All posts by Matthew Callan

The Funny

A Scene from Cheers Where George Wendt is Replaced By Noam Chomsky

NOAM walks into the bar.

NOAM: Hello, everybody.

EVERYBODY: NOAM!

CLIFF: How’s it hangin’, Noamie?

NOAM: American Democracy is cheap facade whose only purpose is to conceal the corporate puppet masters pulling the strings of our so-called leaders.

WOODY: Hey Mr. Chomsky, how’s Vera doing these days?

NOAM: Interpersonal relationships, even romantic ones, have been rendered all but pointless by the commodification of human emotion. If something does not fit into a prefab Disney-approved mold, or can not be altered with Pfizer’s drugs…

CARLA: Yo, Einstein, I told you to knock it off with all that junk about all of us being ground slowly under the heel of Wall Street. People just wanna relax with a beer after work and you’re bumming them out. Even the weird chubby guy with glasses who has no name.

PAUL: My name is Paul.

CLIFF: Seriously? I thought it was Glenn.

PAUL: In an early episode, yeah, but then they expanded the role a bit to…

NOAM: Your role within the capitalist sphere will only be expanded to the extent that you can aid your corporate masters. Do their bidding and they will be happy to extend the walls of your prison cell by an inch or two.

CARLA: Sam, can we do something about this bozo?

SAM: Not now, Carla, I got my eye on a hot tomato at 3 o’clock.

NOAM: Agriculture has been perverted by the Franken-science purveyors of Monsanto and its ilk, who attempt to “patent” what took nature millions of years to…

CARLA: Sam’s talkin’ about a broad, Poindexter, not real tomatoes. You had something to do with this, didn’t you, Diane?

DIANE: I admit, I invited Professor Chomsky here because I attended one of his lectures at MIT and believed he might raise the level of discourse in this establishment a tad. But I must concur that his line of inquiry is not exactly appropriate for happy hour.

NOAM: Time itself is now granted you by your corporate taskmasters, who “allow” you to enjoy weekends off and expect you to be grateful for the gift of your own hours, happy or otherwise.

GLENN: Listen, pal, we just wanna come here and…hey, I just said my name is Paul. Why is my name Glenn again?

CLIFF: Whatta ya talkin’ about, Glenn? Your name was always Glenn. Ain’t that right, guys?

Entire bar nods in agreement.

GLENN: Something weird’s going on here…

NOAM: They have all fallen down the memory hole, Glenn. Your past has been rewritten in real time, and, knowingly or not, your so-called friends have all fallen in line. No doubt at the behest of the CIA, or NSA, or perhaps some other intelligence organization we’ve yet to discover, all of them mining our personal data to further quote-unquote American interests.

GLENN: I’m gettin’ kinda scared. Maybe this guy is right. Maybe we are all just cogs in a corporate machine of our own making.

CARLA: Enough! No more of this “through the looking glass” nonsense. Hit the bricks, buddy!

CARLA bum rushes NOAM out the front door.

CARLA: No more eggheads in my bar, you hear me?

DIANE: I will keep that in mind for the future. However, I did invite one other distinguished scholar to visit tonight.

Door flies open.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Good evening, all. Which of you would care to debate with me the childish fairy-tale belief in a higher power?

Bar clears out.

Stories

Santiago, 1997

I will be in Chile. Dad will also be in Chile.

I will be in Chile because the scholarship allowing me to attend NYU carries with it membership to a scholar’s group that takes international trips over the winter break. Said trips involve sightseeing, community service, and a modicum of free time to do whatever it is college students do while abroad. I don’t know what that is, exactly. I can barely relax back home, let alone in a strange country thousands of miles away.

Why will Dad will be in Chile? I’m not sure. He is a “systems analyst” now. That’s what it says on his business cards. He has many different ones, and it seems each one is from a different company—NASDAQ, USAID, and a dozen other obscure outfits—with its own variation on his name. Eugene Callan. Gene Callan. Eugene A. Callan. Gene M. Callan…

Whatever his work is, it takes him across the globe. He spends a good chunk of my high school years in either Russia (right around coup time) or Hong Kong (right before it was given back to China). He’s also done time in many former Soviet republics in central Asia (The Icky-Stans, he calls them), Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and South America. He does not explain to me what he does in these countries, and I don’t ask. It’s not because I am uninterested. It’s because I don’t expect a straight answer.

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Stories

Shop Room, 1992

My shop teacher is Ratman. Not his given name, of course, except in the sense that junior high kids have given that name to him, behind his back, for a small eternity.

Strictly speaking, Ratman doesn’t teach “shop.” In keeping with the educational nomenclature of the times, Shop is now called Tech. But it’s still shop. His classroom is a dank garage, where the temperature drops 10 degrees from the rest of the school, and the walls are lined with aluminum shelves holding old, busted tools covered in a thick layer of sawdust and metal shavings.

Shop class requires repeated use of drill presses and bandsaws and other things that can kill you if used incorrectly. Ratman constantly warns about the danger surrounding his students at the top of his lungs, in a window-rattling howl that suggests he is not so much warning against harm as he is actively attempting to cause it.

He was dubbed Ratman due to a confluence of unfortunate physical characteristics. First, he is tiny. Four feet tall, if that. He is just tall enough to not be a midget. He also has a long, pointy, rodent-like nose, and a pair of beady eyes made even smaller by a pair of coke-bottle glasses. He owns a shrill, piercing voice that can cut through steel. He also has one leg that is shorter than the other. His pace is evened out by a shoe with a block of wood. It hits the ground with vicious CLUNK as he patrols his classroom.

shop classroomA man of such description should have thought twice about choosing teaching as his vocation. He especially should have run screaming from teaching at the junior high school level. That he didn’t is either a reflection of a serious lack of perception or a byproduct of his unique personality. I’m inclined to side with the latter interpretation, because Ratman is a complete bastard. It’s hard to say if he was a bastard to begin with or if he was made a bastard by years of teaching bastard high school kids. The why’s don’t really matter to me, because regardless of the reason, he is a bastard and I must deal with him.

Much like a religious cult’s compound, Ratman’s class possesses an air rife with the constant threat of recrimination. Ratman is fond if descending on you with no warning and shrieking “WHATTA YOU DOIN?” directly into your ear. This seems counterproductive to his stated aim of teaching safe workroom practices, but his philosophy is “Do as I scream, not as I do.”

Continue reading Shop Room, 1992 →