Two disclaimers regarding the following:
1. One topic of late has been: You know you've watched to much B&B when . . . The following is my entry. You know you've been watching too much B&B when you start to think about it instead of just laugh moronically. Mea culpa.
2. Actually, I really do enjoy the show. A guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. In case you miss the sig. file, flames may be sent to [email].
The Kersey Report, March 28, 1995
THE MAKING OF BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD
Like Matt Groening, who created "The Simpsons" Mike
Judge is a countercounterculture guy who is thought of as
just a counterculture guy. It's easy to get confused. When
you spend your life parodying "the system" folks tend to
lose track of just which system you are talking about.
Judge's creation, Beavis and Butt-Head, airs every
night (precise times are erratic, but usually between 10:30
and midnight Eastern) on MTV. The show features two
teenaged boys, who could be thought of as the Wayne's World
guys after about seven generations of inbreeding. Stripped
of the decency and literateness of Wayne and Garth, (who at
least knew the words to "Bohemian Rhapsody") Judge's
creations wander through an imaginary suburb without a clue
and without the intelligence to figure out what a clue might
mean anyway.
One school of thought says that all the cultural
arguments between the left and right can be reduced to just
one: what are little boys made of? Conservatives claim that
young men want basically two things in life: chicks and
money, and furthermore that the only reason they want money
is that money makes it easier to score with chicks. Left
alone, they say, young men become selfish, lazy boors. The
conservative prescription is a rigourous education, based
upon classics of literature and history, which will
hopefully give young men a bit of perspective on their own
desires, along with strong two parent families, which should
install discipline and values.
Beavis and Butt-Head get none of that at Highland High,
where they are (apparently) freshmen. Rigour? Butt-Head
struggles just to figure out the headline "Sunnyvale Nudist
Colony". Beavis is incapable even of that. With the
exception of a very elementary Spanish class there is
nothing at Highland but the intellectual flotsam and jetsam
of contemporary liberalism, such as that offered by Mr.
VanDriessen, a sixties radical, complete with a peace sign
tee-shirt that he wears every episode, spouting politically
correct drivel in a voice calculated to put students to
sleep.
The parents of the two youths, meanwhile, have not
appeared in a single episode.
Intellectually starved, with nothing to do that's
really worth doing, Beavis and Butt-Head take their cues
from whatever comes along, most notably music videos.
Judge's protaganists have watched and commented on hours of
these, even though they agree that most of them "suck".
Lacking parental guidance and any sense of higher
purposes, Beavis and Butt-Head respect money ("money
rules!") sex ("Whoa!") and violence (as witnessed by their
numerous encounters with "Todd", a small time hoodlum). It
would be easy to blame the tawdryness of their lives on
music videos, but the videos only serve to fill a vacuum
left in their lives by the failures of their schools and
parents.
The schools that do not teach anything are controlled
by the left, and the familial breakup that left young men
alone with the TV for hours was cheered on by misguided
social science and subsidized by an overambitious welfare
state.
Yes, Beavis and Butt-Head are only caricatures, but
caricatures only work to the extent that they mirror real
life. Judge's short cartoons exaggerate what we know in our
hearts to be true: our lives are a lot meaner and a lot
smaller than they used to be. Mike Judge will probably deny
this to his grave, but Beavis and Butt-Head reflect a
conviction on his part that conservatives might be right
about human nature and the decay of American society.