Originating in Iceland and played on the Noggin network, it features a heroic male adult character named Sportacus, who is played by the show’s creator Magnus Scheving. Sportacus is sort of a health fanatic who flies around in an airship promoting healthy activities, eating and lifestyles among the children of LazyTown. The children of LazyTown are a bizarre mix of real kids and semi-realistic puppets.

The yin to Sportacus’ yang is an over-the-top bad guy named Robbie Rotten. Robbie Rotten is always trying to turn the kids of LazyTown away from healthy lifestyles by getting them to eat junk food, and lots of weird schemes and disguises like that. Robbie Rotten is a bizarre looking dude, featuring some prosthetic make-up work that makes him a sort of hybrid between the real kids on the show and the puppets. He is kind of reminiscent of those plasticized-looking people from that Energizer commercial or the Primus music video for Winona’s Big Brown Beaver.

Since this is a kids’ show though, you can rest assured that Robbie Rotten’s evil schemes are always foiled. He doesn’t just fail, but he is typically humiliated in the process. He’s made to look ridiculous, infantile (especially compared to the dashing Sportacus) and the episodes will often end with all the children of LazyTown laughing off the whole thing.

We could also compare this to the recurring “evil” character, Swiper the Fox, in Nickelodeon’s wildly popular children’s television franchise, Dora the Explorer. Swiper runs around with a little bandit mask trying to steal stuff from Dora and her friends. But Swiper’s negative energy is easily dispelled by repeating the mantra, “Swiper, no swiping!” three times in a row. After which, he will slink away, saying, “Awww, man!”

In general, I think this is a positive message for kids - one which even adults could benefit from. As we get older, we tend to think that the power of evil in this world is absolute and unbeatable. The Bible says that the Devil is the “prince” of this world we are stuck in, and we’re often left waiting for an external savior or rescuer to come and release us from our suffering. But what would happen if we were able to retain our ability to laugh away the power of the Devil? What if we could remember that evil is ridiculous and absurd and in the end is really only there to make things interesting for us, and to give us something to struggle against?

Maybe it sounds ridiculous that you can learn how to overcome the forces of darkness by watching children’s television shows. But they offer powerful lessons for those with ears to hear: Laughter breaks tense moments and brings more oxygen into our brain and body, better enabling us to cope with difficult situations. Our bodies loosen up, our posture changes. Telling Swiper that this is a no-swiping zone is a powerful statement of intent and personal values. It gives those who would manipulate us a clear statement about who we are and what’s acceptable to us.

It may be that the power of evil is directly related to how much power we ourselves invest in it. As we grow older, we seem to surrender more and more of our psychic energy to evil. For good reason of course. We can’t just laugh away government atrocities, nor can we yell to a potential mugger or rapist, “Swiper, no swiping!” and expect them to stop. But what we can do is pioneer similar techniques for ourselves by which we can diminish the fear that allows others to take advantage of us - whether they be mischievous fox, cartoonish villains or the very real faces of evil that we struggle against every day.

The level of weirdness, of impossibility, of paradox that I have allowed into my mental and personal life has reached a saturation point. I have seen firsthand and heard from others. I believe and I disbelieve at the same time. I want to know and understand but suspect more and more that I never really will, and that maybe no one ever really does. I feel comfortable now living inside the skin of a world where, “Everything is only a metaphor. There is only poetry.”

Conspiracy theory, it seems, is all about the poetry of evil. Or maybe it is the sweet spiritual semantics of those attempting to throw off despair, but who look around at the world and see only mountains of deception and danger ringing them in on all sides. But if we look for a moment at the pure poetry of evil, what makes the best metaphor? What is the most shocking and horrific image of evil which our imaginations can conjure? Predatory aliens from outer space? The dark alien perversions inside of human beings? The cold calculating inhumanity of power? A beast with seven heads rising out of the sea with a lascivious whore on his back? (Personally, I like that one!)

“Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” The language and imagery change to suit the times and the thinker. It’s strange that we live in a world where we’re forced to ask: What’s more scary, the President of the United States allowed (or commanded) 9/11 to happen or that all things are empty and meaningless, and it’s furthermore empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless? No wonder we end up spending so much time chasing our own tails.

It’s hard for me to say anymore really, to compare two terrors and decree which is the greater. When everything becomes evil, the horrific becomes banal and boring. “Desensitization!” some might call this, placing the blame squarely on the constantly violent offerings of the media. But “evil” doesn’t thrill me like it used to. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because it means that I no longer hurl that epithet like a snowball at people unfortunate enough to pass by my fortress of ice.

And yet the warm transformative power of poetry still fascinates me, the ability of images to penetrate us deeply, to change our lives and our psyches for the better, for the worse, or more commonly for both. For evil, like all things meaningful and important, is a paradox. It confounds us that our myriad self-interests meet at cross-purposes. It seems impossible to us that those we consider “out to get us” might actually be there to help us (although maybe only when it helps them to do so), or that they might not even have noticed us at all. It is quite possible that to be caught in the struggle against evil is to be caught by our own hubris…

I am a victim because I am important, because I am dangerous, because I am “awake”. I fight because I have no choice, because evil must be overthrown!

Yet the battle against evil and its citizen-soldiers, like the image of evil itself, is also poetry. It is a myth that we ally ourselves with in order to draw strength from a great human tradition - a literature of freedom and resistance, of true humanity. What we seldom recognize is that both David and Goliath need each other. Those of us on the ground require “spiritual wickedness in high places” to aim our stones and arrows up towards. And those we perceive as the “rulers of the darkness of this world” need the myth of a people to rule, and of their own inner poetic emotional struggles between stewarding and protecting or manipulating and exploiting those squirming beneath their golden boot heel.

It is a dance that has continued through the ages and which will continue long after we have returned to dust and our theories to bits and bytes floating in the electronic ether. That’s not to say though, that the wiles of evil are insubstantial or that we shouldn’t resist them. Because we should; we must. Our poetry, our mythology, demands it. But if it really is poetry - if any of this is in any way accurate - then we ought to use it to uplift our spirits. For this has always been the purpose of poetry, myth and song; it’s never been intended to degrade, to diminish or to destroy. Therefore, our poetry ought to reflect the rejoicing in our hearts, our gladness that we actually have found a role to play in this life, that there really is a grand story unfolding, with a beautiful prophecy simply begging to be fulfilled. We must recognize that at the end and at the beginning of any struggle is hope. Or else, why struggle in the first place?

If it is all only metaphor, then let us pick the best ones and thumb our noses at the ones that bore us or scare us into complacency. For ours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever ever. It has to be. Our poetry demands it.

But as Nicholas St. James, the president of one ant tank, discovers when he ventures to the surface to find an artificial pancreas for a dying repairman, the actual truth is something different altogether. The war ended long ago, but the powers that be kept going the lie so that those dwelling under the earth would be motivated to keep the system going while living in virtual slavery.

The plot twists and multiple layers of reality inverting again and again are all pure Philip K. Dick. The overall thrust of this book deals with the necessity of lies and violence to sustain a social order - and whether they really are necessary at all. You could easily draw parallels between the imaginary war in this book to a lot of what’s going on in the world today in the “War Against Terrorism.” But this book is nowhere near as polished as a lot of his other work, especially the later stuff.

One of the things that really got to me was his excessive use of made up jargon and abbreviations. The book is chock full of it and it really impedes the reading process. Also very aggravating is the constant internal italicized monologues that take place right in the middle of conversations. It’s almost like Dick started out with a basic fifty page story and then fleshed it out with all these damned italicized passages later on so that he could push it towards 200 pages. Whatever the case, they really slow down the reading process.

About halfway through though, the damn finally breaks and the novel starts to pick up. I don’t want to spoil the fun of what happens, but I think the second half makes the first half worth reading. Overall though, if you’re anything but a hardcore PKD fan, I would recommend you start elsewhere, like maybe with Ubik, Flow My Tears, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?