the old man skexis dies, right? And he's the emperor. Which is interesting, you've got an emperor, and then you've got like just a kind of first among equals, you know. And then there's a struggle of power, right? Which is, did you understand the trial by Stone? Like to me, it was fucked up.

It didn't seem fair. No, it was really silly. It was basically Jenga. Oh my god, yeah. But like- But you win when it's toppled. Right, right. But the thing is, you definitely want to hit the second time then.

Because if the other guy hits it and loosens it, then you're like, oh, I got this. And then you get to be emperor. Like, it's kind of like who wins the coin toss in a football game, you know? And like, why play then? So, but yeah, they have the struggle for power and then Chamberlain loses.

Again, why did he think that like, because he got to choose, right? Because General said challenge is a trial by stone. Yeah. Why would you, if you're physically weaker, choose the one thing that like relies on physical strength? And then you have to go first. Like none of that. Well, I mean, clearly he didn't have the brains to be the true leader. Apparently not, yeah. But yeah, he gets banished. He gets stripped too. That was a really uncomfortable scene for me.

Yeah. Because they all kind of just mobbed him. They mob him. And they're moving off his clothes. Well, he says, please, no. Yeah. I felt very uncomfortable. Yes, yes.

Yeah, there's all kinds of uncompfortability to it. And then Jen meets the thickest girl in all of Throck. And she's got the shard. That's not all she's got. Oh, that's right. Oh, man. She needs to tell him about the great conjunction for reasons. Oh, because you have to heal the him about the great conjunction for reasons. Oh, because you have to heal the crystal before the great conjunction. Yes, yes.

Because if not, I don't know what happens at the end of the world. Yeah, and the skexies stay in power forever. Oh, right. Forever. Yeah, it's like they have free agency until then and then they sign the contract. Yeah. Yeah. She's odd, she's eclectic, she's erratic, but she's obviously wise. She's very, very smart.

She is the old person that helps the hero on his journey. Right before she can tell him what he has to do, of course course and he plays music through like the most impractical flute that there is. And of course she's being crazy and weird the whole time and then she goes to tell them everything and then suddenly agents of the skecs is invading and it's the gartham. Cool thing though, she stops them. She gets in their way and they're like oh shit we can't touch her. Yeah.

I thought that was cool. But then they burn her shit down anyway um now the mystics hear the call of the dark crystal right um which originally I guess it was like a television for the skexis right because they don't they see they okay so they saw when Jen picked up the crystal, like he kind of like activated it. And they saw through the crystal bats. Right, oh yeah, the crystal bats, because they are like satellites for the crystal. Yes.

Okay, that's right. And they see that he's gonna try to heal it and they don't want that to happen because they stay in power if it doesn't. The mystics start their long and really slow journey. Really, really slow journey. Like the whole reason it's slow is because it's a plot. Like we can only have them show up at the very end and the whole time there's just what like they're the most interesting,

uninteresting group that there ever was. All they do is just walk. That's it. They're like the ants of the dark crystal, you know? Oh, I don't know if they get there too early. Are they just gonna like sit around and... Yeah, I guess so. It's like... Oh.

They're like two of them throat singers. Yeah. So, yeah, they start the really slow journey to Skix's castle. Jen goes through a really neat swamp. I liked it. He meets the only other one of his kind, Lucky Him. They dream fast, which was, I thought, cool.

That was, so it was confusing narratively, I thought. But I liked how it, so we've got the parallels between the Skixies and the Mystics. Right. And I kind of like the cemetery also of them and their overlapping experiences. Yeah. And cutting back and forth between their stories, which are both very similar, as if we're happening to each of them at the same time. That's true. Yeah. That thought that was interesting. I like that. I like that. Also, he is, he is learned, and she is natural So you have books and you have nature so you have these two aspects of still wisdom, right?

Where's the skecs is like the the the mystics and and the the gelflings are like Ravenpuff and the skecs is our our slither in well a huffle in The skexes are slithering. Well, a huffle in. Because they, yeah, they're like the worst kind of huffle puff, but they're also very slithering. Yeah, just all the worst parts. So, yeah, they do that.

They hang out with the her adopted people, the pod people. Yeah. Who are just fun as shit, have really cool stringed instruments. Their house, that great hall that they were celebrating, that's actually very similar to what the fragals lived in. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, it might have used the same sets, I don't know.

They love music. The Gartham attack, again, and they have that cool kind of clicky sound when they do that, when they get in, and it's like a little whistle underneath it. Yeah. Kira and Jen Flea, one of them gets wounded. She uses moss to heal him. Yes. The gulflings run into the ruins the very next day,

because it's an 80 minute movie. So we got it. Well, and that's where he checks the shard too. Right. So that plot device of like, we got to go find the shard. Oh yeah, and that takes them to the ruins. Yeah. Which again, he'd never seen. And she'd never seen, despite the fact that they were both like

one street over from it. Uh, he says my favorite line in the whole thing though. He says, oh, that's writing. And she's like, what's that? He says, words that stay. I was like, that's cool. Like every once in a while, there's like a real good, uh, you know, nugget there. Um, they run into Chamberlain, right? Because he saves them from the Gartham. Yes. And he explains to them in his whiny singsong voice about the prophecy. Yes. Well, it's specifically that the prophecy was the motivation for killing all the Galathings. Right, that's right. And he tells them that he wants to be the peacemaker.

Yes. And he tells them it's because he's an outcast. Like he folds the truth into a lie. Mm-hmm. And then so far we got heroes journey. We've got an exile trying to get back in the good graces of those that exile him. There's a clear delineation between good and evil.

There's a karmic bond between that good and evil. And you have a crazy lady with a removal by who knows more than she'll ever tell anyone. Yes. All right. She gets kidnapped too, right? Yeah, so like I thought at first that she had died, because Jen looks mournfully over his shoulder at her house, which is on fire. Yes. And you know, Agra, and then you cut to her later at the skexies. And she's like, fuck you guys.

Fuck you guys. The girlfriend's coming. You all are all dead. Yep. And don't fucking touch me. And at one point, doesn't she even say, you know, you could have, you could have asked me for help But it was easier to send your crab brain soldiers instead. Yeah, they burn my shit down Yeah, it's like so she kind of like was like, yo, I could have I could have helped you with this guy And then she she like as she's talking to them There's some sort of ornament some little metal base or something on the table. And she just kind of goes, pock it's it. Oh my god, your face steals it.

That's right. And she does her squat. Yeah. And one of the the the the skexes and they're eating and it's gross. And one of them goes, oh, how crude. Yes, yeah. So now Jan is destined to heal the crystal before the great conjunction

when all the sun's line up, right? There's three suns. Three suns, yeah. He ends up doing it, but only after they kill Kira right in front of him. And once he does it though, the Gartham literally fall apart. They just do, you know?

I think the castle falls apart too. The castle, so like the castle kind of sheds its exoskeleton. Right, yeah, yeah. It becomes like a white castle now. Yeah, and... How about the Camara are there? I was gonna say, they were bringing Skexius back, but... Yeah, they were bringing skexies back. But.

So yeah, and the padlings whose essence, the skexies, were draining forever regain their essence. I guess it drains back into them somehow. I guess they're. It's weird snowballing, but you know, cool. Yeah, yeah, they look like they were, you know, coming back. Back at it, and the whole castle, like I said,

yeah, it hit full potential. I like that phrase. That's gonna be an album title. And so, and meanwhile, the mystics who have been thoroughly divorced from the plot this whole time show up right at the end to fulfill whatever shit Jim Henson thought he was getting out of Roberts's book

Because they get to the castle and they line up behind their counterpart skecs these and they and I think at that point there's only eight of them because one of them got dropped in the fire Yes, that's right. Yeah, and one of them poops up now when I watched that with my daughter at the time I think she was five or six. She turned to me. She's like, oh Every time one thing happens to them, it happens, because another one got stabbed in the hand, right? And she figured that out.

So good job Jim Henson, my daughter figured it out, and that was good. So I think there's only eight of them left, and this is where it all comes together. And it's like a fucking Mel Brooks movie in that nobody knows how to write an ending for Mel Brooks movies either. The only there's only been a few that have had good endings. Most of the time it's just like, and we're done. But like that's kind of what happens with this one.

Jen repairs the dark crystal. He makes the heart of thrall hole again. Okay. The mystics and the skecs is combined to become pure beings of light. There's our transcendental, lighter selves, a higher purpose, a higher plane, a higher self. They become one again, right? These two comically linked races become their true, high selves. And then they leave throught for the gulflings with a healed crystal. Like they go away away and they're these weird-ass creatures. You can kind of see aspects of each, but it's like the

ugliest combination you could come up with. The castle, like you said, it loses its carpice, its true form, its crystalline form, obviates itself again. The dead valley in wasteland that it had been set in the middle of, that had become throught, is immediately verdant and fertile again. And that's the trick. It's that again. It had previously been, and then it went through a wasteland phase, and now the crystal has been healed, the heart of the planet has been healed, so that everything is whole again and it's no longer used for dominating people, but instead it's used for healing people and everything becomes its own truer, higher version of itself. Yeah they call it the crystal of truth after

it's been healed, it's not the dark crystal anymore. That's right. So there's your new age shit, right? That's LSD. Both of which Hanson, Hanson, Hanson, why do I keep saying that? Oh, yeah, that's because Chamberlain. Chamberlain. We need to have, mm-mm, Bob. Yes, that's cool, we need to.

But Hanson didn't know much about LSD or the new age stuff. So he's pulling from things that he doesn't know much about LSD or the new H stuff. So he's pulling from things that he doesn't know much about and putting it in. Now here's the geopolitical version. Here's where it all gets depressing again. But I have no reason to believe that he knew very much about it. He was a puppeteer and he was very involved in his work all the time. But again, this is what's going on at that time. It's the water that we swim in, as Ed is fond of saying.

Israel and Palestine had been suggested to have a two-state solution as early as 1974. By 1975, the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, accepted it as a talking point in 1975. That's the same year that he's writing this. Now again, I don't think he's looking at it going to a state solution. All right, mystics and skexes. No, but what the movie's saying, what is drawing on, is the same idea that once Palestinians and Israelis realize that they're part of the same land, that much of what is dry and cracked, but once was lush and verdant, once they realize that they're basically the same people, the ones in power will merge with the ones that

are out of power. And once they stop retaliating against each other and once they stop living in two different realities, and they start blending the realities again, and they blend the states of Palestine and Israel that they will see the light, and they themselves will be the light in the region and peace will reign. That's that's holy book stuff. That's a reunification stuff. That's a lot of people's hopes. In the most basic terms, the combination of skeksis and mystics is that they become angels. I have a problem with this again because when you have the skeksis and the mystics, you have clearly a super chill group that's not bad and a group that's

evil is shit. And I don't think either of the Israelis or the Palestinians are that. I agree. But I would also think, I would also say that both at that time saw each other as the opposite. They saw themselves as mystics and they saw the other guy as skexes. Now not in those terms, because again again that's not how these things work, but that's how their image of the other group was and what they weren't doing was unifying. What they weren't doing was coming together to come up with this. But when they combine they become literally our better angels. It's an image that is dreamed up in the whirlpool of culture that included psychedelic drugs,

new age philosophy, and it is real in Palestine's constant conflict with each other. Sadat and Bighin will go back to those guys. Their peacemaking was proof positive that that hope existed at the time that they're editing and writing and rewriting and screenwriting this this movie. Peace could be had in that region of the world. These guys were proof of it. There's a wonderful picture of Jimmy Carter putting his hand over Sadat and Beguines as they are shaking hands and they're smiling genuine fucking smiles. They've brought peace. The optimism that Henson approached his movie couldn't help but be

influenced by what was in the news around him at that time. Now having said that he also saw the conflict which was constantly had rays of hope within it but against a backdrop of horrible retaliatory violence and wicked oppression and and he was still looking through a lens of hope because I think ultimately That's his personality. I don't think it was just the turtle necks. I think that he he really was a hopeful guy now I found a wonderful article written by a person named Amy Knight called Big Henson Energy. And I got her permission for this.

Okay, I reached out to her and she writes for a living so she's got really good quotes because that's what she does for a living. I just translate dead languages and tell kids what already happened. I don't do anything original. Quote, and this is a quote from Jim Henson that showed up in our article.

Quote, I've always tried to present a, I should, I kind of want to do a Henson impersonation because he, he talked a little bit more like this, but I, I don't because I, I think that, but there's a part of me that does. My, my less or angel. I'll, I'll hear it that way. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Everybody turn on your Henson filter.

Um, I've always tried to present a positive view of the world in my work. It's so much easier to be negative and cynical and predict doom for the world than it is to try and figure out how to make things better. We have an obligation to do the latter. I think as dark as the dark crystal was, as it's 75 minutes of sad and then and then it's light and it's better which i think is one of the big problems i have with the movie quite honestly

but it does he does pull optimism through the whole thing it is a through line and i think he living at a time where all the shit's happening in the background living through the great malaise living through opek and all this horrible shit terrorism everywhere hijackings are in the news all that i the Great Malays, living through OPEC and all this horrible shit, terrorism everywhere. High jacking's around the news and all that. I think he still has a lot of hope. I mean, that's why he's doing, you know, Sesame Street at that time. That's why he's making this movie. In July of 2017, there was a,

which we call it a Tumblr user. I think it's before they banned pornography on Tumblr. Okay, which you have what views you want on it, but when they did that, they used broad sort of not a scalpel. And so anything that in any way resembled a rhodica, they got rid of, which like there's a whole bunch of fan fiction out there that's just gone. Yeah. Which is a damn shame. But there is a Tumblr user named Ariaste, which was a fantasy author, Alex Andrew Rowland. She coined the term Hope Punk. And this is again, all of this is quotes from Amy Knight's article.

It's a storytelling trend, an ideological stance, and a big mood that means, quote, and all of this is quotes from Amy Knight's article. It's a storytelling trend in ideological stance and a big mood that means quote, kindness and softness doesn't equal weakness. Roland believes that quote, in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act and act of rebellion. That's July of 2017. That's six, seven months after a certain circus peanut fascist takes over and immediately

starts trying to ban people from this country and the cruelty becomes the point. Back to Ms. Knight. The way Hanson saw things was inherently silly. He used muppets to make statements. Usually soft fuzzy muppets with many human flaws. But, quote, any silliness was always tempered with overarching notes of respect and empathy. And in this way, Hanson was subversively earnest and earnestly subversive. I love that flip. Again, this is what happens when you have somebody who's a writer for a living. Now, I think, this is back to me, the dark crystal used so little of that silliness,

and yet on its most basic level, it's really quite ridiculous. And he used it to explain, without meaning to, New Ageism, LSD, and the Israel-Palestine conflicts, and the violence using puppets. He was expressing it, maybe not explaining it, but he was expressing it. He valued the individual's ability to make the world a better place, but more importantly, he valued a team's ability to make the world safe for an individual to be strong enough to make it a better place. Jen didn't get there on his own.

He had a support network the whole way. And that's really the point of the dark crystal. Is that we're all in this together. And for the hero to make his journey, he's got to have this support network so that he's safe enough to make that journey. And in that journey, he fulfills the world being a better place. This was in the face of what I've listed so many times, she says. He truly valued diversity of approach and saw that as an ultimate

good. She says, quote, these themes embracing dynamic and group oriented diversity and its benefits could be written off as a typical territory for kids media, but Henson's creepier, more adult-oriented films, the Dark Crystal and the Labyrinth, still hinge on the resilient power of community over venal individualism. I'm going to break quote for a second. Mystics vs. Skexes. Back to her. Why do we discredit stories about cooperation as being lessons only children need to learn? Night goes on to point out that being hopeful is a gamble and it's doing it in such a way that Henson was a master at it Quote, gambling on hope is a tough gig, but someone's got to do it Philosophies like hope punk help me think that pop cultural tide is turning

like Hope Punk helped me think that pop cultural tide is turning, carrying cynics out to see, returning with the treasure trove of wholesome memes and buoyant themes. That's a really good name for a group too, wholesome memes and buoyant themes. Quote, when I feel bitter about the swath of serial killer biopics doing the rounds, I watched the latest dark crystal, Age of Resistance trailer, and feel connected to all these kindred strangers preserving furthering Jim Henson's vision. The Dark Crystal was the project he felt most proud of. It's certainly the most hope-punk in the Rollins' fan- fantastical sense. Okay, and I'm going to do a whole episode probably on the Age of Resistance because it's absolutely about living under Trump

and stuff like that. But I do love that she also picked up on the through line of optimism and hope through the dark crystal, even in the new one. And in some ways, more explicitly stated in the new one. There's brighter colors and all kinds of stuff. Some of that is new technology, the is the 1970s and 80s now. She wasn't exactly connecting Henson's hope punk attitudes to drugs and new age thinking or to the Israel Palestine conflict like I was But that's why I'm doing this and she's doing what she's doing

But she did note that the qualities that he pulled from it Quote, Henson had the luxury of believing that we create our own reality and that everything works out for the best, because he moved through his world with a myriad of privileges, several of which I share, others I don't. I resent not being born with those that might help me make that dented, that gym, that gym did. So I love the optimism that she pulls out of even the dark crystal. Because at the end, the hero does win and it does work and it brings care back to life. Fiskig is saved. Aagra gets to live. The mystics and skecsis problem obliterates itself and we're left with the goodness.

The pod people come back. Potatoes are going to potato. It's all good. I think when this movie came out, there was an upsurge in optimism about the Israeli Palestine conflict because Sadat and Begin had made peace. I think that the hopelessness that a lot of people felt in the 70s was starting to come out and new ageism and drugs were part of that. Unfortunately, then we got into consumerism. But, you know, just because he wasn't necessarily correct about all the things doesn't mean that he wasn't right in thinking that so That's that's basically what I've got on on the dark crystal and on

Jim Henson and the time in which he did his thing so Having quoted an excellent author having talked about all these movies Or this movie and all these things What's your takeaway? What have you got? What is my takeaway from Jim Hansen? All of this. Yeah. Hansen, how we approached it, whether or not you think this had anything to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict, all that kind of stuff. Like, what do you think? Well, you mentioned mentioned that maybe Jin, Hanson, hadn't gotten it correct, but if the ideal is

the point, then correctness almost isn't. Yeah, that's a good point. And I do like the idea, especially nowadays, of hope and kindness being a type of rebellion, because things are dark and mean right now under this administration and it does feel kind of like America is kind of just eating it up right now. Yeah, there's a lot of people reveling in their skexious nature. Yeah, and you try to point out some of the stuff

and why it's wrong and it just kind of falls on deaf ears. Yeah, or they're like, you damn right. And that's why I'm proud. And it's like, how are you reviling in that? Yeah. Yeah, not that I support Mike Bloomberg, but he did release a good ad that kind of had clips of Donald Trump saying things and then clips of like 1980s bullies. Oh yeah, yeah. of showing those parallels. So, hope, punk, and kindness of being rebellion is something that feels really poignant now.

Yeah, kind of something we need to vouch safe, something we need to kind of protect. Yeah. And also grow. I think that's kind of implied in what she's talking about. Like, you know, I don't have the advantages he did, and I resent that I don't get to make the dent that Jim made. But he was a very self-actualizing, and admitted he didn't get things, kind of guy, and he kept hoping. Like, to me, he hoped almost obliviously, and in so doing that, he pulled people into that bubble.

Whereas what I'm seeing now, with what she's talking about, with the age of resistance, for instance, with what hope is now, it's almost like this aggressive resilience of hope. I'm just like, oh no, you're not gonna knock me down. You know, I'm gonna keep hoping. It's a defiant hope. Yeah, absolutely. You know

Well cool. Well, is there anything that you'd like to plug this week? Do you have any trivia stuff coming up? I do Well, I mean every every Tuesday at Yola Brewing Also, well, I don't have an exact date. I'm not sure I'm doing it. So is that quite a plug? Okay. I am doing a, I'm doing, well, I'm doing a burlask cello act.

Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna get in my underwear and play the pray-lead-to-box cello seats. Wow. That'll be late March at Yola Brewing. Oh, fantastic. I hope that's not like the same night that I'm doing my show.

What's that? Well okay, so I will, while you're plugging, I will plug, capital punishment is returning to the Sacramento punch line on March 22nd at 7 p.m. and it's going to be amazing. And we're going to have some of the funniest punsters in all of Sacramento. And we've even got one coming up from San Francisco who's on sketch fest with us this year. So do you know when your thing is?

Yeah, it's March 27th and 28th. Thank God. Yeah, oh no, I'm not missing that show. I'm there for that. That's oh my god. See if I can get a babysitter or something. Oh, that's fantastic. I assume you play cello.

I do. And this is kind of like an attempt at tibet agreement. I told the director, I have to dust off my cello and practice a little before I formally agree to do this. But it's in pencil right now on the works. I love that you're like, yeah, I'm going to do this burlesque cello thing, and you're worried about the cello part. The burlesque part, that's not even a concern to you.

No. As much as the cello part is. Yeah, you know, with, like, I just figure, I've come to terms with my body. I've got what I got. I'm pretty comfortable. Yeah, burlesque is a very celebratory of all body types too. Yeah, and I'm not too.

In some ways, it's a safer space. Yeah, I feel like I'm coming into a good environment. Yeah, I'm not gonna say anything else for fear of sounding creepy. So, but God, that sounds so fun. Yeah, I think it's gonna be fun. Oh, that's great. But you know, between doing the puncher

over the first time. That's right. You're on capital punishment in... Was it February or? Yeah, this month and then doing for less next month. And being on this podcast, I'm just full of doing things that terrify me lately. What you do well? Cool. Is there anywhere on social media that you would like people to know that you exist? Yeah, speaking of being comfortable with what I've got, my Instagram handle is Da Ash Doe,

D-A-T, period, A-S-H, period, D-O-H. That is my Instagram handle, yeah. I like it. I like it. You can find me at Da Harmony, two H's, Da, then Harmony. On the Twitter and on the Insta, you can also find my erstwhile partner Ed Blaylock at EH Blaylock. You can also find us both at Geek History Time on the Twitter. And please drop us a line, let us know what we got right, what we got wrong. Let me know if we got right what we got wrong Let me know if you think that I completely butchered Miss Knight's article and and did it wrong

And again, thanks you. Thank you Amy Knight for letting me use your article And yeah, please let us know if you want us to talk about other things if you have questions about Ashley's burlesque We'll try to be a conduit for that. Oh, man, that's exciting. I'm excited for you. I'm more excited about the cello than the other thing. Probably because I've seen enough burlesque that I'm like, how's a cello going to work with that? I don't know. We'll find out together. Oh, that's really rare. Oh, man. Cool. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm Ashley Sanders.

And, uh, oh, I was gonna say, keep your crystals dark, but that's not how the movie went at all. No, live your crystal truth. Oh. Thank you.