Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the State of the World Today

I came relatively late to the minor pop cultural phenomenon that was Mystery Science Theater 3000 (henceforth, just MST3K for brevity's sake), catching its last three seasons on what was then still the Sci-Fi Channel.

It is not the sort of thing that would appeal to me as much today--it fundamentally comes down to three actors (two of them playing robots) mocking a bad movie as they sit through it. And even back when it had appealed to me not everything worked--especially when the film did not seem to merit the mockery the jokes tended to fall flat. Still, at its best it was hilarious--to the point that some of their quips seem to have stuck in my memory years and decades later.

At the end of the little group's viewing The Deadly Bees, when the house that was the principal setting of the film goes up in flames, Crow T. Robot quips that the house "was made of typing paper and oily rags."

I think of that line a lot.

Like after hearing each and every report about the world--about the climate and the environment generally, about the state of the economy, about the international order.

We are reminded with truly distressing frequency that the "house" we live in is likewise made of typing paper and oily rags.