Combo Unlocked

What's the best time of year? Christmas. What's the best place conceivable? Heaven. Put them together for maximum value and you get "Christmas in Heaven". I watched Monty Python's The Meaning of Life again last night and, like a lot of people, I find the Pythons' wit has taken on a new life, their work is a refreshing dose of intelligent, brash comedy in an entertainment landscape increasingly concerned with piety and greed.

The final segment of the film shows a heaven resembling a floor show at a swanky restaurant. The lyrics promise creature comforts including the latest video games, Sony walkmans, and a TV channel that plays Jaws I, II, and III. It's this last promise that tips the hand slightly. It's all so wonderful, surely you should be grateful to watch Jaws III, right? Well, Heaven's taken funding from Universal so you'd better like it.

You could say that it's bad form to mock a desire for a life of ease. Should we begrudge a factory worker in China stealing a few minutes of pleasure from a video game? Or this Australian guy in an advertisement that, according to an article on Dark Horizons that by no means received payola, has drawn "acclaim"?

I would say that societies that consume lives with menial labour or with soulless office drudgery are both guilty of leaving the only scraps of human imagination left over fit for solving puzzles in a video game. We all need to shut off our brains sometimes and just mellow out but I think we all, if even only in some deep recess of the brain, realise that this is not the pinnacle of human experience, that true Heaven would be more than being pampered or coddled with the dopamine breadcrumbs of simple puzzles or team sports of the political or athletic variety. But I wouldn't blame the average person for not having the imagination to know what that something might be under the auspices of forces who see no profit in widespread individual thought. When everyone has the same thoughts, they'll buy the same lines, and that's how institutions can properly take root. But to borrow a line from Groucho Marx, who wants to live in an institution?