Home What To Do     What To Rent     What To Think    What To Read    What To Listen To

Where To Go Links Contact    Life With The Poor       Anonymous Personals       The Movie List



The Magic Christian by Terry Southern


"Little man whip a big man every time if the lttle man's in the right and keeps a' comin'"
- Motto of the Texas Rangers

     The poop: The Magic Christian is the story of billionaire Guy Grand who spends $10 million a year on series of hoaxes and pranks that include hiring a gibberish-speaking Pygmy to run a Madison Avenue firm and entering a panther in prestigious dog show. The stunts build up to Guy's greatest prank, The Magic Christian, an exclusive cruise ship that, among other things, winds up sailing in circles.

    As literature, I give The Magic Christian a C minus. The episodic nature of the book (each chapter is about a particular prank) and the lack of character development (why is Guy doing this, anyway?) would make this a monotonous read if the book extended past its slim 148 pages.
Say, does anybody
else smell shit?


    The shit: As manifesto and instruction manual, however, The Magic Christian gets a B fuckin' plus. True, I wish the character of Guy Grand hadn't been a billionaire (Makes him kinda hard to identify with, especially when you're scraping together nickels in order to buy orange juice. And what grudge could a billionaire possibly hold against society?). I wish he'd been more like Tyler Durden (From the best film ever, Fight Club) or Frank Cranmer , but, fuck it, when it comes to stories about people who are so pissed off at society that they finally turn around and fight back, I'll take what I can get. Besides, some of Guy's stunts contained an element that is sadly missing from most revolutionary actions - they were fun.

    About fifty pages into The Magic Christian I began to ask myself "Why can't I do something like this? I'm not a billionaire, but I have at least a billion dollars worth of anger bottled up inside me." That's when I set about on a series of experiments:

Experiment No. 1 - The Shuttle:
    First, a little bit of info, if you don't mind. I work for a huge pharmaceutical corporation that receives a tax break for encouraging its employees to take public transportation by providing shuttle service to and from the train station. Before we started moving our corporate headquarters, there were about seven of us (out of a company with several thousand employees) who regularly rode the shuttle. In the past few months, that number has dwindled to three - me, the sixty-five year old, hard-of-hearing, shuttle drive, and a cafeteria worker who seems to suffer from (and this is my best guess, kids) Echolalia (Congratulations, JSP - two links in one review…that last one doesn't count.).

    Here's a little taste of what my morning commute is like:

Shuttle radio: … only at participating dealers.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: Participating dealers.
Geriatric shuttle driver: What?
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: What?
Geriatric shuttle driver: Yeah.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: Um huh.
Me: [Silent. Praying for a swift death]


    I swear to fuckin' God, these two once laughed their asses off for twenty minutes at an AM radio commercial. The following doesn't really capture the magic of that moment, but screw you. I had to live through it, now it's your turn:

Shuttle radio: …then you can mow the lawn.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: Hahahaha. Mow the lawn.
Geriatric shuttle driver: Hahahaha. Yeah she told him.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: What she tell him?
Geriatric shuttle driver: To mow the lawn.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: Mow the lawn. Hahahaha
Me: [Silent. Looking for something to slash my wrists with.]


    But these two really shine when they discuss current events. Move over McLaughlin Group. Oh, please keep in mind that the following conversation takes place at least three times a week:

Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: How 'bout that guy? Did that thing. I'm glad they caught him.
Geriatric shuttle driver: Oh, yeah.
Me: [Silent. Thinking "Who the fuck are you talking about? The beltway sniper? Slobodan Milosevic? Butch Fuckin' Cassidy? Who?]


    I was on page fifty-two of The Magic Christian when I decided to test a little theory that had been building in the back of my brain:

Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: How 'bout that guy? Did that thing. I'm glad they caught him.
Me: Oh yeah. That guy in New York. The one with that atomic bomb. I'll be thanking Jesus every day that he never got a chance to set that thing off.
Geriatric shuttle driver: Oh, yeah.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: Bomb. Yeah.


    Theory proven. These two didn't even know what they were talking about. The next day, I raised the stakes:

Me: How 'bout that guy? The one that killed that old lady - slashed her throat [There had been no old lady killed]? I'm glad they caught him.
Geriatric shuttle driver: Oh, yeah.
Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: Yeah. Old Lady. Slashed her throat.
Me: To be honest, that kind of thing used bother me, but the other night I saw this documentary on PBS that looked at war crimes as sort of an artistic statement. So I started thinking of murder as art. Like that guy who slashed that old lady's throat - he was kinda like Jackson Pollock. You know, creating a "drip" painting. Slash, slash, slash [I drove the point home by flailing my arms wildly about.].
Geriatric shuttle driver and Echolalia suffering cafeteria worker: [Silent. Wishing I'd shut up]
Me: Now, take a drive-by shooting, for example. That's kinda like Pop Art. Heck, the guns even make a popping sound. Pop, pop, pop [Oddly, I decided to drive this point home with the same flailing about of my arms that I used to illustrate "Slash, slash, slash"].

    We rode, the rest of the way, in silence.

    "Rodney, you're an asshole" you're probably saying right now. "Those poor guys are on the bottom rung of the ladder. If you think about it, they really hadn't done anything to you. That was just cruel." Know what? You're absolutely right.

    But you see, when the Army tests its newest biological weapon, they don't test it on hordes of armed Iraqi soldiers. No, they go down into the subway and test it on poor African-Americans. Well, that's just what I was doing. I was gearing up for war with society and I needed to test my weapons. The shuttle driver and Mr. Echolalia trainable were merely the first casualties in that war. They suffered for the greater good.

    My next target would be much larger.

Part Two - The Real World