Great satire: Katrina and People Like Us

[drscott]

This is the funniest skewering of the self-important I've seen in a long time, and applies to a lot of the posting here recently as well as to HuffPo.

I knew if I restrained myself from writing about it, somebody else would do it better.

In a related note, Yahoo put together a meta-list of "missing people" sites, and when I put Volney's name in, it turned out he was being sought by several people. I transferred the info to Volney via Bear411, and he swore he'd have gotten around to them eventually. :-)

Comments

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

That's one of the reasons Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) is so popular: the normal news uncritically transmits premade, spun content from the various power centers, but Stewart et al satirize them at the same time they cover the daily news. Which puts the perspective where it belongs. A piece like this one is more of a self-contained antidote to a constant diet of high-minded, self-interested propaganda, and so of course it can't delve into the serious parsing of the true from the false or misleading.

But it's funny.

[abearius.livejournal.com]

That is the danger and the allure of satire. To write it or to understand it, you have to be so deeply aware of and invested in the paradigm it attacks that you feel the pain of the contradictions it exposes, which is what makes you laugh. The danger comes when you accept the satire as normative discourse. Then you become an ethical monstrosity like Sean Hannity. Or Hunter S. Thompson. In those cases, the only real language becomes the ability to mock and distort your opponents, a process that leads you to forget how to structure or express compassion, even when the only means you have for expressing it is frustrated anger.

I'd prattle on about this for hours, but I have to shove on. The tarantula is looking for me.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I heard. :-) You should probably stop thinking for a few hours. Most of the world is happily ignorant, people treating each other largely kindly, children playing, life going on. The spiders come from thinking the marbling of venality in all human societies invalidates the good.

Your point re: satire is well taken. But without it those who are sure of themselves would run roughshod over those of us who know enough to be uncertain.

[abearius.livejournal.com]

No, no, no, no, no, Dr. Scott. You have it all wrong. The tarantulas are vortices of self-realization. They merely manifest themselves as giant taranulas so that you will resist them until you are ready to be consumend by them. It's all highly symbolic, you see. Highly symblic.

As for satire, I [perhaps vaguely] recall that one of the Celtic triads lists mockery as one of the Druids' special powers. It worked because they were, as ecclesiastics and philosophers, intimately connected with military and civil administration. It was also a power of the bards. A few instances in the Mabinogion associate it with the wives of powerful men. Basically anyone who controlled language could ruin the reputation of(or destroy the confidence of) even the bravest and most capable king, or bring the most deserving villain to ruin.