The Great Lie of The Great Power Of Satire

Well, now I've seen everything.   No, sorry to have gotten your hopes up, I'm not going to shoot myself in the head like in a Loony Tunes cartoon, now.

Someone got far enough into my post yesterday to read my update

[Update:  I also hear in the news just now that threats and violence against Jewish institutions and individuals are up in Europe, as well.   So, well done, Charlie Hebdo!  You showed them.]

And has decided that it meant I approved of the threats of violence against Jewish institutions and individuals in Europe.  Which, in the midst of a long post containing sarcasm, condemning what Charlie Hebdo does, inciting violence and a threat of violence, failed to communicate sarcasm, to at least one person.  Or at least one person who wants to pretend to not have understood my meaning. Which shows you just how effective satire is at getting a message across.

For some reason it made me think of Mort Sahl, the stand up comedian who was famous as a "satirist" who many of what would pass as urbane liberals would have claimed as an anti-establishment bird of a feather in the early 1960s.

His what-passes-for satire did nothing, though, to keep him from being a supporter of the presidential ambitions of Alexander "I'm in control here!" ""I would like to suggest to you that some of the investigations would lead one to believe that perhaps the vehicle the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock," Haig, after he claimed the presidency in the wake of the Reagan assassination attempt and his trying to blame the four murdered American Church women for their rape and murder by the El Salvadoran military thugs, trained, armed and funded by the U.S. government.

Now, isn't that a knee slapper.  It called to mind that 1956 interview of Dorothy Parker  I excerpted a part of a while back.

Ah, satire. That’s another matter. They’re the big boys. If I’d been called a satirist there’d be no living with me. But by satirist I mean those boys in the other centuries. The people we call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and consider themselves satirists—creatures like George S. Kaufman and such who don’t even know what satire is. Lord knows, a writer should show his times, but not show them in wisecracks. Their stuff is not satire; it’s as dull as yesterday’s newspaper. Successful satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow.

That it was part of Mort Sahl's stand-up act that he'd walk on with a newspaper under his arm and make cracks about topical topics is what made him a legend in what gets called "satire" now.  And his biting, anti-establishment satire was of such moral and intellectual power that he was able to endorse Al Haig for president.  Now, that is, actually,  the raw material for satire but if Dorothy Parker didn't feel up to it, I'm not going to even try.

I do think that it is the moral purpose that is missing from everything I've heard graced with the name "satire" these days.  And along with that disintegration of the denotation of the term, there has been an absurd overestimate of its influence in the world.  I mentioned the failure of the biting and often brilliant satire of the likes of Brecht and Karl Kraus to prevent the Nazis coming to power. There is no one working in English or French today, who I'm aware of, who can match either of them for writing talent or intellectual content mixed with truly dangerous ridicule.  While, of course, I've never witnessed one of Kraus's performances even the most sophisticated audience members said he was spell binding.  Even when he was reading other peoples' non-satirical material.  Yet Hitler came to power, made himself an absolute dictator, brainwashed Germans and Austrians in the millions and fomented one of the most homicidal regimes and one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our planet.   And they spoke the same language as Brecht and Kraus, the pitiful excuse for satirists we've got today probably couldn't reliably order up a meal from an Arabic restaurant without descriptions.

It's the attractive and easy thing to believe, that all we have to do is ridicule people and ideas and political movements and they'll magically go away, it's so much less work and leaves us so much more time to be witty and urbane and socialize and watch Comedy Central.  But it's a lie.  It's a lie that has worked far better for the Al Haigs than it has for the Maryknoll nuns who get killed while they're trying to change things.   I saw Al Haig's performance where he said that, part in a cover up of those murders, something he later tried to pretend hadn't happened.   I couldn't find the video on Youtube or online but as I recall, when challenged on his lie during the testimony, he tried to turn it into a nun joke.  I'm sure some found it funny.  Or found it advantageous to pretend to have.  Of course the terror war in El Salvador that was in service of was a victory for the oligarchs and fascists and American economic interests.   Even as Mort Sahl was joking about his endorsement of Al Haig.

Update:  The hate mail is coming in and it's obvious I have spoken truth to impotence.

Update 2:  Oh, yeah, I've always been sooooo impressed with how Jonathan Swift's brilliant satire did so much to improve British policy in Ireland in the subsequent decades and centuries.  And how it led to the enlightened British social policy of the 1840s and onward.   Which, are sarcastic remarks, not satirical ones.

Update 3:   An objection is made at Duncan's Brain Trust that I brought up - with citations in the friggin' New York Times, I'll point out - that Mr. Liberal c. 1960,  Mort Sahl was supporting a war hawk, right-wing Republican for president to succeed the husband of his good friend, Nancy Reagan.

Oh, yes, I remember it so well, in 1987 it was de rigueur among liberals to endorse Al Haig for president, even as the dirty, terror war in El Salvador he had a large part in waging was at its height and death squad murders were happening most every day.

And it is de rigueur among blog rat "liberals" c. in their own minds, to forget little details about that so they can make nostalgic pop-culture references to people who self-generated such inconvenient baggage as supporting the candidacy of a right-wing war criminal.

Like I said, you could make up satire out of this if the irony didn't block the way.