Venture Bros rocks - "They want to mold the world into a specific shape... and if you don’t believe in that, it just seems crazy."

The Horrible Truth About Super-Science: Jackson Publick of The Venture Brothers on superheroes, satire, and the '60s - Reason Magazine:

"Reason: Like the Guild of Calamitous Intent.

Publick: With the Guild we’ve created a bureaucracy, a union of hate. Even the way they express that pointless anger is that it’s just their job. That’s the best explanation they could come up with. It’s their job, and they have to deal with the bureaucracy, the paperwork that comes with hating someone...

Reason: You regularly tweak patriotism as a motivation for these characters. You hark back to the patriotism of the 1960s, but the contemporary government actors, like the president, are generally gullible morons.

Publick: It’s a bit of a stereotype, and maybe not the most creative endeavor of our show. Anyway, patriotism is the wrong word to use. It’s the self-righteousness that pretends to be patriotism that we see today. I don’t think a lot of people are able to relate to genuine patriotism, a genuinely good feeling about our country and its meaning to the rest of the world. I think the bloom is off the rose. Any time you hear people who still talk with that mind-set, they come across, to me anyway, as just as ridiculous as our characters. You read books about their crazy experiments, like Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Reason: About the military’s “psychic spies.”

Publick: Yes. You read stuff like that and realize that those people are crazy. Fundamentalists are crazy. They’re the real-world equivalent to the evil geniuses of our spy fiction and our superhero comics. They want to mold the world into a specific shape that they really believe in, and if you don’t believe in that, if you can’t relate to that, it just seems crazy. What is the difference between wanting to develop insane weapons so America can dominate the planet and being the guy with the cat on his lap who wants to take over the world?"