A couple of years ago we took our youngest to see Sooty. Anyone from the UK will instantly know who I mean – Sooty is a little glove-puppet bear (?) who never speaks but has managed to turn himself, over the last 50 years or so, into a British national institution.
Sooty has a couple of friends – Sweep the dog (always my favourite) and Soo – and various others who appear in his show. The host/puppeteer had changed over the years. Harry Corbett started the Sooty show in the 1950’s, his son Matthew took up the reins in 1980 or so, and these days he’s retired also, so it’s now someone else.
The format of the show has remained unchanged over the decades.
“What’s that you say, Sooty?” [glove puppet “whispers” in hosts ear]
“You want the children to sing a song?” [whispers again]
“Then you’ll do some magic with your magic wand?”
“Okay boys and girls, altogether now…”
This simple and timeless act has sustained a decades-long career on TV, radio, comic books, and live theatre shows, with all the spin-off merchandising that goes with it.
Anyway, we recently took our little girl to see The Sooty Show at the local Palace Theatre. Like me at her age, she was entranced with Sooty. Four-year-old kids really enter into the spirit of the thing: she sang along, she laughed at the funny bits, she called out “look behind you!” at all the appropriate times, it was great.
Driving home, she was still excitedly talking about all the funny stuff Sooty had done. It was clear that to her Sooty, while on our objective adult level simply a few inanimate bits of furry cloth sewn together, was a real personality
I know, I know – it’s not much of a penetrating insight, this. The fact is, little kids are wholly taken in by the glove-puppet illusion; the character looks real to them, every bit as real as the performer. More real, even. The star of the show for my daughter had been Sooty, not Matthew the performer.
---oooOOOooo---
Now, consider your typical dub. (Me, I’m thinking of my utterly faithful, 40-years-in mother).
You have these “performers” who get up in front of them and say:
“Devote your life to selling our books!” - who would ever fall for such a thing?
Aaah! But here’s the trick. THEY don’t say it. It’s their “Jehovah” glove-puppet who says it.
“Go out in service – it’s what JEHOVAH wants”
“Be at every day of the assembly – that's what JEHOVAH requires!”
“Don’t celebrate Christmas – JEHOVAH wouldn’t like it!”
Anytime the WTS wants to compel a specific behaviour, or compliance, they just wiggle their glove-puppet, and the faithful dub is instantly entranced. They have no idea that they are doing the bidding of men, they believe they’re pleasing God. And who wouldn’t want to do that?
I have tried talking to my mum about things. Stuff I have learned over the last couple of years about how badly the Watchtower’s leadership have behaved over the years.
“Mum, look at the 1975 fiasco, look at the failed prophecy, the UN scandal. Look at…”
“Oh, Duncan. I don’t care what you say. I am going to remain FAITHFUL TO JEHOVAH!”
You know how in bullfights, they say the bull doesn’t gore the matador because it is wholly distracted by and enraged by the cape, and spends its entire energy going after that, rather than the cape’s wielder? It’s like that.
I’m not for a minute here saying that the general idea of God is an illusion. I’m pretty much agnostic on that – I don’t know.
But I do know for sure that this Jehovah character, with all his “requirements” and “standards” and “commands” IS - absolutely and completely – a cynically-contrived, utterly useful, wholly artificial glove-puppet creation of Brooklyn.
It’s waking up from the glove-puppet illusion that causes so much post-Watchtower rage.
“How could I have been so stupid as to give up my job? Waste my life? Let my child
die?”
Izzy-wizzy. That old Sooty magic is powerful stuff.
Duncan.
