Although you may not know it, good satire is an exceedingly rare commodity. More than ever, the creation of the ridiculous is almost impossible because of the competition it receives from reality. In the old days, if the satirist was artful, he obtained his greatest effects by exaggerating the norm in such a way that the reader became aware of its abnormality. Today the extreme is so commonplace there is little left for the satirist to do.
Robert A. Baker (1963)
“Introduction,” A Stress Analysis of A Strapless Evening Gown (And Other Essays For A Scientific Age)
*
Irony, as was pointed out in an earlier post, involves at least two separate states of awareness. The ironist—who is always insincere—has one state of awareness; he knows that his presentation is deliberately overstating what he doesn’t believe, or understating that which he does believe. The former—the overstatement—is the mode of sarcasm. The satirist, after putting forward (seemingly approvingly) the position of his opponent, then attempts to undermine it by setting it down a path of ever-increasingly absurd propositions. Hopefully, at some point, the penny drops and the opponent can no longer cling on to his belief. Reason and logic have abandoned him. Only foolishness remains. And only a fool remains with it.
*
Jovan Pulitzer is either one of the world’s greatest satirists—or a complete nut. He was identified by slate.com as either the originator or popularizer of the claim that one reason the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump was that Chinese thermostats controlled US voting machines, changing Trump votes secretly into Biden ones.*
I stand in awe of such a pronouncement. It has all the earmarks of a brilliant satirical invention—specifically, a sarcastic thrust against Trumpian believers of a massive conspiracy that put the Democratic candidate into the White House.
Consider:
The statement posits a voting machine conspiracy by which Trump votes were sabotaged (which is the Trumpian position).
It then identifies the most outrageous possible instrument as having been used to achieve the transfer of votes—a thermostat, the device that regulates the temperature level of your house.
Crazy enough for you? Wait!
They weren’t just any ignoble thermostats—they were CHINESE thermostats.
Bad enough that the Chinese have been inundating the US with plastic doodads to fill the shelves of your neighborhood Dollar General emporium; now they’ve gone hightech.
Sure, the sarcasm would work if the Chinese were left out—or if, say the Germans or the Israelis were the alleged culprits. But adding the Yellow Peril—that just puts the satire over the top.
But was it satire—or was it nuttiness? As Robert Baker is quoted, at the top of the page, in 1963 “the extreme is so commonplace.” Is today any different?
*
Another vote conspiracy allegation, supposedly promulgated by a group called Nations in Action, claimed (again according to slate.com) that “an Italian defense contractor uploaded software to a satellite to switch votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.”
Examining this claim, we find similarities to the thermostat mishegas:
Here, too, outrageously inappropriate technology is being used.
Instead of the Chinese we have the ITALIANS. The land that has given the world Michaelangelo, Sophia Loren, and linguini aglio e olio, is not, I believe, world-renowned for its satellite technology.
The conspiracy theory is stretched to the breaking point.
But, apparently, there’s no attempt at satire here; we’re mired in true conspiracy swampland. Nations in Action claims its goal to be “the exposure of the ‘shadow government’ that controls the world.”
(If you think all of the above is too crazy for words, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had several government agencies investigate the thermostat and satellite claims.)
*
At which point, what should a sane person think?
J. B. S. Haldane, the polymath scientist, said:
"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
I would suggest that the United States today “is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
***
* https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/jan-6-roe-gas-prices-congress-skewed-priorities.html
No comments:
Post a Comment