
.ili.   Devil Shat Thirteen   .ili.
---------------------------------

This is Devil Shat Thirteen released on 11/06/97. Devil Shat is published by disobey and is protected under all copyright laws. All of the issues are archived at the Disobey website: http://www.disobey.com

To unsubscribe from this ZINE, reply with "unsubscribe" anywhere within the email. Submissions, email, and news should be sent to morbus@disobey.com. Your comments are welcome. We also send out plain-text copies of our back issues through email. To get these, send mail with "Devil Shat Back Issue X" (where 'x' is the issue number)... your issue will be sent out within a day.


.ili. Contents .ili.
--------------------
Why Evil is Cool (by Morbus)
Madness (by Cris Brafman)

------------------------------
.ili. Why Evil is Cool .ili.
------------------------------ by Morbus

When I first wrote this cryptic idea on my notepad, the title was "Why Evil is BECOMING Cool". That was a couple of months ago, during the throes of a Devil Shat birth. But, as with time, ideas change, thoughts develop, and life becomes more interesting. Articles are no different.

But our society is. Take with a quick, diluted look with me through our history. A long time ago, in Rome, we had coliseums where we would throw men in with the lions to fight. Move forward a bunch of years, and you will come to the medieval times where we had slayings of peasants and other unpleasant events. Move forward a couple, and you had the hanging of the witches because of their different ideologies.

And then you come to our society, a society where we look back at history and grimace over the barbaric inhabitants of that world. We are so happy that we are civilized... let us all join hands and sing songs. But the funny thing is this: Merlin looked backed at the Romans and chuckled at their immaturity, and Cotton Mathers looked back upon Merlin and shook his head just AS WE DO. There is no difference. Our perceptions are the same. Fifty years from now people are going to be looking back at this society and puking... this is the society where Evil is Cool.

You see, this is the society where:

GOTHS ABOUND: People seem to think it's cool nowadays to dress all in black and be depressed all the time. This seems to have been the next step from the coffee house junkies. Instead of drinking coffee, they now wait for their prozac prescription to go through. Instead of reciting bad poetry, they recite worse poetry. Instead of sitting in coffee houses, they sit in dark corners and look spooky. It's all about image in this society, and the image they want to portray is "leave me alone, i want to look cool, i want to look spooky, i want to look evil." And sadly, this has worked to an extent. In my town of Concord, New Hampshire, we don't have that many goths. I've seen about five or six of them. Yet, on an odd day where both Yakub and I were wearing black and walked into the State Library, this old man literally ran behind a librarian's counter to get out of the way. Ah twell.

You see, this is the society where we have:

GLORIFICATION OF THE KILLERS: This is a fun one. Our society hasn't been the first to do this... but as soon as London starting complaining about the Jack the Ripper murders and mystery, we decided it was a good idea and jumped on the bandwagon. Now Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and all those other lovable little killers have their own T-Shirts, their own websites of worship, their own trading card series. Our TV is full of documentaries about these cuddly people, and we watch them and are amazed at the lack of control these bad, bad people had. Serial killers disgust us, but they take us to a world where we can imagine our boss being sliced from neck to groin, and our neighbor being tossed in a barrel of acid.

And, of course, the media helps us along - how could they not? They have to give us what we want, otherwise their ratings will go down. That's why the news is so full of death and despair. "Ten people died in the next town over, their houses brutally painted in their own blood. Meanwhile, the hunt still goes on for Geo Nickerson, the convicted felon who escaped from jail just days ago, and is already suspected in the raping of two Manchester females. Oh yeah, Bobby won a trophy in some sport." Great stuff, isn't it? Don't you want to be a serial killer? Lose control, get out aggression, and hell, be famous all at the same time? It almost sounds like a spam mail.

You see, this is the society where we like to:

BRING ON THE VIOLENCE: Isn't our society wonderful? I'm so glad we don't have those gladiator fights anymore. That killing was so mean! Oh, honey, would you turn on the wrestling? Sure... wrestling is fake, but it gives us a chance to root for people beating the shat out of other people. It allows us to make a connection with good and evil, and reaffirms our faith in the fact that evil will always fail in the long run, no matter how much bigger and how much tougher they look.

But that doesn't explain why our good is so infatuated with evil. How many times have you seen the Rodney King beating on the TV? It was the talk of the town for months. And what about OJ? Hell, his trial is still making the news... well, at least his golf scores are. Or why COPS is in it's twenty-third season and has spurned numerous rip-offs. How about America's Most Wanted? We watch all these shows with relish... otherwise they wouldn't still be playing.

And why stop at TV? Look at computer games... Quake is still on top, and Postal is moving up there too. New games everyday are dedicated to killing others, and rarely do they cover up that fact. I just saw an advertisement the other day for a new game which went something like this: "Meet hundreds of new friends... and then kill them all." Well... okay, but my mommy always told me that was bad. Other games hide under a "stress management" label... kill representations of people you hate to relieve yourself of them. Sure... just don't give Johnny a copy of that.

And finally, this is the society where:

EVIL IS COOL: And there is but one more thing: the very name of this article is an example. Horror movies are back in nowadays, partly because of SCREAM's success. And as much as I love it, I can't help but think it is done for the wrong reasons.

Shows nowadays (The X-Files, Millennium, all of the hundred vampire shows) are about the epic battle of good versus evil. Only, most of the time, we root for evil. We see our kids watching the shows and then instead of emulating Mulder, or that old guy, they emulate the quiet evil... slinking around our house and pretending they are on the prowl. Kids don't want to be Jews, or Christians, or Waco-ians... those religions just aren't evil enough. Now, they want to be Satanists, and Occultists. They want to drink blood and think they are immortal, they want to go to s&m bars and learn to like the display of pain. And then we wonder why our kids are growing up into such f cked up little people, raping their girlfriends, beating their moms, and shooting their friends. You wanna know why? They want to be famous like the man on TV.

I'm sorry.

-------------------
ili. Madness .ili.
------------------- by Cris Brafman

insane /m'sem/ adj. 1. not of sound mind; mad. 2. colloq. extremely foolish; irrational. insanely adv. insanity /-'saniti/ n. (pl. -ies). [Latin insanus (as IN-1, sanus 'healthy')]

"It makes me cold to remember them. Large dusky forms with sly and jeering faces crouched in the corners of the room, and bent over my bed at night, tempting me to madness. They told me in low whispers, that the floor of the old house in which my father's father died was stained with his own blood, shed by his own hand in raging madness. I drove my fingers into my ears, but they screamed into my head till the room rang with it..." [A Madman's Manuscript- Charles Dickens]

I don't know what madness is. I don't think anyone really knows. Except those who live it. But they can't tell anyone about it, because no one would quite understand it. To experience something referred to as madness... what exactly is it? Those who know what it's like probably won't ever discuss it with a "normal" person. Then again, what's "normality"? Dull, drab, I think. What is madness? A world only the madmen know. Perhaps, a world which if you enter it, you won't ever really come out. Where things don't need foundations? Where things happen regardless?

Schizophrenia- Any of a group of mental disorders characterized by gross distortions of reality, withdrawal from social contacts and disturbances of thought, language, perception and emotional response. There is no known cause but possibly due to a hereditary or genetic disposition with psychological, biochemical and sociological factors. [Dictionary of Medical Terms' Barrons Educational Series Inc.]

When madmen act in their own world, without logic, and barriers, no limits, no one interferes. Unless it's harmful to others. Or so I think. Wouldn't it be wonderful to become mad for a while? Escape from everything that's driving you "insane" and surrender to that moment of complete madness, breaking down. Just explode and cease to care of the consequences. No one would understand. My ideal fantasy...maybe everyone has something inside of them which would eventually lead them to the epitome of madness if it was activated. Why not just activate it because we're sick of the routine that's expected of us? Why can't we just do whatever it is we want to, and not have a hoard of parental figures stepping over to calm things down and try to make it better? Maybe it would be better to just let go, and give in to the psychotic instincts we all must have in our minds, in ourselves. Like this dormant gene that awakens if probed. As long as we didn't cause any harm, why bother being "normal" and following society in its insignificant path of dullness?

"..I'm perfectly aware I play at being mad here, and I do it quite calmly. Your trouble is, you live your madness out in a fearful panic, without realizing it or seeing it for what it is." [Henry IV-Luigi Pirandello]

Do whatever we please, think whatever extraordinary thoughts and theories devour our minds. The concept of madness has been engraved upon society and anyone who acts out of the norm is automatically labeled "mad". How does anyone know for sure who's mad or not? Maybe everyone who think they're "normal" are actually mad, and the madmen themselves are the only sane ones. How do you know? How does anyone know?

"Madmen, and good for them, do build without logic! Or with their own feather-brained logic! They're unstable, they're inconstant! Today one way, tomorrow God knows how! You stick to things, they don't. Instability! Inconstancy! You say "This can't be so"...but for them anything can be." [Henry IV- Luigi Pirandello]

Let anything be. Do anything and everything. I wonder, who was the fool who decided that stability and consistency was to be the norm? Why is it so important that we all follow it? Ok, maybe things would be somewhat out of control if everyone decided to step out of the norm, but with time people would realize that this so called normality they'd been living in is so useless and pointless, and eventually they'd be forced, in a way, to adapt to insanity. Why must insanity be seen as a disease?  Why must it be seen as a bad thing?

Well, I'm not mad. Not to the extent that it could be considered a mental illness. Yet, I hope I'm not "normal". In a way I'm jealous of anyone who's lives in a happy state of madness. "Building without logic"...living in a world where instability and inconstancy reigns.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
The website edition includes images, a nice design, and all
of the email we have received about this issue. Go there.
http://www.disobey.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 
