I want to start off thanking the individual who sent us a generous Bitcoin donation. There was no identifying information, or I would send a personal note. Mrs. FarSide expresses her gratitude, as well, and she has already presented me with a grocery list in celebration. If you’d like to support RadioFarSide, give us a like and share with your network, and you can find our hat
I started RadioFarSide 13 years ago on Blogger and YouTube, and was almost immediately demonetized by Google across all its platforms - no reason and no recourse. Since then, Google has slowly been whittling away at my work by changing the rules on a regular basis and retroactively deleting anything they don’t like. The vast majority of the Blogger site is now available here on Substack, and I’ve moved most of the videos to Rumble and BitChute. Though Rumble is monetized, I’m not retiring soon on the income. Rather I see myself as a busker - the guy playing the guitar in the corner of the subway platform with my hat on the ground, gratefully accepting tips for making the world a little more interesting and colorful.
RadioFarSide is my way of fighting the Culture War. I used to force my kids to memorize poems by W. B. Yeats and Bob Dylan, but they’ve long since grown up and old Dad no longer has leverage in that respect. I forced them to learn how to write cursive and do cell animation with transparencies and develop 35mm slides at home, because if you don’t know how to do something with your hands, you will never understand the digital world.
I’ve literally spent my entire life on the Western front of the Culture War. I won my first writing award in 8th grade with a short story about a 12-year-old boy and an infant being the sole survivors of an Indian raid on a wagon train. That same year, I earned my first professional paycheck as Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh, a summer stock kids’ show at the Alley Theatre just before they shut down the old Fan Factory and moved to their new space in downtown Houston. I later won my first video award for my documentary on the same theatre, called 40 Years at the Alley.
I worked on the world premier of Da by Hugh Leonard at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, which went on to win a Tony Award on Broadway. I worked on Terms of Endearment, which won the Best Picture Oscar for 1983. I worked on Jean-Michel Jarre’s Rendez-vous Houston, which turned the entire city skyline into a performance and still ranks in the Top 10 for live audiences - about one million people. That show was supposed to feature a saxophone solo by Ron McNair from orbit, but he died a couple of days before in the shuttle Challenger explosion.
Most recently, I started up operations for both of Indonesia’s first professional theatres, the Ciputra Artpreneur and JIExpo Theatre, and in the process helped to bring the first-ever Broadway tours to Indonesia.
While it’s fun to brag a bit, my point is that I am a Culture Warrior. I have invested my entire life, career and heart into forging the chain of civilization - creating, expanding and preserving some of the greatest art our species has produced.
And I resent with every fibre of my being the slimy Do Nothings that are trying so hard to destroy millennia of growth and beauty and life.
Don’t get me wrong. I love parody and farce. Whether it’s Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Swift’s A Modest Proposal or Molier’s Tartuffe, Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest or Mozart’s La Nozze di Figaro, and the mighty Monty Python of our current era, parody and farce are the guard rails on the cultural highway - they let us go outside the bounds, but guide us back into the main lanes with new appreciation for what we have achieved.
Imagine Michelangelo’s “David” or Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” as horrifically mutilated by surgical “gender” reassignment. Or worse, imagine those precious and iconic works destroyed in the name of “climate change” or “trans rights”. This is not parody or farce, it is an attack on the treasures of civilization itself. The people who do this are not trying to make a point, they are trying to wipe out beauty and history in the name of their selfish and narcissistic ideology.
Great parody and farce are creations in their own right - fresh looks at ancient symbols and manners. They are funny on the surface, with profound messages about who we are. The Wokians don’t honor the Great Works, they defile them the way they defile their own bodies in self-hatred and loathing for Nature and ingenuity.
They cannot create, so they destroy.
We have seen this before in the name of religious dogma, which tells us this new movement is also a religion. It cannot bear the witness of past glory that flies in the face of their belief system. They demand obsequious obedience and the obliteration of all that preceded, because they can never rise to eternal truth, and so they must hide from it. Everyone must be whipped into admiring the emperor’s new clothes, because even the slightest divergence undermines the fragile scaffold on which they have built their edifice of fly ash.
The easiest and most powerful weapon we have is patronizing the arts. Go to good quality museums on a regular basis and study art history. Attend the theatre when quality productions of classic plays are staged. It’s not enough to boycott the darkness, we must support the light.
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Radio Far Side is a labour of love. We don’t use a paywall, and we don’t sell stuff. We just create things to inform and entertain. But like any good busker on the digital mean streets, we put our hat down, and if you feel inspired, drop a coin in to show your appreciation:
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Amen brutha! I would add Aristophnes' "Lysistrata" as one of the great works of farce. Imagine (real) women withholding sex until the (real) men stop the war. Ha!