Oct 17, 2006 / Buddy Jesus / BagNews Just like the long running SNL News gag announcing Franco, the former dictator, as "still dead," I imagine a modern equivalent tracking the moribund condition of irony. In a humorless reality where Popes hurl daggers and cultures do battle over cartoons, news comes that a sophomoric Hollywood creation, designed to give the fundies a poke-in-the-eye, has been converted to ammo in the GWOT. Buddy Jesus originated in the 1999 slacker movie, "Dogma," as part of a (fictional) marketing effort on behalf of the Catholic church to inject more "cool" into their main man. Although this film was firmly planted in the "glory of dumbness" genre, Buddy had enough going for him to strike a popular chord. As a result, his visage -- with a "ceramicized" or cartoon-like countenance -- earned an afterlife as a sticker, t-shirt, poster and dashboard figure. Not content with that action, however, Buddy acquired a recent feature role in an all-too-real drama starring the Mahdi of Sadr City and the U.S. military. |
