Have Americans lost their sense of humor?

The New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama as a Muslim and Michelle Obama as a terrorist has sparked a bit of idiotic controversy around these parts. Barack Obama has come out and said that it doesn't bother him but it's insulting to Muslims. Some people have come out and said that this kind of satire shouldn't be allowed. Yes, in the land of the First Amendment, this sort of thing shouldn't be allowed. Sigh.

As Leonard Pitts points out in his latest column, satire is tricky. If people take you seriously, things get ugly. That's what has happened with the Obama cover. However, if people take you seriously when it's something as over the top as this, they start looking ridiculous.

It's obvious that this cover is meant as satire. It's so over-the-top that I should be surprised that anyone is taking it seriously. Does anyone really think that the artist is trying to say that Obama is a Muslim and his wife is a terrorist? Especially after that news commentator (wasn't she on Fox News?) who wondered, on the air, whether Obama fist-bumping his wife was a "terrorist fist jab"? The artist is obviously poking fun at all the people who think that this is what an Obama presidency would look like - Barack and Michelle cackling in the Oval Office while burning the flag under a picture of Osama bin Laden. That's the problem with satire in today's world - there are FAR too many people who believe this is exactly what will happen when Obama wins.

That's the problem with satire. People for centuries have failed to "get it" - as Pitts points out when he mentions that people in 1729 took Jonathan Swift seriously when he suggested that starving people should eat babies - but these days, with the proliferation of media outlets and voices from the fringe being taken seriously, it's harder for people to see when someone is poking fun at the conceits. I heard recently that my pal Michael Savage thinks an Obama presidency would lead to a sort of "Cultural Revolution" ... and he was totally serious. I imagine Savage looked at this cover and said, "Yeah, that seems about right." Pitts even mentions that he has gotten e-mails from people expressing this sentiment. The wackos on the fringe have a voice, and unfortunately, it's often louder than those people who aren't crazy. Not crazy people have things to do in this world, like go to real jobs, raise real families, and worry about whether they can make the mortgage payment. The wackos who live in bunkers and whose only expense is an Internet connection don't have to worry about that sort of thing. They can spend all day ranting about how Barack Obama signalled to his Muslim brethren that America is ripe for the picking when he tapped fists with his wife.

What's sad is that these wackos force Obama and McCain to take this seriously. As Jon Stewart pointed out the other day, "Barack Obama is in no way be upset about the cartoon that depicts him as a Muslim extremist, because you know who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists."


I understand that things are offensive, and that no one but the person offended can say that it's wrong. However, this isn't a shot at Obama and his wife, and they have to know that. It's sad that in America today, we have lost any sense of irony and sense of humor that people are up in arms about this. Wouldn't it be nice if people understood what is going on here?

Peyton Manning on SNL

If you haven't seen the United Way spoof Manning did on Saturday Night Live this past week, here it is. Warning: Peyton uses some naughty language (suitably bleeped)! But it's really freakin' funny.

Caesura

Picture Day will be here tomorrow (I know you just can't live without checking out my pictographic record of my life!), but in meantime, enjoy this very funny and very politically incorrect monologue about beauty salons (it would help if you've ever been in a beauty salon, I guess):

What I've been reading

Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season by Matt Taibbi. 331 pages, 2005, The New Press.

I don't read too many books that piss me off, but this is one of them. It's very funny, insightful, witty and cruel, and perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with this country. Taibbi follows the Democratic candidates for president in 2004 around on the campaign trail, joins the Republican effort in Florida for a few months in the summer of 2004, and comes to a terrifying conclusion: it's absolutely hopeless.

It's not quite as nihilistic as that, but it is an extremely depressing book, despite the fact that you will laugh a lot while reading it. What Taibbi points out with stunning clarity is that not only are the candidates simply carbon copies of each other and that neither Kerry nor Bush is good for the country (which was obvious watching the campaign in October and November of 2004), but that the media is an active part of keeping anything that might rock the boat out of the public eye. Jon Stewart highlights the meekness of the press with regard to Bush almost every night, but Taibbi goes much deeper than he does (not surprisingly, considering the two formats) and reveals how evil much of the press in this country is. Yes, I said evil. Taibbi obviously has an axe to grind, but it's clear that he's onto something, because even just looking at news articles this week (I finished the book a few days ago), it's clear that the press is not reporting the news, but shaping it. Again, this isn't all that radical an idea, but there's this idea that the press is shaping the news because they're "liberal" and they want to embarrass the president. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Taibbi points out. All the media wants is to keep things basically the same: they occupy a privileged place in the American political hierarchy, and they want to stay there. Anything that threatens to upset their spot comes under scrutiny. Again, conservative commentators would say this applies to Bush, but it applies equally to the Democratic candidates. John Kerry won the nomination for the Democratic Party because the press wanted him to win - he was the most palatable to the members of the media, and they knew that if he won the presidency, their position would remain stable - just like it has under Bush. Therefore, Taibbi tracks how the reporters destroyed first Howard Dean - which he doesn't mind, because he thinks Dean isn't a very good candidate - and then Dennis Kucinich - which he does mind, because he likes what Kucinich has to say. His indignation over what happened to Kucinich is the heart of the first part of the book, when he follows the candidates around in 2003 and early 2004. He points out that even if you didn't like Kucinich, you never got a chance to make up your mind, because the press didn't like him and therefore marginalized him. It's a fascinating look at how we are spoon-fed news to the point where we believe that Kucinich was a weirdo and Dean a loon, just because the press hammered home certain brief moments that showed this - Dean's primal scream comes to mind. Taibbi struggles to understand why the press doesn't care to ask pertinent questions and simply let the candidates talk about nothing, and as he does so, we get angrier and angrier. He points out that the candidates use hot-button words ("jobs," "patriotism," "values" - you know them all) without really saying anything. Why doesn't anyone call them on it? There are plenty of nifty little nuggets about the vacuousness of the press, and I opened the book at random to find one:

Soon afterward I joined the scrum around Edwards. He was turning clockwise in a crowd of hacks and expertly batting away one question after another; he looked like Rafael Palmeiro at a home-run derby. When he caught New York Times reporter Rick Lyman standing open-mouthed without a question ready, he cracked: "Hey, buddy? You just gonna stand there?"

Behind me, two female reporters cooed. "Wow," one said. "Just look at his tan!"

The press, on the other hand, did not like that Dennis Kucinich was a strange-looking man who actually talked about the issues. Taibbi writes about how Kucinich threatened to use eminent domain to seize a hospital in a poor neighborhood in Cleveland that a health conglomerate was planning to close. Little things like that get left out of the news stories about the candidates, because they're boring. Instead we see Kerry hunting ducks and hear about how presidential he is!

In a very funny section, Taibbi breaks down Kerry's acceptance speech at the Convention. He removes everything that was bullshit: self-aggrandizing bullshit; phony religiosity; pointless political platitudes; gratuitous flag-waving; forced and hollow tough-talking; comparing oneself to great figures of the past; callow patriotism; syrupy talk about love for our vast and beautiful country; references to the wonder and might of our armed forces; and hot-button words: hope, the future, freedom, truth, pride, values, heroes, power, change, pledge, faith. After a bunch of pages in which he breaks down the speech and eliminates all the bullshit, he comes up with this:

I was born in Colorado. America can do better.

Now that's an acceptance speech!

In another very funny section and slightly creepy section of the book, Taibbi infiltrates a Republican campaign office in Orlando and checks things out. What's most disturbing about the entire thing is the casual racism of the people involved with the Republican campaign. Taibbi asks to interview the black Republicans in central Florida, and they can't think of many until they recall the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for Florida, plus a Promise Keeper who comes in for a fake interview with Vibe magazine that Taibbi sets up. One of the white Republicans actually says to the Promise Keeper, "I know how you people don't like to work." He says it as a joke, but it's this kind of casual racism that is everywhere in central Florida, according to Taibbi. He mans a voter registration table at a gun show, where a woman was selling etchings of Nathan Bedford Forrest and doing rather well. Taibbi quotes her as saying, "People are so narrow-minded. They think that just because he founded the KKK, he was a racist." Later on, a woman calls Taibbi and says she loved Bush because he's against gay rights. Taibbi asks someone in the office if he should correct her, because Bush is against gay marriage, not gay rights. The guy thinks about it, then tells Taibbi not to correct her. The mainstream Republicans, Taibbi writes, knows that intolerant people are part of their base, and they don't care.

Taibbi reserves plenty of opprobrium for protesters, as well. He points out that protesting like it's the 1960s doesn't work anymore, because those in power aren't afraid of it anymore. In the 1960s, the randomness of protests worked because society was so much more rigid. These days, randomness is part of society, so these mass protests (which of course aren't covered accurately by the media, but that's another point) simply reinforce a new status quo: the protesters will have their say, and then disappear. It doesn't matter. What the powerful fear these days is organization, but these protesters aren't organized beyond the desire to show up at an appointed place at an appointed time and get on television. This goes back to Kucinich: he wants to talk about "boring" issues like NAFTA and the American manufacturing base, but the press doesn't care about that. They want to talk about John Edwards' tan and John Kerry's Vietnam reminiscences (which, as Taibbi points out, are completely beside the point). The powerful know that these protesters are just something to be endured for a very short time, and then everyone can move on and keep screwing everyone over. They are assisted in this by the press, who simply reports about a protest as if it's some quaint thing that means nothing. And everyone keeps going.

The saddest thing about this book is that it offers no real solutions. Taibbi doesn't seem to know what to do about it, and it's very difficult to change this political-media axis, because they control so much. I have no idea if Dennis Kucinich was a good candidate or not, but even if people like him and vote for him, Taibbi implies he will just be sucked up into the power structure and destroyed. We have options, but it will take a revolutionary effort, and no one really cares. It's a difficult book to deal with, because it leaves us angry but without a place to vent that anger. The best thing we can do, probably, is to keep it local and hold people who are at least a bit closer to us accountable. Those who are up in the hierarchy occupy a completely different stratum than we do. It's a horrible feeling of powerlessness that Taibbi leaves us with.

Despite that, it's an important and powerful book. It's must reading for anyone who cares about where this country is going. Taibbi, despite his inclination toward Kucinich and his loathing of Bush, is much more concerned with the way society is structured rather than picking on any one person. He calls Bush a monster more than once, but he also has special bile for John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. He absolutely hates the media, and his final chapter, in which he puts reporters in a bracket and has them face off against each other by looking at what they write about the campaign is devastatingly funny but very depressing. Taibbi does a great job making us laugh and making us angry, and that's a good thing.

Spanking the Donkey will make you think a lot about what you can do to make society better. Well, at least it did for me. Yes, it will make you angry. But it might inspire you as well. And that's not a bad thing.

What I've been reading

The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck. 151 pages, 1957, Bantam Books.
I must admit something to you, good readers. I majored in English at a prestigious Eastern university. I was, until the little darlings came into my life and robbed me of my will to live, quite a voracious reader. And yet, through all that, I have never read a John Steinbeck book. Not The Grapes of Wrath. Not Of Mice and Men. Not East of Eden. Oh, the shame!

Then my friend Barbara, who was in graduate school the same time I was and shares my love of medieval history (my focus was on Merovingian France, while hers was on Angevin England, but still), sent me this book as a present. Oh, it's beaten up. It's probably a first edition from the late 1950s. It still bears, proudly, the advertising slogan "Look for the Bantam rooster - your assurance of quality!" It will never be mistaken for a classic. But, good readers, at least I can say I have read a Steinbeck book. As long as no one asks which one, I should be fine.

This is actually a fun, breezy satire. It's certainly not a great book, but it is fun, and shows a humorous side of Steinbeck that, if I understand correctly, we don't get in stories about dustbowls and oil tycoons. The French government, paralyzed by scandal and instability, decides to restore the monarchy. So that no group will have a bigger sway over the monarch than any other, they choose a lineal descendant of Charlemagne, who happens to live in Paris and is a quiet, retiring, amateur astronomer who earns a pension off a small tract of land in the Loire valley. His wife is typically domineering, while his daughter, 20, is a world-famous novelist/Communist/budding film star. Pippin Arnulf Héristal (the names are important in a historical sense, but one doesn't need to know why) just wants to live his life looking at the stars, but once the various factions in the government get into their head that they need a king, they force the crown upon him. He reluctantly agrees.

They want a figurehead, and for a while, Pippin goes along. He tries to sneak out into the streets in disguise, but he soon realizes all he needs to do is wander off dressed as a commoner and nobody recognizes him. He talks to his "subjects" and tries to learn about France. Meanwhile, his daughter takes up with Tod Johnson, an American whose father is the Egg King of Petaluma, California. Johnson attempts to convince the king that he needs to run the country like his father runs a business, but Pippin is a woefully bad student. Meanwhile, his wife, who has no one to talk to, brings into Versailles an old friend, Sister Hyacinthe, who was once a dancer in the Folies but is now a nun, and complains to her that the king refuses to even name an official mistress. Eventually, Pippin himself goes to Sister Hyacinthe for advice, as she is far more worldly than most of the people surrounding him. When Pippin does finally make a stand and realizes that to give up being king he has to act like one, the government factions unite against him and depose him. He decides not to flee, but instead simply returns to his life as an astronomer, with no one the wiser.

It's a gentle tale when it comes to how Steinbeck treats Pippin and Marie, his wife, who could have easily become targets of wrath. Marie, particularly, could have been ridiculed far more, but Steinbeck doesn't want to focus his anger on her. Instead, he wants to satirize government, and he does, pretty savagely. He makes the point (pages 22-23) that the French Communists supported the restoration of the monarchy because their party's natural function was revolution, and as French politics was in a state of anarchy, it is difficult to revolt against that. So the Communists could take advantage of the restoration of the monarchy, because then they could rebel against it. He gives similarly funny and cynical reasons for the wide array of political parties (including the Christian Atheists) to support the king. The best passage in the book comes on pages 89-91, when Tod Johnson discusses American politics with the king:

"I never understood America," said the king.

"Neither do we, sir. You might say we have two governments, kind of overlapping. First we have the elected government. It's Democratic or Republican, doesn't make much difference, and then there's corporation government."

"They get along together, these governments?"

"Sometimes," said Tod. "I don't understand it myself. You see, the elected government pretends to be democratic, and actually it is autocratic. The corporation governments pretend to be autocratic and they're all the time accusing others of socialism. They hate socialism."

"So I have heard," said Pippin.

"Well, here's the funny thing, sir. You take a big corporation in America, say like General Motors or Du Pont or US Steel. The thing they're most afraid of is socialism, and at the same time they themselves are socialist states."

Tod goes on to explain health care and pensions in business, and how if the U.S. government tried to do even a little of what GM does, the businesses would revolt. It's a very concise summation of our system, something that is true even today.

This is a quick, fun read that will make you smile and offers some nice insight into human nature, but it's nothing that is going to change your life. If you see it at a used book sale for a few dollars, it's certainly worth checking out. Who knew Steinbeck had a sense of humor?