“GOOD OMENS” + ART HISTORY OWNS TWITTER NAZIS

 

The TV adaptation of Good Omens took eight years to produce but only 60 seconds to piss off Twitter Nazis.

For my money, that’s an A-plus return on investment.

Published in 1990 by Neil Gaiman and the tragically late Terry Pratchett, the book Good Omens chiefly parodies the 1976 movie The Omen.

We added it to our recommended Satanist reading list, principally because of its core religious thesis: That real, material life on Earth is a more enjoyable–or at the very least more promising–prospect than any possible spiritual rewards in alleged other worlds:

“That’s what the end of the world meant: no more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn’t know which was worse.”

 

 

The series (which is unfortunately streaming on Amazon), adapts the whole thing in six episodes. But certain viewers don’t know that, as they evidently crapped out 1/300th of the way through, which by the way is also about as far as I lasted on the Keto diet.

Via Twitter, self-described racist, xenophobe, and white supremacist @GhostMinear whined directly to Gaiman himself about the “forced diversity” (™) of the program and proclaimed that he turned it off after one minute.

I don’t know if this was a widespread ejaculation or just one asshole unclenching, but Gaiman responded saying that the contempt of Twitter twats reminds him that “a negative review is a heartwarming thing,” which is the hardest an Englishman has owned a Nazi since the sinking of the Bismarck in 1941.

For those who haven’t seen Good Omens, the gripe was that the show cast two black actors, Schelaine Bennett and Anthony Kay, as Eve and Adam.

For whatever reason, the racial makeup of fake people in Biblical art has long troubled even some commentators who are not moribund Twitter Nazis one Vacuum Challenge away from redundant brain death.

European artists left a long and uncomfortable legacy of dark-skinned devils throughout galleries and museums worldwide, for example.

“In the later Middle Ages, the persecutors of Jesus were depicted as black, [and] images of the martyrdom of saints often showed the executioner as black,” curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum note.

“Black was also used for the depictions of devils that featured in the visions of saints. In medieval theatre, actors wore black masks to play demons, and Satan went by a variety of names, including ‘black man’, ‘black Jehovah’ and ‘black Ethiopian.'”

Fucking yikes.

By contrast, Jesus is usually anachronistically white in classical art, a dichotomy that history professor Edward Blum calls the “darkness of Satan/sexy whiteness of Jesus” conflict. Which, racist overtones notwithstanding, sounds like the beginnings of a reasonably hot Biblical three-way fantasy.

In his 1836 book Light & Truth, ethnologist Robert Benjamin Lewis pilloried these tropes by arguing that the Garden of Eden had been located in Ethiopia, declaring “the first people were Ethiopians […], from Adam to Noah.” 

Lewis was a bit afield of the actual location of Eden, which of course was in the fertile imaginations of ancient holy men who had a limited understanding of genetics.

 

 

But that wasn’t really the point. Lewis, whose mother was a former slave and whose father was a member of the Pequot tribe, was decrying entrenched cultural beliefs about white supremacy, using the same religious myths that bolstered white power structures.

Subsequent archaeology really does trace the earliest human origins to the African continent, of course. The Smithsonian Institute reports that “the fossils of early humans come entirely from Africa.”

Eve and Adam are usually whiter than roller derby in most of art history though. Post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau broke precedent in his 1907 painting The Snake Charmer, depicting serpents drawn to a figure that curators at the Musee d’Orsay call “a black Eve in a disquieting Garden of Eden.”

Though hailed as beautiful, commentators regard the image as cryptic, sinister, foreign, and, yes, even Satanic, the dark feminine imagery agitating latent cultural stereotypes and prejudices.

So this is all very interesting. But none of it matters to Twitter Nazis, because racist rubes are not aware of or interested in complicated topics like the history of race in Biblical art and how it relates to media today.

Having been subjected to some of their own writings, I can say they’re not much interested in chores like reading either. Odds are few have cracked Good Omens at any point, just as few ever managed to crack the alphabet.

Those with brains afflicted by Reich rot are just boiling in piss over what they call “forced diversity” (™), a made-up non-problem that roughly translates to “any diversity.”

Even the phrase is openly doltish. There’s no need to “force diversity,” as the world is already naturally diverse. On the other hand, the homogeneity that online autocrats desire is entirely artificial and uses force more often than Mark Hamill’s combined filmography.

As a Satanist, I’m always encouraged (and amused) when circumstances conspire to throttle the doctrines of dipshits right in front of them.

We have no choice (for the time being…) but to co-habitate with witless brainstems who build gullible gospels out of their worthless pretended identities. But at least that affords opportunities to play the Satan by persecuting their delusions.

For that if nothing else, Good Omens qualifies as wonderfully Satanic entertainment. And it only needed 60 seconds to get the job done.