Against the Maxxers: Or, On the Necessarily Transcendental Nature of Ethics

We are living in the Age of the Maxxers.

That, anyway, is what Sam Kriss thinks; it's also what a surprising number of other cultural commentators, Substackers, and NPR hosts think as well. Moderation is out; normalcy is out; morality itself is out. It doesn't matter what you maxx; pick something, anything, and maxx it. 

I don't believe in this trend; I don't believe in any trend that NPR hosts and Substackers tell me about, beginning with AI but also including Traditionalism, Social Media, the Alt Right, and facts. I am, as Dr. Ian Cameron once said, an educator in daily contact with young minds.

Nevertheless, like many fake trends talked about by people on the Internet, the term "maxxing" does in fact designate something--though what it designates is not in fact a fad originated by a few teenagers, but a pervasive cultural viewpoint that has structured our social and economic lives for many decades and is now mostly exemplified by people over fifty. This is true of every one of the trends mentioned above.

This particular viewpoint is easily defined, if not necessarily easily understood: it is merely what happens when people try to do ethics and live human life without believing in transcendent ends.

Hence the modest purpose of this short essay: to point out the exceptionally simple, straightforward, and obvious fact that without a robust and practical acceptance of transcendence as a pervasive feature of human life and action, it is impossible to construct a coherent ethical system, impossible to live a human life, and utterly impossible to be happy.

A Short and Succinct Four-Point Argument For Why You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way

[I have written about and against AI before, pointing out that the underlying technology and cultural orientation are nothing new, and arguing that AI is a last desperate attempt for the tech industry to save their bloated techno-salvationist bureaucracies. However, I admit that both of those pieces are very long and hard to follow, especially in the age of AI. 

Hence, I have produced the present piece, in which I make four straightforward points about why you shouldn't use AI while also including images from "the Funnies," which I am reliably informed that everyone loves (the year is 1967), for popular appeal.

Before reading the following, however, a clarification is necessary:"AI" in contemporary usage is not a descriptive term for a new technology, but an advertising term for an essentially political program of reallocating massive economic and social resources toward developing and finding applications for and forcing large-scale use of a heterogenous range of pre-existing digital technologies, products, and services. 

Hence, the question "are you for or against AI?" is not "do you in the abstract support the further development of digital technology?" but "do you support this political program?": or more immediately "do you think that the present or future achievements of this program in fact and on the whole justify the costs?" To be unable to ask this question, as I pointed out, is to be insane.]

Point 1: AI will never be profitable enough to justify the private investments made in it.

Argument 1.1: No LLM product or data center has as yet generated a profit purely on the basis of consumer and corporate usage, as opposed to investments or circular financing. Nevertheless, AI investment is scheduled to exceed 1 trillion dollars in 2026 alone. The scale differential between zero profit and trillions in investment makes it nearly impossible for the former to ever catch up with the latter for basic mathematical reasons. 

Argument 1.2: The intrinsic nature of LLMs makes them processing-heavy and therefore expensive even in carrying out simple tasks. Increases in processing power in chips have already reached a plateau, and the chips themselves require rare materials and can only be made in a few locations. Hence, the technology will continue to be very expensive for the foreseeable future. 

Argument 1.3: LLMs are inherently limited to automating tasks that are in and of themselves either superfluous to making a profit or not all that expensive. In itself, human labor is cheap and will likely always be cheaper than LLM usage at scale and for the overwhelming majority of tasks. 

Point 2: Given its lack of profitability, the only way AI development can continue on anything approaching its current scale is on the basis of enormous government investment.

Argument 2.1: The current hyper-financialized economy is ultimately structured by profit, if not for corporations at least for investors. Sooner or later, AI investment without returns will lead to a market crash and a pullback on investment into AI. 

Argument 2.2: The only institution that regularly invests AI-scale capital without any financial return on investment at all is the government. 

Argument 2.3: The use cases for AI include present priorities of the US government in which it regularly invests large amounts of money. These include most prominently military technology and mass surveillance.

Argument 2.4: The US government has been the main driver behind the current AI boom both through favorable regulation and active investment.

Point 3: The only feasible use case for mass-scale long-term government-funded AI is surveillance and murder.

Argument 3.1: Over the past decades, the US government has built a remarkable surveillance and data gathering operation. The main obstacle to the utility of mass surveillance and big data for government purposes is the difficulty of sorting through so much information and arranging it into useful and clear and short and actionable narratives. But this is in fact the one thing that LLMs are consistently good at. 

Argument 3.2: Over the past decades, the world has entered a new era of drone warfare, exemplified by the Russia-Ukraine War and the Iran War. Large-scale drone manufacturing requires development in magnet, battery, and chip technologies. The AI boom involves in part targeted development of some of these technologies.

Argument 3.3: One of the main limiters for drone warfare has become the ability to jam remote-controlled drones or even hack into them. This has led to a significant push in the direction of so-called "autonomous" drones with the ability to choose targets and carry out attacks largely on their own, as well as swarming drones operating in sync with each other. Both require sophisticated software.

Argument 3.4: Even non-autonomous drones lead to a vast multiplication of targets; the same is true even for the current military trend towards long-range targeted air bombing with manned aircraft. Selecting targets rapidly enough to keep up with operational requests requires the processing of large amounts of information and the weighting and determining of threats ad hoc and at scale. LLMs are again a technology adept at processing large amounts of information and producing an outcome based on it.

Argument 3.5: The US military and DoD have become a leading investor in AI technology over the past year, with the head of the Department of Energy declaring it a "new Manhattan project." 

Point 4: The social, political, and creative effects of mass-scale long-term government-funded AI are and always will be overwhelmingly negative and fall most heavily on the poor and vulnerable.

Argument 4.1: Most if not all military AI uses are unethical in and of themselves, since they involve violations of privacy and the waging of war and taking of life irresponsibly and unjustly. 

Argument 4.2: AI Chatbots have already provably caused suicides and driven people mad by forming quasi-social or romantic relationships with them. 

Argument 4.3: AI tools have already deprived numerous students of education by allowing them to automate most aspects of schooling. 

Argument 4.4: AI tools have already seriously degraded the quality of American visual art, film, television, and even corporate graphic design. 

Argument 4.5: By their very nature, LLMs cannot be entirely controlled or predicted, and will always be prone to "hallucination" of various sorts. This has already caused damage in many ways, from spreading false information to hacking networks to causing suicides to committing economic fraud. Militarized AI systems would be able to cause untold destruction.

Argument 4.6: The build-out of data centers has already caused environmental damage, raised energy costs, increased inflation, created noise and other pollution, and failed to produce jobs. Current plans call for an exponential growth of data centers, which would have even more drastic effects.

 

Ergo: You Should Never Use AI At All For Anything Ever and Actively Do Everything You Can to Prevent the US Government From Supporting It in Any Way. QED.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a Sign of the Times

Since I wrote my totally-completely-absolutely-justified-I-would-not-take-back-a-single-world denunciation of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer three years ago, a number of people have told me I was wrong and tried to argue with me about it. I, meanwhile, have been waiting for an apology.

Is Christopher Nolan's Odyssey a personal apology to me for having made Oppenheimer? Did the British-American filmmaker whose movies have made over $6 billion over the past three decades read my blog review of Oppenheimer, feel its profound truth, and attempt to personally make up for it to me by making a Classics-derived film about the importance of trust and inter-personal bonds?

I doubt it! Nonetheless, this is what I've been asking myself ironically ever since I first heard of the project however many years ago it was announced. Meanwhile, a friend paid for my ticket so I could see it in theaters and report back on my thoughts. 

Well, after seeing all three hours of Nolan's take on Homer's take on the story of a man trying to get home, though I can't praise the movie that much, I can mostly accept the apology. 

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is not a great adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, or a great Hollywood epic, or even a great film; it is, however, a film that captures our times, and in the process tells one very important truth.

Everlasting Life: Annihilation, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Stalin and the Bomb, The Unconsoled

"You can combine up to a certain point; you can distort up to a certain point; after that you lose the identity; and with that you lose everything. [...] A thing that has changed entirely has not changed at all. It has no bridge of crisis. It can remember no change. If you wake up tomorrow and you simply are Mrs. Dope, an old woman who lets lodgings at Broadstairs—well, I don’t doubt Mrs. Dope is a saner and happier person than you are. But in what way have you progressed? What part of you is better? Don’t you see this prime fact of identity is the limit set on all living things?”

“No,” said Phillip, with suppressed but sudden violence, “I deny that any limit is set upon living things.”

-G.K. Chesterton, The Flying Inn (1914)

We live in a time where more and more people want to stop existing. Considered historically, this is a surprisingly common desire--and a key to understanding many things present and past otherwise incomprehensible.

Last year, numerous otherwise normal people online, and an even greater number of abnormal people online, and also many people working for the United States Federal Government, embraced a twenty-year-old meme in which Werner Herzog narrates a single pilgrim penguin inexplicably leaving its colony and heading out into the frozen tundra to die alone in the cold. While for the old-fashioned pessimistic humanist Herzog this was supposed to once again point out the inhumanity and cruelty of the natural world which humans must transcend through reason, for innumerable people in America today this nihilistic story about an individual seeking death through isolation was instead seen as inspirational, even aspirational. Numerous otherwise sane people started talking about "Being the Penguin" as though lonely death by exposure and starvation was a desirable goal--and perhaps, for them, it was. Whatever Americans are in 2026, we certainly are not normal.

Still, if Americans are abnormal, they remain human; and our passion for death can in fact be understood in the light of universal human nature, via the concept and pragmatic, ethical reality of transcendence, which understood properly is as foundational to human action as food and drink is to human bodily life.

If, as Aristotle says, the soul is in a sense all things, at least by way of relation and telos, then the soul quite naturally and necessarily wants to transcend itself. If, as Aquinas says, man is ordered towards God as to an end that transcends his reason, then man quite naturally and necessarily desires to transcend himself. 

Transcendence, though, is a confusing concept. In the most basic sense, one thing transcends another when it has something in common with it, but also goes beyond it. In the proper Thomistic-metaphysical sense, one thing transcends a group of other things when it contains all their perfections in a higher, simpler, and more eminent way. Either way, though, a puzzle emerges: for what could it possibly mean for a thing to transcend itself?

One rather simple answer to that question might be that a thing transcends itself when it ceases to be itself, and becomes something else. If today I am Nathan Israel Smolin, and tomorrow I cease to be Nathan Israel Smolin and become Captain Bob "Captain Peabody" Peabody, a blue clayman veteran of the Second World War and also a blogger, there can be no doubt that I have transcended Nathan Israel Smolin in at least some sense. As Captain Peabody I can certainly reflect with satisfaction that I have left behind all the difficulties and limitations of Nathan-Israel-Smolin-hood; as well as in the concomitant fact that as Captain Peabody I will evince perfections and have experiences that Nathan Israel Smolin could never have had. And if it is the case that Nathan Israel Smolin must and will inevitably die, a transformation into Captain Peabody could well extend my life, and an indefinite series of such transformations extend it indefinitely, and so constitute a kind of eternal life beyond the span of human years.

For all that, though, there are (at least) two reasons that such a transformation does not constitute transcendence in either its metaphysical or ethical senses. The first is the simple fact that in gaining the perfections and advantages and experiences and memories and indefinable spark of being a blue clayman with a large apparent-rocket-launcher attached to the right side of my body I will have at the same time lost the indefinable spark of being Nathan Israel Smolin. Or, put another way, I will not have transcended or moved beyond the entire category of human (and clayman) personalities in such a way as to contain all the perfections of them in a supereminent way; rather, I will simply have moved from one member of that category to another. Or, put in the most fundamental way of all, I will not have found eternal life, but died.

In the second place comes the difficulty pointed out by G.K. Chesterton (via the honorable Dorian Wimpole) above, that in ceasing to be Nathan Israel Smolin I have in the proper sense simply ceased to be. Human personality and personhood, it turns out, is not simply an accidental relation added to a kind of quasi-physical substance; as rational beings, our personhood defines and constitutes each one of us in toto, body and soul. Even if (arguendum) in the transformation from Smolin to Peabody and from flesh to clay every single atom currently present in my body were kept and none discarded, the mere fact of altering my personal and rational identity from that of a human being from Alabama to a clayman from Claymatia would involve my destruction. For a transformation to be an improvement, let alone a true form of transcendence, something of the original must be preserved and survive the transition.

As I have pointed out before in this space, America has over the past fifty years been obsessed with the concept and term of identity as no other in history--even while showing little or no understanding of what identity actually is. 

If personhood and personality and therefore identity is for rational beings (as both Aristotle and Aquinas new) fundamentally defined and even constituted by relation, we could quite easily predict that the pervasive isolation and atomization of our society would result in an obsessive fixation on identity. People always become obsessively fixated on important things they are in the process of losing. And if at times our society has seemed to show a kind of naive utopian optimism about identity as such--assuming as an article of faith that every asserted or imagined or even merely vaguely felt identity was ipso facto good and just and necessary for happiness and compatible with every other identity--we can also recognize in this identitarianist optimism the kind of avoidant magical thinking present in nearly every psychological experience of loss.

Still, if there is a primal terror that makes us cling to our identities against the world, if there is an animalistic rage that makes us use them as weapons, if there is an avoidant naiveté that makes us accept any and every identity merely as a shield against the infinite dark, there is nonetheless no denying that there is also, deeply rooted in us, a desire to transcend our identities, chosen or unchosen, shallow or deep; and that this desire can quite easily be twisted into an unslakable thirst for annihilation.

In the remaining paragraphs of this essay, then, I will be tracing this human thirst for annihilation through a number of different fictional stories and historical accounts, in all of which we will be attempting to understand the human proclivity for self-destruction not through the lenses of ethics or metaphysics, but via psychology and narrative and history. By understanding these accounts, we will, hopefully, come closer to understanding ourselves and our society--and in so doing, hopefully learn to counter the thirst for death wherever it is found in America, in others, and in ourselves.

Short Story: The Date

I was sitting in the cafe by the window, working on an academic article for the Journal of Ancient History, when I saw them.

It was a man and a woman, both young, though not too young–not college-aged, or immediately post-grad. The man could have been a few years older, or that may just have been the way he was dressed; buttoned up, as they used to say, to his chin, with a coat over it. Not a “formal” suit coat, but similar. More casual. He was not wearing a tie. She, on the other hand, was dressed in something more like what a college student might wear for a first date. Tight pants, a low-cut blouse with straps, both in bright colors. Nice shoes, but not high-heeled. 

They came in together, but slightly awkwardly, as if they had only just met outside the restaurant. He did not hold the door, but he looked for a moment as if he might. After a brief hesitation, he led the way to a table by the window. It was a good table–the best in the house for a view of the park outside, as I knew well, but not one I ever took. The glare from the sun as you get towards the late afternoon makes it too hard for me to see the screen of my laptop.

Despite leading the way to the table, the man waited for the woman to sit down first. She had already pulled out her phone and was scanning the QR code on the table for the menu. After a moment, he did the same. The next few minutes were spent in silence, and I returned to a difficult passage about Late Imperial rituals of power. I’m not sure how long afterwards (I always lose track of time when writing) it was when the woman finally spoke.

“Have you been here before?” 

The man must have shook his head, but I didn’t see it. “So why did you tell me to meet you here?” the woman asked, a new note in her voice.

I looked over to see the man shrug. He was thin–too thin, I thought, and a little uncomfortable in his own body. He raised one hand in a meaningless gesture. “Well, it’s near where you said you worked. I was going to be driving out here all this way anyway, so I didn’t want you to have to go far.” His voice was oddly flat, and he didn’t meet her eyes.

Her voice now held an unmistakable undercurrent of tension; it might have been anger or some other suppressed emotion. “And you didn’t think to ask me where I’d like to go? You know I live just around the corner.” She had blonde hair and those odd little bangs. She was wearing flesh-colored lipgloss.

He looked down at his phone, scrolling through the menu again. “Well…” he ventured. “You told me to pick the place. Since you said I’d be driving farther. I thought…”

“Well,” she said, “obviously I assumed you’d pick a place you’d been to before. Or at least because the food was something you liked.” 

He didn’t respond; he was looking down at his phone still. 

She looked vaguely in my direction; I turned back to my laptop. “Picking an interesting or exotic restaurant would have shown personality. Or picking a safer restaurant you’d been to before would have shown that you cared about me having a nice time. Or you could have responded by asking me to pick a restaurant since you knew I knew the area better and wanted to show you valued my preferences. And because of the dietary restrictions I listed on my profile.” Her voice now was not angry, but unfocused, like someone reading off a Powerpoint slide. I glanced back at her face; she was looking right at me. I turned quickly back again to my laptop screen, and tried hard to focus on Ambrose of Milan’s meeting with Magnus Maximus rather than the one in front of me. It was difficult. 

The man sighed. “The Monte Cristo Sandwich looks good.” I glanced over to see him looking around vaguely for the waiter, one hand raised awkwardly again.

Three Lessons for Starfleet Academy

Star Trek has reached a crisis and juncture and turning point--which is not unusual.

If my very lengthy series of essays on this blog laying out (in rather inaccurate fashion) the history of Star Trek have anything to say, it is that Star Trek is not and never has been a simple, single formula or genre or thing or "vision" of Gene Roddenberry or anyone else. Most of what makes Star Trek interesting to me, in fact, is the intensely collaborative nature of the (now extinct) genre of network television, and how tied Star Trek has always been, not to any particularly original treatment of science fiction or politics, but rather with the ever-shifting personal and political and utopian visions of America looking at itself.

Anyway, more or less since the year 1966, Star Trek has been in crisis: beginning with the initial crisis of its failed first pilot, extending through the crisis of its too-expensive budget and too-low ratings, through the crisis of its first cancellation, through the crisis of its second cancellation, and ending with the crisis of its true and final cancellation after its third season. 

Then began the terrible monstrous crisis of trying to revive Star Trek, which took up most of the 1970s, got a lot of people fired, and resulted in dozens of unproduced scripts, lots of unused design work, one terrible cartoon show, and one terrible (but sublime) film. Then there was the terrible horrible crisis of TNG's birth and first two years, then the crisis of how to do a TNG spinoff in the '90s, and a lot of other crises that I refuse to summarize in this sentence.

Certainly Star Trek has been in crisis since the year 2005, when Star Trek Enterprise was unceremoniously cancelled after four seasons. There are a lot of things one could say about Enterprise--and maybe one day I'll say them--but perhaps the most relevant is that its demise is impossible to untangle from the gradual and now irreversible decline of network television, television networks, and indeed television itself. 

In 1995, Star Trek Voyager had debuted as the flagship show of the new network UPN; in 2001, Star Trek Enterprise took over that role; in 2005, Star Trek Enterprise ended; and in 2006 UPN itself went the way of the dodo. Its successor, the CW, has like most of network television continued to limp along til the present day, gradually losing viewership and profitability and shows: it now runs more or less exclusively sports, news, reality, and variety shows, with its last produced scripted drama show set to end this summer. 

A few years later, though, Star Trek took to the big screen, attempting to join the "Marvel rush" of would-be blockbuster films greenlit by executives desperate to find any even vaguely comic-book-esque franchise (Battleship? Emojis?) to share in the bounty: and, like most of their peers, met with mixed success. JJ Abrams' Star Trek produced three successful, popular films that nonetheless were considered disappointments by the studio for not matching the grosses or profit margins of true blockbusters: and Star Trek was once again left to die.

While all this was going on, a little website called Netflix was introducing on-demand streaming to the world: an event that not only accelerated the decline of network television, but also led to a desperate attempt by any and every studio to replicate Netflix's success. In 2014, CBS, the owner of the Star Trek shows, released CBS All Access (later Paramount Plus), a transparent desperate cash grab with a complete dearth of original content whose main selling point was that it had the old Star Trek shows available to watch. And so, a new era began, where the hoary network-television entity Star Trek would be retailored for a new age of free-flowing subscriber cash, maximal budgets, and an ever-increasing demand for content. 

And then, of course, the streaming economy completely collapsed, and studios began cutting back massively, cancelling and reducing budgets across the board in a desperate attempt to figure out how the new model of streaming television could possibly be profitable. 

Hence, the latest Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy was cancelled shortly after the airing of its first season ended, and probably more than a year before its already filmed second season was set to be released (the date has not yet been announced): as I write this, its sets are being auctioned off publicly for peanuts. Strange New Worlds, despite having two seasons left to air, has also already finished filming its fifth and final season: and for the first time since Star Trek Discovery began in 2017 there are no Star Trek productions filming anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, Paramount is in the process of being bought out by Skydance, run by the son of Trump ally and CEO of massive-beneficiary-of-circular-AI-deals Oracle Larry Ellison in a monopolistic bargain that numerous Hollywood and Star Trek stars are currently protesting, but which many people on the Internet either hope or fear will make Star Trek stop being woke--reactions themselves occasioned by the massive, politicized online backlash to Starfleet Academy for being woke and/or having a gay Klingon. And as the Culture War (and also a real war) rages on, Star Trek fans around the world wait, and watch, and bemoan the fact that (undeniably) Star Trek is In Crisis, that (once again) Star Trek As We Know It Is Over, and wonder if anyone, anywhere can perhaps (in a stunningly original neologism that I just came up with) Make Star Trek Great Again.

As the dust settles, though, those of us not engaged in furious online debates over Wokeness (an online term for things that are cool from the year 2015) versus Anti-Wokeness (an online term for American conservatism from the year 2019) can once again take stock, reflect, and post absurdly long essays on Star Trek to our blogs. Or as Quark said, "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

Abstracting (quod sit impossibile) from the political and economic situation of America, the fact remains that a lot of people have not been particularly happy with the 2017-2025, streaming-bubble, Alex Kurtsman era of Star Trek. Some of those people have been merely grumpy old men who vastly prefer rewatching another episode of Star Trek TNG to watching any new show whatsoever or spending time with their wives; but some have been people who had legitimate issues with the actual creative quality of these shows. And what is more, this era of Star Trek, taken as a whole, has in fact resoundingly failed to recapture the general audience lost to Star Trek c. 2000, so that Star Trek is less culturally relevant in the year 2026 than it has ever been, even during the 2005-2009 interregnum, and is more or less the least culturally relevant franchise still producing content--significantly less relevant, alas, than The Fast and the Furious, whose proposed eleventh film is currently bogged down in production hell.

Hence, it is my goal in this post to Do My Duty as a Star Trek Fan (i.e. tedious old man) and do the hard work of drawing some lessons from the recently completed era of Star Trek to, hopefully, offer to future generations and/or future runners of the Star Trek franchise. Unfortunately, it is too late for the actual writers and producers of Starfleet Academy to benefit from them: but the below "lessons" are still offered in the somewhat aggressive, ironic, tongue-in-cheek spirit of one educator speaking to another. 

Star Trek has in its history been run by everyone from an ex-Southern-Baptist ex-cop (Gene Roddenberry) to a Jewish ex-Quiz-Kid (Harve Bennett) to a Jewish writer of Sherlock Holmes novels (Nicholas Meyer) to a Jewish actor-turned-director (Leonard Nimoy) to another Jewish actor-turned-failed-director (William Shatner) to a Jewish documentary producer (Rick Berman) to a Jewish writer with a blue beard and an obsession with Las Vegas (Ira Steven Behr) to a Jewish writer of Transformers films (Alex Kurtsman): and I for one am eagerly awaiting the next anointed one in this storied lineage.

For after all, when Woke and Anti-Woke both disappear into the mists, reality will remain: and so will things like aesthetics and framing and character and story and plot and themes and meaning and the true and the good and the beautiful. Also, just FYI, budgets really matter.

Who is Captain Peabody?

 “Alright, men: let’s mooooooove out.”

These iconic words were spoken by Captain Bob “Captain Peabody” Peabody on June 4th, 1945 at 8:23 AM, just one week before the Battle of the Gory, Gut-Wrenching, Brain-Searing, Intestine-Spewing, Blood-Burning, Stomach-Churning Death. 

Photograph usually identified as Captain Peabody during his mission deep into enemy territory in 1945; may be misidentified (colorized)

These words were then spoken again on a number of other occasions, probably four or five times a day or however often his troops had to move out, until the fateful day when everyone in the battle died except for Captain Peabody, who survived.

One of the few surviving photos of Captain Peabody’s many inspirational talks at schools across the nation (1945-1955, colorized)

In the following years, following his Presumably Honorable Discharge from the United States or Possibly Claymatian Armed Forces, Captain Peabody embarked on a remarkable second career as an inspirational speaker, writer, life coach, and tax-deductible charity, giving thousands of talks to dozens of small children forced by their teachers to listen to him. 

Security camera footage alleged to show Captain Peabody’s final, presumably heroic moments (1955)

Sadly, this inspiring career and also life tragically ended in tragedy when, on April 14th, 1955 at 9 AM, a probably Communist-inspired suicide bombing at Elemen Tree’s School in Fort Pine, Indiana prematurely ended Captain Peabody’s talk, as well as killing him. Even in his last moments, however, we presume that Captain Peabody heroically saved a bunch of children, though not himself.

Ever since then, Captain Peabody’s legacy has endured to inspire generations of thrill-seekers, tomb-raiders, treasure-hunters, time-travelers, and probably also children. 

A screen capture from the 2003 MTV music video megahit showing the Captain-Peabody-esque body that sparked the craze

In the year 2003, a bloody corpse resembling Captain Peabody’s was featured prominently in the music video for Speak the Hungarian Rapper’s international dance-craze mega-hit “Stop the War,” inspiring a global revival of Captain-Peabody-Mania. 

Rare surviving Captain Peabody coffee mug (manufactured 2003)

During the week of March 12, 2003, Captain Peabody-branded coffee mugs briefly reached the #1 position for product sales by volume in the “branded coffee mug” category for all Wal-Mart Superstores in the Upper Midwestern United States and/or Claymatia.

Plans to produce a Captain-Peabody-themed Happy Meal for McDonalds, however, were ultimately shelved after the release of forged papers featuring spurious allegations of alleged mismanagement of purported military funds during Captain Peabody’s time in Laos in 1943. Though later vindicated by history itself, sales of Captain-Peabody-themed merchandise plummeted, leaving surviving items as rare, sought-after collector’s items. 

Photo posted by the Anti-Tin Man League’s Facebook page on January 3rd, 2003 at 2:23 AM CST, allegedly showing the purported Captain Peabody clone supposedly commanding paramilitary forces

Also in 2003, press reports suggested that a clone of Captain Peabody might be serving as a commander of the so-called Anti-Tin-Man League, a racist paramilitary organization engaging in guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Southern Claymatia. 

According to an unreleased script for an unpublished text-based adventure game ultimately rejected by Videlectrix Computer Gaming, Inc, this clone was created by Doctor Bob “Vladmir” Evil, PhD, the recipient of the 1998 Epstein Prize for Cloning and Cybernetic Excellence, as part of a proposed line of Peabody-inspired supersoldiers, which was sadly discontinued. All other information is apparently classified.

Rumors that the original Captain Peabody is in fact alive and/or has been cryogenically frozen in a block of ice and stored at an undisclosed government location are merely rumors, not facts. I certainly wouldn’t know anything about that.

I have no idea what’s going on in this picture or why it’s here

While Captain Peabody may be presumed dead, this blog is very much alive, reposting precious material from the scattered papers found in and/or in the vicinity of the presumed former location of Captain Peabody’s office and/or home and/or bar. 

As loyal adherents of the Captain Peabody Movement, it is our hope to encourage a revival in Captain Peabody studies and/or merchandising, and, ultimately, to produce an edited scholarly multi-volume series of his Collected Works along with various other branded products. 

Please join us! And stay tuned for further licensing opportunities!