"The rest of the world, which allowed the things recorded here to happen, should put the obligation to weep before the right to laugh."

Feuilleton:   a part of a newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader

The performance of this play, which according to terrestrial measurement of time would encompass about ten evenings, is intended for a theatre on Mars. Theatre-goers of this world would not be able to bear it. For it is blood of their blood; the content is the narrative of those years, unreal, unthinkable, accessible to no waking sense or memory, only preserved in bloody dreams, when operetta characters played out the tragedy of mankind. The action, leading to a hundred scenes and hells, is impossible, fractured, hero-less. The humour is merely the self-reproach of a witness who has not gone mad at the thought of surviving these times with his mind intact. But except for those who reveal their share in this shame to posterity, nobody has any right to that humour. The rest of the world, which allowed the things recorded here to happen, should put the obligation to weep before the right to laugh.

For anyone who wants to learn more about the real satirist Karl Kraus and why he makes the two-bit clowns who get called "satirists" now-a-days look like two-bit clowns, here's a website that takes on the huge project of presenting a translation of his enormous play,  The Last Days of Mankind.  As it points out, the entire work was not until very recently all available in translation and was often presented in watered down excerpts made congenial instead of meaningful.   There is so much in the play that is, if anything, far more relevant to an America trained by the decadence and corruption of television, hate-talk radio, pop culture where entertainment that sells has entirely swamped fact and reality.   Kraus rather exactly predicted what happens when that kind of thing replaces reality.  From his Preface to the play.

The most improbable deeds reported here actually took place; I only painted what was done. The most implausible conversations in this play were spoken verbatim; the shrillest inventions are quotations. Propositions, whose folly is indelibly registered on the ear, swell into the music of life. A document is a character; reports rise up as living forms while the living die as editorials; the feuilleton gains a mouth and delivers its own monologue; clichés stand on two legs – some men are left with only one. Cadences rattle and rage through these times, crescendoing into a hymn to the unholiest acts. 

The America that produced the Donald Trump candidacy,  a mere eight years after George W. Bush and the catalog of horrors and crimes his time in office committed,  is the world in which Trump's TV show,   The Apprentice, is denominated as being "reality TV."   That a population which has had the phony, constructed, fiction of television presented as "reality" is in the gravest danger of choosing him as its leader is proof of the power of the media to produce, not democracy, but a depraved, demented, dangerous and deadly demagogue.  That is what Donald Trump promises to be, not covertly, but as a promise.  Donald Trump is what it happening here looks like.   The Donald Trump phenomenon is, absolutely, the kind of thing that Karl Kraus warned would be the result of the press being as irresponsible as ours is.  From top to bottom the cynical, self-serving, press presented in The Last Days of Mankind is what we've got.   When The People have been corrupted, democracy doesn't mean that people make choices that are for the common good, they are a manipulated tool of TV promoted millionaires and billionaires.   

As I've mentioned so often, what presents itself as the cream of our free press, the lefty magazines and such electronic venues as Democracy Now and The Young Turks have been as irresponsible this year but with their own twist on it.  Some of them are still encouraging people who can be gulled into voting for Jill Stein.   Having been brought up on the reverence for journalism that I was propagandized into, believing in by the media and the cult of the romanticized First Amendment, both created and promoted by the media industry, it took me a long time to see through it.  Karl Kraus was a journalist who saw how corrupt it can be, how corrupting it can be at first hand.   It isn't any great shock to realize that he wouldn't be as much promoted by the media as the far less biting, far more facile and far more easily dismissed Bertolt Brecht.  And both of them are buried by the media attention given to the chief executive of The Apprentice.