by Guy Walker

The image is always the same. A squalid, yet verdurous Bethlehem, gentle and peaceful in its scenery, peasants pulling creaking wooden carts full of hardened breads, dead birds, and sinless obedient children covered in the mire of prayer and utter boredom. The town bells ring. A dove farts, then flies away under the parting clouds. Everyone is preparing in their forgetful timid ways, for another Jewish baby to be born. But this isn’t just any Jewish baby. This baby’s mother swears her and her husband don’t fuck. Rumors spread throughout the country that indeed she is quite prudish, and so the lonely oligarchs come with presents, and the stars shine a little brighter for us this night.

The birth of Jesus was indeed significant for many reasons. For instance, time began. For another, centuries of war and hatred and overall misery began not in the name of healthy animalistic impulse, but rather in the name of love. Another: Starbucks, Best Buy, K Mart, and many other doloric laboratories of perpetual grief sell several times their regular numbers around the time of his designated birth, as if to say, Another country peasant was born. Let’s buy stuff! Christmas is good for us. Many 16-year-old girls in Calabasas were just gifted their first of many BMW’s. Many women in Newport Beach were given new tits. My cat ate a special dinner of wet food instead of his regular dry food. But as important as all this is, the birth of Jesus is still a secondary abstract peroration in the line of a happy and free society; it’s a trifling stroke in the historic strength of the first world. America’s freedom has recently been jeopardized—North Korea has tried to take our movies away. Prominent leaders in the first world have been recently seen chanting in the streets of Hollywood, throwing crumpled napkins at the clouds, protesting the trauma caused to them by Kim Jong Un and the alleged Guardians of Peace—the cyberhackers who compromised the private information of thousands of Sony Corporation employees. Jesus can’t save us! they chant, but Seth Rogen sure can! I toured the famous avenues today, as I do everyday, hopping on every star on the Walk of Fame like it was happy celebrity hopscotch. Then I took a photo with Superman and giggled with all the cute Japanese girls as we took three thousand selfies with an extended pole. And all the stars were out. Not Jesus’s guiding stars, and not the Walk of Fame stars—the real movie stars, in their naked morbid flesh. They were having an event, waving a tremendous banner that read, “Freedom of Speech Against Kim Jong Un and his Little Dick.” Everyone was there, sucking each other, smiling, never not smiling, waving at the flashing cameras. It was a chancroidial fetid nightmare—thousands of assholes and armpits and tongues intermingling. Everyone quite literally had a very brown nose. Brett Ratner had his face plunged into Spielberg’s graying butt hair, licking it ferociously, Spielberg giggling uncontrollably, clawing at the piss-stained gum-matted sidewalk. Ro-gen! the masses of groping famous bodies chanted. Ro-gen! We’re just women and men, and we love Seth Ro-gen!

Seth Rogen is the writer, director, and star of the feature film The Interview, currently amidst much international controversy around the issues of censorship and freedom of speech. A national outcry has erupted over whether or not the Canadian high school dropout can release his movie, something even President Obama has expressed much concern over, even considering whether or not to return North Korea to the terror watch list. But Rogen is one of those strange diabolically misshapen lackeys of life who cannot actually summon enough comedy to be controversial. He’s a lightweight comedian at best, but he is still very much overweight. When you see him speak and then make the grunting gestures of laughter at his own jokes, you can almost taste his lonely nihilism pushing out with the tears of his sweat. Seth Rogen has the ugliest laugh in the history of the world. I want to pee on him. We laugh because he’s the fat kid in school we don’t want to go on a rampage because he didn’t get enough attention, a dismal L’Heautontimoroumenos who masturbated too many times to feel anything anymore.

The wry irony in the outcry over Rogen’s movie is that while we Americans refuse to be censored by another overweight imperious Korean man, we don’t stir much dour opposition over Edward Snowden’s compulsory expatriation for exposing the NSA’s massive domestic spying program, or Chelsea Manning’s thirty-five year imprisonment for his release of American military warcrimes, or Julian Assange’s indefinite asylum for his evangelical testament for freedom of the press.

We go to the movies to spend an hour and a half watching someone with a more fantastic life than ours. The very act of going to the movies is a fervent inveigling drama that we are blue miasmic animals, so tired of this life of ours. It’s the ultimate nihilism. But it’s not all that different from laying on your back in the dirt, staring at the stars, wondering what this life is all about. It’s beautiful in a way, until you realize you’re not the attractive man winning on the huge screen. Even writing is a contentious business—I have created far more enemies than friends through the written word—and of all the inflammatory nightmares I have dreamt up, my mom finally said I need to start being a man of grace. Last night I had a dream about Rimbaud, but he was such aggravating company, he just drank and threw bottles at me. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but I do know that writers are the worst of hypocrites—they don’t actually live. Every twenty-something year old with a stupid hat standing in line for an art opening with a title of something like “Illegal Paradise is Upon Us,” will mechanically quote their Nietzsche, so desperately trying to convince us they might be something of a serious intellectual themselves. Live Dangerously! Nietzsche declared, as he literally chained himself to his desk, forcing himself not to live, but to write. He slept with one woman in his whole flaccid desolate life—a whore, who he contracted syphilis from. Writers are awful creatures. That’s why Seth Rogen is a writer.

Hollywood’s own hypocrisy is beyond measure. They happily mock North Korea for their poor Orwellian idealism, representing the entire society as having not a single independent thought, no passionate loves, no heartbreak or tragic wonder, no lonely squalid nights that send us to the edge of life. But they refuse to discuss it in interviews, or sign petitions, just as they refuse to recognize the iniquitous genocide of the Palestinians, afraid their own pallid lachrymose careers will end in a cold wind. But we’re all guilty. We’ve all snorted too much horse tranquilizer in too many cold florescent bathrooms, that our smiles become weak fixtures of happiness—we stand under the buzzing city lights in the middle of the night, frantic for some fried chicken, not knowing that eventually we’re going to screw it all up.

In 1945, when Korea was liberated from decades of Japanese rule, there was overwhelming support from within Korea itself to be unified and self-governed. Russia came down from the north, the United States came from the south, and they met roughly at the 45^th parallel with ensuing violence and almost a million and a half dead. Dropping 800 tons of bombs a day, the United States dropped more napalm and bombs on North Korea than they did in all of the Pacific during WWII. U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay stated, “we went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea too.” In the later stages of the war, because the United States had destroyed every meaningful military and communication target in North Korea, they began bombing a series of hydroelectric dams—which is a serious warcrime in itself—killing unnumbered Korean peasants, flooding and destroying all food crops, and wiping out the entire power grid in North Korea for two weeks.

The Interview may just be another routine comedy, another gilded masturbation that will be completely forgotten in a few years. But it might not be. If we look deep into the bilious heart of it, we can unlock Seth Rogen’s fustian contention. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he highlights that the world itself cannot be a collection of things, but rather of facts. Our day-to-day is one great fetid orgy, interacting with laws and effects. I desire a woman’s marvelous body not because of her breasts and curves and sensual drama as things of themselves, but rather because the erotic fact of beauty makes it so. If we read deep enough into his Philosophicus, we realize the frightening truth about Seth Rogen: “The specification of all true elementary propositions describes the world completely. The world is completely described by the specification of all elementary propositions plus the specification, which of them are true and which are false…With regard to the existence to n atomic facts there are   possibilities.” Meaning Seth Rogen could be anything, any queer monster we were too afraid dream of. If we plug “Seth Rogen” into n atomic facts, we find our definitive answer: Seth Rogen is in fact Kim Jong Un himself—fat and relishing and always laughing at his own traumatic existence.

After its first week after release, The Interview is the highest grossing online movie of all time. The despondent calamity of Kim Jong Un spreads throughout the terrible bleak countryside, and Seth Rogen picks his nose and chuckles.