Jordan Peterson remixed.  Tha-a-at’s right, remixed.

So I watched Maleficent last night, as it had been on my list of movies I would probably enjoy, and I got to it as soon as I could, on account of how I don’t watch much of anything these days.  Me, I’m more of a sit down and read the encyclopedia man, Britannica 1970, thankyouverymuch. Although some Star Trek novels got in there.  I still recall that my favorite authors were Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath writing together.  How I remember that is beyond me.  I can’t remember my phone number without a keypad in front of me.  And then I didn’t read The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner in High School, and everything went downhill from there.

To be totally honest though, I checked out on homework pretty early.  I recall that my first-grade teacher, Mrs. S________, when I actually handed in a sheet of phonics homework, adjusted her octagonal-framed spectacles eagerly (almost furtively), grasped the paper, stood so that her chair shot backward and exulted “Glory BE!”  Naturally, if this were my own son, I would ask him why teacher not shout GRORY A, huh?

Anyway, I decided that if this dropout were ever to amount to anything, I should read something other than Star Trek novels, so this skinny sailor went to DeLauer’s newsstand between 12th and 19th in Oakland and picked up a Mentor Books (New American Library, Penguin) paperback of the Great Dialogues of Plato.  I have it right here.  Smells wonderful.  Yet man does not live by cred alone, so I also picked up Sillitoe’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.  Well, it turns out that book is a collection of short stories, and my assignment was only to read forty or so pages, the titular (snicker) piece (snicker).  Would that I had known!  I would have felt much different about never reading it.

For some reason, the ship’s library on USS Enterprise had another Sillitoe book, Raw Material, which I adored.  I devoured it, despite it not smelling so good as Plato.  There’s a bunch of socialist agitation in there, but ohhh the writing.  I recall Burton the smith staggering back as a cinder struck his eye, then leaning forward and going back to work.  As one does.

So time goes by, and I find myself reading audiobooks more than anything.  I’ve listened to Peterson’s 12 Ways to Clean Your Room (or similar) several times, and the heftier one about archetypes and arche-archetypes (or something).  Great stuff.  “Reading,” he says.  Well, there’s YouTube as well, and I try to keep my frivolous watching to a minimum.  There’s a difference between watching Jordan Peterson almost trivially explicate your whole childhood through high-quality analyses of Disney films on the one hand and vegging out to FailArmy clips, inert, on the other.  Seriously, his treatments of Pinocchio and Peter Pan are magnificent.  Lion King (which I have never even seen) — profound.

Peterson has inspired a generation of young men in particular, and is frankly an inspirational figure for the world.  I say this without cult-y overtones — I simply think that if more people thought the way he did, we’d be a lot better off.  And he actually has some purchase, unlike the many folks here who also would be decent models for the world.  There’s a reason the left wants to shut him up.  He gives the game away.  Jordan Peterson voice: “It’s like, he puts your power back into your own damned hands, eh?”  You can not buy that sort of leadership.  Apparently you can rent some of it, which is fine.  A man does not live by cred alone.

Maleficent was good.  The narration was redundant (the movie quite competently conveyed all of that!), and the only time I felt poked in the childhood was “I should know — I’m the one they called Sleeping Beauty.”  After that well-executed romp across the feminine landscape, why did we need that donut on the lawn of the patriarchy?  The rest of it was brimming with symbolism and a ripping good story to boot.

So I figured I would see what old JBP had to say about Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent.