THE DEATH OF SATIRE
by R J Shulman
SANTA FE, New Mexico
(PTSD News Service) – Ever since my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Lieblick read out
loud about “Le Grand Thanksgiving” a ridiculous half-French accounting of our
national holiday, written by Art Buchwald, whose name he pronounced as if it
rhymed with “kook-wald,” I was hooked on satire. Whether it was the National Lampoon, Monty
Python, Saturday Night Live or my own attempts of poking fun at life on April 1st
as a radio disc jockey, I have loved me some satire.
I have been enchanted
with it so much so, that for the past decade, I have written this blog, The
Post Times Sun Dispatch, (or the PTSD New Service) in an attempt to poke fun at
the political landscape, whether it be George W. Bush, the man you would like
to have a beer with, Barack Obama, the man you would like to have arugula beer
with or Trump, a man who you would like to have a beer with in a brothel. While the idea of Trump trying to run this
country seemed preposterous and silly at first and ripe for a windfall of
satire, I have found that I can no longer use that tried and true form of expression
to comment on the current state of his affairs or the affairs of state.
The reason that satire
has gone the way of the typewriter, public telephone booth and Myspace for me is
the rapid rise and nefarious use of “fake news,” the method Trump and other
enemies of our democracy have been using to ridicule and erase facts that do
not support Trump’s mega megalomania and single-minded pursuit of personal
power and emotional aggrandizement.
There has always been heavy
spin in the news, whether it was the truth about what really happened in Roswell,
New Mexico in 1947, Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, who shot JFK, or why
we needed to invade Iraq and break the Middle East in 2003. But, there was always enough real journalism,
print and electronic to keep it all somewhat honest or at least from spinning completely
into never-neverland. Whether it was the
news media reporting a lawyer named Joseph Welch asking Senator Joseph McCarthy
“have you no sense of decency?”, or mainstream television showing the disturbing
flickering images of the body bags encasing brave but dead American boys returning
from Southeast Asia, or reports of what happened at the Watergate Hotel. But over the years with the death of the Fairness
Doctrine by Ronald Reagan or the enactment of the Communications Act of 1996,
signed into law by Bill Clinton, opening up the floodgates for a few powerful
entities to gobble up most of the electronic media, the press has all but
become interested in its immediate corporate interests rather than any semblance
of the truth or common decency.
Which has led us to now,
this unprecedented Orwellian news cycle, on steroids ever since the Donald polluted the waters
by sticking his short pudgy reality TV orange toes in the political pool. Of course, this “fake news” epidemic was not
just employed by the liar in chief, but by the Russians and fat multinational corporations
and domestic and foreign oligarchs such as the Koch brothers to solidify their
own wealth and power while the average American focuses his or her anger and
frustration at the throat of some other average American. Such fake news, spread like a viral epidemic via
Facebook, Twitter and the right-wing propaganda media, such as so-called Fox
News, Sinclair TV and the dozens and dozens of right-wing AM radio talk show hosts over
hundreds and hundreds of radio stations, including some of the so-called Christian
broadcasters was all instrumental in not only helping Trump ascend to the Washington
throne, but have been largely responsible for keeping him unprecedentedly popular
with his phenomenally fooled fanatical fan base.
So, what does fake news
have to do with news satire? Think about
it – what is the real difference except in the eye of the beholder? Is it a real story? Is it something the Onion cooked up? Was it something wild that I made up? I’ll admit I used to get a personal shot of wicked
pleasure when someone would wonder if my satire news story was real or not. But not anymore. Satire at its best makes us laugh at our human
foibles, but fake news at it worst, keeps us angry and divided and as it has
become abundantly clear, the world has gotten so crazy and ridiculous that now
any story, no matter how absurd, could be the truth. Abnormal is the new norm.
If you write a silly satire
about Trump’s summit with Putin being about the Russian strongman arranging for
a new wife for the Donald in exchange for an American surrender, his supporters
will get even angrier and threaten with an armed response anyone who disagrees
with them that Trump is who Jesus would be if he came back as promised, or if
you write a silly satire about how an
unfortunate Secret Service Agent, Nole Edward Remagen who died suddenly
while overseas was secretly killed by Hillary because the agent’s third cousin
had a friend who spoke the terrible Truth about the Clinton Foundation being a
front for child pornography, the sex trade and the sale of illegal uranium to
Islamic terrorists, you will whip up all the true believers who will say that
it’s about time somebody finally told the truth.
We are more divided as
a nation now than at any time, except perhaps the sixties and I mean the early
1860s, right before the Civil War. I
would like things to be more like the more recent 60s when some people thought
it might be nice if we all got along.
If you are old enough you might remember hearing this:
Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now
They seem corny and
quaint now, but those lyrics from Get Together, written by Chet Powers a pen name
for singer/songwriter Dino Valenti, and made semi-famous by the Youngbloods is a
sentiment needed now more than ever for the American democracy to survive.
So, I will try to
refrain from writing satire as it indistinguishable from today’s real fake news
and will most likely further divides us.
I will attempt to write about that which can bring us together. I believe that it can be done. Why? Because
I am naïve enough to think that the things which we all have in common, the
diverse 325.7 million of us Americans are greater than the surface differences
that we have that are being exploited by those that want us divided. We may have different opinions and
preferences about things, but in general, we all want to feel useful, have work
we love or at least tolerate that grants us and our families a reasonable living. We all want to be able to afford health care for
ourselves and our families and a good education for our children. We all want to be free to pursue our lives
without offensive or dangerous government intrusion. We all would like the roads we need to travel
on to be in good repair and the bridges not to fall when we drive over them. We
all would like the electricity to work, clean water to flow and to be able to
breath without getting sick. We all would
like to live in a country and in a world where life, liberty and the pursuit of
our own happiness and purpose is possible, protected and respected.
So, I will devote these
pages to pointing out what can bring us together because it was as true at the birth
of these United States of America as it is today - united we stand, divided we fall
and I am tired of all of this division and the pit we are surely headed into. So, let’s have a new “le grand thanksgiving”
in which everyone is invited to the table to share in the American dream, except
perhaps those that want to keep us economically downtrodden and those that do
not believe that all men and women are created equally, because those are the beliefs
that are truly Unamerican.