The obvious response to the title of this node is that, yes, you indeed can fight evil with a macaroni duck.

Steps:

1. Locate an evil that needs fighting, preferably one that can be easily crushed.

2. Fashion a macaroni duck from macaroni and rubber cement. Be sure that your macaroni duck weighs in excess of 250kg.

3. Drop said duck on aforementioned evil from great heights.

Congratulations. You have now fought evil with a macaroni duck. Next time, get a Ruger 9mm, which my neighbor down the hall tells me is good for killing dwarves, or for that matter just about anything else, and which can easily be stored in an oversized boot.

"Tick, you can't fight evil with a macaroni duck!" is from the hilarious animated series The Tick, specifically the especially hilarious episode Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love. One of the four or five plots of that episode was the rift that developed between Tick and Arthur over Carmelita and their friendship. Arthur had been spending more time with his girlfriend, Carmelita, and less with the Tick, and Tick felt like he was losing his sidekick. The tension building between them exploded into a confrontation on Craft Night, when Arthur tried to blow off the weekly routine of he and Tick making kindergartenish arts 'n' crafts for a date with Carmelita.

(The Tick brandishes a silhouette of a duck, made from pieces of macaroni glued to a sheet of paper.)

Tick: But Arthur, evil!

Arthur: Tick, you can't fight evil with a macaroni duck!

Tick: I'll be the judge of that!

(Arthur leaves.)

Arthur's date on Craft Night is the impetus for practically all of the episode's other events, including Tick's creation of Little Wooden Boy, and Tick and Arthur's encounters with the Swiss, Blowhole, and Carmelita's father, but those are all stories for another node...
(Ideally a node about Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love, but considering how long this explanation of one quote took and how much I like that episode, it would be quite an effort.)

I originally wrote this up because CrowJane asked where this phrase is from in her writeup, since deleted. Best to give credit where, uh, impetus came from.

...Two and a half months pass and I use the word impetus a second time in the same writeup.

Before the veracity of this assertion can be debated we must step back from the implicit terms of the debate and examine the texture of the page. Can evil and a macaroni duck co-exist in the same universe? Just as an unstoppable force cannot ever meet an immovable object - the existence of one makes the other impossible - so it seems to me that a universal process which could produce a macaroni duck could not produce evil, and vice-versa. I shall examine whether this is the case, aided as I am by a mixture of bread and alcohol. These two combined provide redundant sustenance, bread containing water and Bailey's containing cream, which is food. It helps me to perambulate my mind, my magic swirling ship.

If the reality presented by The Tick is to be our playground, then a macaroni duck is objectively real, albeit that it is merely a depiction of a duck created with macaroni - it therefore exists in a deeper layer of fantasy, although the characters in The Tick do not view the duck as a living creature, merely a depiction of one (contrast this with Little Wooden Boy, a piece of wood on which a face is drawn which is nonetheless treated as a living being by the main characters, at least until they burn 'him' to make smoke). We are shown the duck, and in the fictional subset of the superuniverse in which the show exists we witness the reaction of a second character to the duck. There is no indication that these characters are experiencing an alternative semi-reality, and we have no reason to believe that the characters are experiencing a 'fade into their own parade', to paraphrase the reality-defying work of Bob Dylan; despite the fantastical nature of The Tick, the show takes place on a single plane of 'reality', on which the macaronic duck co-exists with the mainstream.

And we must turn to evil, for no other reason than that it is cruel to be kind. The word 'evil' assumed a camp dimension over the course of the twentieth century. It creates mental images which are at variance with the true nature of evil; images of caped, moustachioed rogues, of Tesla coils, of overacted silent films. Of Fantomas, Lex Luthor, comic books, melodrama. The reality of evil does not intersect with the reality of The Tick. Neither the awe-inspiring spectacle of genocide nor the oppression of entire populations by ideologies, rather than emotions, nor the mundane evil of pimping, slavery, sadism and the murder of defenceless individuals have a place in the world of The Cartoon Network, of The Powerpuff Girls and/or Johnny Bravo, notwithstanding that the latter character is actually a narcissist rather than a crime-fighter. The evil of cities, of suburbs, of Harrow and Hounslow, of hate and fear, of the smothering legalities which prevent good men such as myself from bearing arms against the evil which pervades sociality, there is no circle on the Venn Diagram for this.

Of course there is no reason to suppose that a macaroni duck is an exclusive property of The Tick. I can create such a creature in this universe, at least as far as I am free to act in a society which prevents me from legally driving a car without first having to undergo conditioning and the ownership of insurance, itself a potent symbol of the mistrust and hate with which the social order views my actions. I would create such a duck myself, if only I had some macaroni. I do not like macaroni; I do not enjoy pasta, or anything which involves warm cheese. I cannot abide the thought of dairy products at anything above room temperature; cheese, milk, leather, all these things must be cold to the touch. Cheese is the essence of nature. Granted, macaroni may be eaten plain, in which case a second issue emerges. Macaroni conceals its true nature. What evil lurks in the curled folds of macaroni? I know not. Suffice it to say that uncertainty is not a property I find laudable in food.

Of course The Tick is a property of our universe, and thus a macaroni duck does not 'belong' to The Tick any more than love is an exclusive property of the universe of Romeo and Juliet, although not my own universe, oh no. Yet we must restrict the terms of the debate, for everything is possible. Over time, even black holes evaporate into the void, and that which eternal lies may outlive death. To accept that all points of view are equally valid and that all things must pass is to accept oblivion, and I will not accept that. There is still so much to do in this life, still so much to rage against, and to rage for. We are lucky to have the light. Our ancestors will consider it a black matter if we were to let the light out. Therefore, insofar as a macaroni duck exists of our universe, and that evil is also a property of this same universe albeit not abstracted, it seems reasonable to conclude that life is light and that life and humour are linked and therefore evil itself can be made pause by macaroni and duck and I so rule.

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