Dear friends,

Oftentimes, people encountering the Word of "Bob" Dobbs for the first time, & even longtime SubGenii dyed in the wool they've consciously pulled over their own eyes, will ask the question, "Just what IS the 'Church of the SubGenius', this 'Church of 'Bob' Dobbs' -- what's it REALLY all about, anyway?" In finding out, much as some of you are for the first time tonight, it may all seem like one great big, complicated joke, HA-Ha-ha! Ha... Well... not entirely. Getting more familiar with it, & with us, you may begin to suspect that we take it all VERY SERIOUSLY. Well... not entirely.

I think I can best resolve this apparent dilemma with a prime example of what we SubGenii call BULLDADA. To quote the Church's canonical Pamphlet #1, "Bulldada is the nearly unexplainable label for that mysterious quality that impregnates ordinary things with meaning for the SubGenius no matter how devoid of value they may appear to The Others." (To get this amazing Pamplet #1 in all its jam-packed glory, send $1 to the SubGenius Foundation: P.O. Box 204206, Austin, Texas 78720) The following Bulldada moment comes from the character Bernie LaPlante in the movie "Hero"; here the "sleazebag with a heart of gold" character, played by Dustin Hoffman, explains his philosophy of truth to his young son:

"People are always talking to you about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or something & they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn as you get older is that there ain't no truth. All there is, is Bullshit, layers of it. One layer of Bullshit layered on top of another. And what you do in life, like as you get older, is you pick the layer of Bullshit you prefer, & it's your Bullshit."

Well. Sure sounds like Normal life among Normal people to me... To that I add this (& I don't remember if this was in the movie or if I realized it on my own): Everybody is trying to sell their brand of Bullshit, to get other people to "buy it". But you can't keep buying other people's lines of Bullshit forever, 'cuz then YOU aren't having any say in YOUR OWN DAMNED LIFE; THEY are -- ALL the Bullshit that other people SOLD & YOU BOUGHT comes to make up a big part of YOUR REALITY. If you get wise enough to this fact, you might decide to pick your own brand of Bullshit, so you've got "your shit" to try & sell to everybody else. However, most folx miss a crucial point, one which any seasoned streetcorner narcotics pusher knows well: Whatever line of shit you're dealing, Never, EVER make the mistake of BUYING YOUR OWN SHIT.

Speaking for myself as a SubGenius, "Bob" Dobbs said it, wrote it & sold it, & I BOUGHT it, NOT because I believed it -- I don't "believe" ANYTHING, anyway -- NOT because I DIDN'T believe it but found it "entertaining" somehow; rather, I BOUGHT what Dobbs was selling because it was the BIGGEST, STANKIEST, most OBVIOUS pile of Bullshit I'd EVER seen. Therefore, INSTEAD of having to MAKE UP my own line of Bullshit from SCRATCH, or buy some other guy's polished & gilded Bullshit that he's trying to pass off as the Actual Truth, I could simply license the Way & Word of "Bob" as my own, ready-made line of Bullshit, & because it's such obvious Bullshit, I'd NEVER even be TEMPTED to make the mistake of BUYING MY OWN Bullshit. I'm just a middleman for Dobbs' Own brand of Bullshit; I only buy it, so I can compare it against the Truth & sell it to others, NOT because I'd actually buy any of it for myself. "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the sort of person I'm preaching to!"

In my experience, the SubGenius Brand is among the finest grades of Bullshit that you can buy into for the money. For one thing, how can you beat a guarantee like "Eternal Salvation or TRIPLE Your Money Back"? For another, I think there IS such a thing as Truth -- the greatest Bullshit is built upon kernels of it -- that is, the Shineola. When the SHIT is as BLATANTLY OBVIOUS as what WE'RE selling for "Bob", the Shineola of Truth hidden within becomes that much EASIER to identify. Indeed, the very INSTANT anyone starts trying to talk about, demonstrate, or explain any kernel of Truth, they're already, unavoidably & as a matter of course, adding layers of Bullshit to whatever Shineola they started with.

To compensate for this confounding factor, the SubGenius Method applies JUUUST enough layers of pure, positively identifiable Bullshit to help us recognize the Shineola by contrast when we get to it -- hell, we even leave it in the can most of the time. This is one interpretation of our saying, "Pull the wool over your own eyes" -- you KNOW the wool is there, 'cuz you put it there, & knowing what & where the wool IS, you also know better what & where it ISN'T. Finding a needle in a haystack is a lot easier than finding a particular needle in a whole stack of needles. Returning to my original metaphor, when Real Shineola gets stacked up under mounds of Bullshit carefully refined & packed into counterfeit knockoff Shineola cans, it gets real challenging to tell 'em apart -- who could find the real Shineola hidden in a big ol' pile of Fake Shineola? Who'd want to even try?

For that matter, who can find -- who'd bother to find -- any True Slack in a world saturated with False Slack? The SubGenius CAN & WOULD, because we WANT to know the Shit from the Shineola, & we WON'T't give up our free, natural-born Slack to buy into the False Slack that They are trying to sell to us. THEY hope that by flooding the market of OUR VERY LIVES with enough of their Bullshit packed into fake Shinola cans, we'll just STOP WANTING or even TRYING to find any real Shineola, just give in & start buying & selling their Bullshit instead, JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE DOES.

When our reality gets filled with nothing but A LITTLE of our own, private thoughts & experiences & A LOT of the Bullshit that other people produce, construct, & create for us, then those people producing the Bullshit that everybody buys into become THE ONES IN CHARGE of mose of the shared, consensus reality in which we participate. This is what we call The Con, the Conspiracy of Normals, the masses of average folx buying, repackaging, & selling each other's Bullshit as if it were the Shineola of Truth, allowing their own & each others' lives to become defined & constrained by what they buy & sell among each other, so Normal life becomes just what ol' Bernie LaPlante said it was: NO TRUTH, just layer upon layer of Bullshit. Bullshit which the Normals mistake for Truth & which comes to define the only parts of their Reality they share in common with each other.

So, you could just GO ALONG with this unwitting Conspiracy of Normality, choosing from among the many mainstream & alternative options The Con offers to you as to how you spend your time & what experiences you have -- what things & activities, what sights, sounds, scents, flavors & sensations fill your environment & your time -- effectively HANDING CONTROL over those aspects of your life to those who define & offer those options. Just maybe, if you get good enough at playing The Con game, you can aspire to define others' lives by creating & controlling THEIR availble options. This is what passes for so-called "success" among Normals of The Conspiracy.

Or, you can CHOOSE NOT TO CHOOSE any of what The Con is offering, REFUSE to play THEIR game by THEIR rules, & instead seek your OWN Truth on your OWN time in your OWN way, couched in the Bullshit of your OWN choosing, so long as it's obvious enough to help you distinguish the Truth from the Bullshit & HAVE AS GOOD A TIME AS POSSIBLE doing it. Now, you COULD make up your own Bullshit, or you can save yourself the time & trouble by buying the Good Stuff ready-made from "Bob", leaving yourself free to bask in as much of your own True Slack as you can find & enjoy, getting MAXIMUM RESULTS with MINIMAL EFFORT, & WITHOUT having to PAY THE PRICE of buying your own Bullshit, nor of buying someone else's gilded & polished Bullshit & accidentally mistaking it for the Truth they're advertising it as.

Instead of "just going along", unwittingly becoming both a partipant in & SUBJECT TO The Con, you can define & share aspects of YOUR CONSENSUS REALITY in cooperation with those of us who define OUR OWN experience in OUR OWN way -- not trying to sell you our Bullshit repackaged as some kind of Truth, nor looking for Bullshit to buy from you or ANYBODY else. We're just following our own sense of Slack, so you're free to find & follow yours. You were BORN with Slack. ALL of you. True Slack. For FREE. Something for nothing. The more you buy into the False Slack that The Con is trying to sell you, the less you get to enjoy your own True Slack, which is whatever you get outta life that you don't have to WORK or PAY for. We're not trying to sell you any False Slack; we're just selling you "Bob's" Grade-A Bullshit to help make identifying, finding & living your True Slack as clean-cut, effortless, & enjoyable a pursuit as possible.

Praise J.R. "Bob" Dobbs,
Hail to the Church of the SubGenius, &
SLACK BE TO ALL!

___    A  The F1st SubGothius Psiborg Gnontophagy (TM), Est. 3BX (1995) /^\
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