When Hysteria and Satire Meet. by Leonard Pitts Jr.
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled..." - Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, 1729 Satire is tricky. It makes its point by exaggerating wildly with a straight face. In inflating a thing beyond all common sense or propriety, it seeks to render inconsistencies and hypocrisies glaringly apparent. Satire seeks truth in the ridiculous. For illustration, see any given episode of The Colbert Report. What makes satire difficult is that sometimes, people don't realize they are being had. Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal, for instance, had some convinced he wanted to eat babies; they didn't realize he was actually attacking people's blithe unconcern with the plight of the poor. For that matter, when All In the Family came along 2 ½ centuries later, some folks saw Archie as the soul of reason. I have experience in this. Some years back, I satirized a study that said many Americans feel news media routinely get the facts wrong. In a column "defending" media accuracy, I made misstatements so grandiose -- Bob Hope was host of the Tonight Show; Quincy Jones was his bandleader -- I thought no one could miss my point. Silly me. I got hundreds of e-mails "correcting" my supposed errors.' So I feel the New Yorker's pain. The magazine is under fire for a cover illustration depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office wearing a turban, bumping fists with his wife, Michelle, who wears an Afro, fatigues and has an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. Osama bin Laden watches from a portrait on the wall. An American flag burns in the fireplace. more... http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/17/10432/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
