20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few will be inclined to defend, with the Leninist zeal and emphasis of former days, the thesis of the necessity of subordinating art to ethical and communitarian ends. At best, perhaps, the position is still defensible in the attenuated and complicated Adornian form of the contention that art is the privileged form of society's self-condemnation. Were this and no more true, however, it would suffice as ground and legitimation for an intervention at this point, and an insistence that art must indeed answer, at some (however complicated and mediated) a level, to and for the moral well-being of the society in which it arises. And must also answer, moreover, to the often deliberately and wilfully obscured facts about this society.
Deliberately and wilfully obscured for generations now has been, for example, the undeniable vast diversity of the stalker community, in which a whole range of media of communication, and of fatal and non-fatal weaponry, are favored and cultivated which receive not even a passing mention in this latest offering from the evidently increasingly commercialized and populistically corrupted Jeff The Chef hit factory. Likewise conspicuous by its absence is even a nod of acknowledgement in the direction of the many achievements of members of the stalker community which extend beyond - and are, in the view of some, equally meritorious with - the abandonment of the poop-stained bodies of 15-year-old girls in deserted tracts of woodland. How many people know, for example, that Harold Zebedee Felsenhower Jr., Deputy Chairman of the US Inland Revenue Supervisory Board from 1947 to 1958, was two-thirds stalker on his father's side? Or that some 27 of the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence can be documentarily demonstrated to have spent, on average, some 28 hours a week explaining, by means of lengthy and often strikingly digressive notes thrown through their windows in the hours between 2 and 4 am, the more difficult passages in Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" to female members of the 14-16 age-group (a figure equal to six times the time spent explaining the same text to male members of the 30-40 and 40-50 age-group COMBINED!)?
Time, perhaps, then to ask ourselves whether the joy which is surely and undeniably given to ALL of us by the verbal and imagistic brilliance and sheer rhythmical inventiveness of all that emerges from the kitchen of Jeff the Chef is not, for all that, a joy which goes unintentionally to perpetuate the culture of lies and oppression which continues to poison American society even in an era in which a man of visibly partially stalker heritage is bearer of the highest office in the land.
(This was a statement by the Public Relations Office of the National Association for the Advancement of Stalkers and Terrorizers of Youth (N.A.A.S.T.Y))
