Double Flee A

political humor bloggers: the new hippies

Hippies tried to change the world, but not really. They were all about love or hair or some concept called peace. If the hippies can teach us anything useful, it's that if you take your hands off the political wheel, it shouldn't surprise you that you lose the ability to steer. Alas, a great many people have not learned this. And they're making political satire.

Today there is a
smattering
of
sarcastic
fake
republicanism.

Mainstream America knows that hippies were easy to identify and mock, so hippies went away, high, confused, and a little unsure how they lost. The spirit of rebellion lingered as it always does. Now, due to the opportunity of "unlimited access", it has found purchase in a special kind of political protest, one that appears almost everywhere you look these days: fake reports from within the right wing of the culture wars, which seems clever and subversive.

Naturally, their readability and humorous effectiveness varies. I think the most sophisticated is probably the razor sharp fafblog, whose author appears to have phased it out. I don't want to turn this into more than a brief exposition on the ways in which culture wars miss the point, but I can't resist the opportunity to exhibit how good satire is supposed to look, from the late Fafblog:

Run for your lives - America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America's freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the "Blame Atrocities First" crowd will tell you these prisoners were "driven to despair," that they "had no rights," that they were "held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice." But what they won't tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States - a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! - and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!

"Oh but Giblets there are dozens of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo" you say because you are a namby-pamby appeasenik who suckles at the teat of terror. Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an elaborate plot to make it look like we're holding them in our secret military prisons, that's what! And once they get there they can chain themselves to the floor, break their bones on helpless guards' fists, and waterboard themselves to their heart's content to further their sinister Salafi scheme to sully the reputation of secret American torture facilities everywhere!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg! Even as we speak the forces of Islamanazism are infiltrating our network of classified CIA prison camps, rendering themselves to third world dictatorships, and launching unprovoked assaults on innocent American bullets! There's only one thing to do with all these malicious prisoners, torture victims, and massacred civilians - and that's to imprison, torture and massacre them before they can mount another attack! Yes it will be difficult, but these people want to destroy our very way of life - our obliviously violent, guilt-free way of life. Let's roll!

[Applause] That's nearly a perfect piece of satire. But does anyone change the way they vote based on it? It's not that the page is inaccessible. The page loads easily into any browser, it's made out of the same words as is any other page, but a big problem, commonly misunderstood, is that access is the opposite of how it seems. The person is the access point, not the news channel, not the blog. Carnies and hucksters have known this forever, you don't sell the electrolux vacuum cleaner, you sell the person buying it. The concept couldn't be simpler, but it's no fun to think about unless you're going to make some money off of it.

Limbaugh and Hannity and Bill Krystal and the Heritage foundation and the Fox news channel, the contents of whose private meetings would boggle the minds of the people they broadcast talking points to daily, get it. Through big channels, the information has access to the audience, for whom it's like a warm fuzzy blanket, and it's a simple sociology functioning on a massive scale. You all know the rest.

Once a person has a worldview they're comfortable with, they'll do nearly anything to keep it, so there's a built-in audience for a certain kind of political entertainment format. Fox news viewers want to believe America is a bulwark of goodness, and why not want to do that? Even I want that to be true, even if it sometimes isn't. If Fox news makes top ratings for pretending the world is neatly divided into evil and good, it's not to be diabolical, it's to make money. Another great quarter, pass the Moet.

Yes, it's a goddamn shame it's as simple as it is and yet nothing can be done about it, at least here at places like this blog or even at other ones that get a lot of traffic. When I see Shelley the Republican hammering away as if it's funny that her point of view as a person other than a neo-con media insider doesn't matter, all I can think about is that I wish it made me think about something other than that the point is that she really wouldn't matter otherwise, and it's also and mainly that she still really doesn't matter anyway. No offense, hilarious left-wing inside-outsiders, but I have a tough time getting a belly laugh together in this condition. Pass the bourbon.

posted by dale @ 7:55 AM