The following is an attempt at rescuing a nodeshell of inordinate specificity.


Note to all Men of Power: If you ever hear this deadly phrase chanted, shouted, whispered, or in any other way communicated – divorce your wife immediately and hire a team of all-male body guards.

The history of the discovery, or more like uncovering, of this phrase is so long and wrought with intrigue, bribery, near-misses, and even fatalities, that it could easily be the subject of a best-selling Gore Vidal novel. And many are still uncertain as to what it really signifies. We do know this: This exact phrase has appeared in various points throughout history, and when these occurrences are all examined together, it points to one of the most insidiously evil plots of all time. Forget The Masons. Forget Yoyodyne, the Illuminati, or the Magi - this is much, much worse.

Consider the three most accurate accounts:

I - Bell and The Bomb

The phrase was first recorded in modern times by Special Agent Sylvester Mynch, of the United States Secret Service, on the night of August 6th, 1945 (just after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima). Assigned to the White House, Agent Mynch was making his rounds when he happened upon a ghastly sight: spying through a cracked door, he claims to have witnessed Bell Truman and several other predominate women "popping open champagne bottles, laughing merrily, and dancing about with jubilation." After a few drinks and several tasteless BBQ jokes, he claims the First Lady raised a toast "to the best day’s work ever committed by The Order." The women then recited

The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!

The last line was said to have been uttered with "particular frenzy." He then says the First Lady and her conspirators proceeded to "empty the champagne bottles, undress one another, and engaged in the most vile acts of sexual debauchery" for "four or five hours", at times using the champagne bottles as "props" and then "really getting into it and busting out bits and bridles, with three or four of them neighing..."1

To his death, Agent Mynch staunchly believed that Bell Truman influenced the president to drop the bomb.

II – Cleo’s Funtoy

The phrase also appears partially inscribed on a marble phallus discovered near ancient Alexandria. Written in Greek, Latin, and Egyptian (and for a time used by scholars in their efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics – until the Rosetta Stone was found), the phallus is considered by several hard-up archeological perverts to be the personal dildo of Cleopatra. In English, its inscription reads

...penis evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once...
For years most considered this fragment a part of a phrase from a general paean for dildos. It was even adopted as a slogan for a popular Parisian adult toy manufacturer in the 1970s.2

However, the dildo is quite revealing when cross-referenced with Agent Mynch’s account, as for years historians have generally blamed the Egyptian hussy for the Roman Civil War, as well as countless other male deaths. Perhaps she too was a member of The Order.

III – The Cries of Valerie Solanas

Though he didn’t remember it at the time, Fred Hughs, Andy Warhol’s manager, swears that Valerie Solanas cried out the phrase just before she opened fire on Warhol (Solanas shot Warhol in 1968 when she also attempted to shoot Hughs, who was present at the time). It wasn’t until years later, when he became acquainted with our research, that Mr. Hughs recalled Solanas’ words:

It was all so crazy at the time. I mean, I’d just got done popping a quaalude and my pants are at my ankles when all of a sudden this crazy feminazi bursts in with a revolver. I remember her shouting something, but man, all I wanted to do was get down on the floor and pull up my drawers, you know? Then I saw the research on The Order and read the quote, and that’s when it struck me: that’s exactly what that crazy bitch was jabbering on about right before she started firing. She was talking about "the gun being good and the penis being evil and shooting seeds and poisoning the earth and a plague of men," and all that. Then she screamed "Long live The Order! Go forth and kill!" and damn near blew my balls off.3

Who is The Order?

It is said that behind every great man is a great woman, and that may be true, but what’s her motivations? Men have long been the scapegoats for violence and war, but the implications of this matriarchal, lesbian, and perhaps misanthropic society seem to reveal the exact opposite to be true. Are the women hiding in history’s shadows really the purveyors of death?

The penis is evil. The gun is good.


1 - Taken from Agent Mynch’s personal journal, discovered postmortem.
2 - The company Vagin de Fer
3 - Excerpted from An Interview with Fred Hughs

Or, in Spanish, ""El Arma es buena! El Pene es maligno! El Pene dispara simiente y crea vida nueva para envenenar la tierra con una plaga de hombres como en el pasado! Pero el Arma dispara muerte y purifica la tierra de la suciedad de los Brutos. Id... y matad!"

More pertinently than the above writeup, which is utterly fictitious, this is the mantra of Zardoz, the big flying stone head that provides religion for the characters in John Boorman's 1974 film of the same name - one such character being Zed, played by Sean Connery. Zed is an Exterminator, a barbaric killer who, on horseback, deals flaming death to wandering peasants known as Brutals, in order to stop them posioning the Earth etc.

Periodically Zardoz arrives on the scene to deliver proclamations and spout the guns in question - literally, as they shoot from his mouth like water from a hose. 'Zardoz' was filmed in the Republic of Eire and, according to John Boorman's commentary on the excellent DVD (which has Spanish subtitles), when problems occured importing sufficient replica and blank-firing rifles from props houses in the UK, members of the crew who had connections with the IRA offered to supply Boorman with weapons instead. He politely turned them down. The majority of the guns are Lee Enfields, presumably WW2 surplus.

Throughout the film Sean Connery's character is armed with a Webley-Fosbery, a curious revolver which, almost uniquely, had an automatic, recoil-operated action, and a safety catch. Whilst most revolvers rely on a mechanical linkage between trigger and cylinder in order to chamber the next round, the Webley-Fosbery used the recoil impulse of each shot to perform the same function, the intention being to reduce the required trigger pull and increase the rate of fire. Unfortunately, the expense, mechanical complexity and slight pointlessness of the exercise did not help the pistol's chances, either in the commercial or military marketplace.

The film takes place on our planet after an unspecified apocalypse has eliminated most of the population, save for scattered savages and a small bunch of immortal intellectuals; the latter live in fear of the former and create an imaginary 'religion' to keep the savages from rising up. This explains the quote, which is a deliberate perversion of verse 8, lines 16-17 of the book of Genesis ("Go forth of the ark ... and multiply").

The DVD contains a French language track, and it has been noted by many that 'Zardoz' is a better film in French. From what I can tell the first lines, in French, are "L'arme et le vie; le penis est le mal, le penis tire le semens...", although my French est un petit voiture, as they say.

As Pseudo Intellectual points out, these words are also part of the opening dialogue, and are acutely embarassing to listen to if you're twelve and you've just persuaded your parents to watch a Sean Connery sci-fi film you've never heard of, thinking it might be like Outland or Time Bandits.

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