Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The spelling of the word "Monkees," as the name of a 1960s pop cultural sensation, the so-called "pre-fab four," contains a very clever bit of word play. So clever that sixty years later it comes to my mind for no good reason.  Allow me to expound. For those who don't remember: the Monkees were a fictional band (which in time came to treat itself as a real-world band) created for a comedic television show on NBC in 1966. This was the peak of Beatlemania. Indeed, the Monkees' TV show first aired around the time the Beatles released REVOLVER.  The Monkees were designed specifically to catch the Beatles vibe, more as a comedic tribute group than as a parody.  The neat bit of word play? It involves the names of the two groups.  The name "The Beatles" refers, of course, to an insect. It involves a deliberate misspelling of the first syllable of the name of that insect in order to incorporate a musical term, "beat".  The name "The Monkees...

Whatever your own aspirations, and whatever are the difficulties in reaching them, you can if you like call the latter your condition of being stranded, the island on which you are stuck, and you can refer to the former as the task of "getting off the island." Thus the situation that provides the plot of most of the series' episodes is quite generalizable. The heart of the philosophy of the show is this: to achieve anything in life, you have to suppress your inner Gilligan. Some part of you probably has adapted pretty well to your island, to the limits of your life, to the frustration of your ambitions. That part of you will frustrate efforts to get off the island. But it (he) will do so in an amiable way, a way that doesn't look like sabotage, and that may even seem ... funny. DON'T TOLERATE THAT. Be tough on your inner Gilligan.