Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Invigorating Invective

Here’s two examples of well-crafted bile from the week worth noting in the blog:The British MP George Galloway may be a shady ego-manic, but he can hurl a great, almost baroque, insult. From the Gruaniad, which describes an exchange before Galloway proceeded to demolish a Senate committee ostensibly convened to grill the Scot on alleged oil money from Saddam:”Before the hearing began, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow even had some scorn left over to bestow generously upon the pro-war writer Christopher Hitchens. “You’re a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay,” Mr Galloway in formed him. “Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink,” he added later, ignoring Mr Hitchens’s questions and staring intently ahead. “And you’re a drink-soaked …” Eventually Mr Hitchens gave up. “You’re a real thug, aren’t you?” he hissed, stalking away.””Drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay?” Brilliant.The second example comes from Anthony Lane’s ferocious onslaught on George Lucas’s “Star Wars: Episode III�Revenge of the Sith” in the New Yorker. He seems to have a real issue with a certain Muppet:”No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in �Gremlins� when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink�squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. �Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,� he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you�d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we�re here, what�s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. �I hope right you are.� Break me a fucking give.”