 “Without a winking smiley or other blatant
display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody [Trumpism]
in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine
article.” - Poe’s Law Extended
I wanted to try to write a satirical essay about Donald Trump,
the Republican Party, and its MAGA base in the style of Jonathan
Swift’s 1729 “A Modest Proposal”, but I found it almost
impossible to break new comedic ground. Swift’s famous political
satire proposed that, to lessen the grinding poverty of Irish
peasants during that time, the poor should consider slaughtering
their own babies and selling them as food for their English
landlords. “A Modest Proposal” is a classic of social and
political satire because of its use of hyperbole to unmask the
exploitation of the poor and the helpless who live under the
boot of a wealthy and powerful class of foreign occupiers.
Of course, America is an experienced serial occupier itself,
having fought and lost its war in Vietnam and its misspent and
fruitless war in Afghanistan. Few can actually explain why we
went into Afghanistan after destabilizing the Middle East with
our attack on Iraq, a country that did not attack us.
Purportedly, we finally got the real 9/11 attackers located -
not crouched in a spider hole in Tikrit after all - but,
instead, among the illiterate, backward Islamist warlords of
Afghanistan. Those tribal masterminds made the mistake of giving
safe harbor to Osama bin Laden, the inspiration behind the
attack on America’s symbol of global hegemony and economic
power: The World Trade Center in Manhattan. Our shrewd political
leaders at the time, the ignominious George W. Bush and his
external hard drive, Dick Cheney, were guided by the ethos
described by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his 1854 poem “The Charge
of the Light Brigade”.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”
Theirs not to not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.
Afghanistan was a blunder, not a deterrence; not a nation
building operation; not an effort to save women enslaved by the
remnants of Iron Age misogyny. It was a blunder. A 20 year-long
blunder of the swinging dick variety.
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”,
asked John Kerry to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in
1971. This is how.
So, to all the Democrats who voted for Joe Biden and his promise
to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan after losing that
war, and to all those who now blame him for the chaos that
ensued, I ask: what did you think would happen?
“Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.”
All the world wondered. There goes America again. Civilized
America, problem-solving America, enlightened America.
But now we’ve become Amurika. We’re no longer the savior of the
world because the machismo of realpolitik replaced our legal and
moral ideological underpinnings 60 years ago. We began as the
America of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, but
now we are the embodiment of Johnathan Swift’s modest proposal.
Our Republican governors punish those who work to save children
from a deadly virus; they conspire to exploit and enact cruel
restrictions upon the poorest and least educated among us. They
are led by a murder of crows dressed in dark suits and
authoritative voices promising a renewed level of greatness. It
will be an Amurika guided by a new raison d'état that is far
more useful to them. It is an Amurika of “bread and circuses”
with a revised ethos that still defines its unalienable rights,
but in a different order: “The Pursuit of Happiness” comes first
- as in “The Pursuit of Happiness, Liberty, and lastly, Life”.
Maybe we are at a place in our history where only one question
can be asked and answered: “Will Democracy survive, or will its
Constitution become merely a placeholder document – a lorem
ipsum for a civilization that once flourished and then succumbed
to the Machiavellian scheming of its rapacious business class?
What we are witnessing is nothing less than a devolution, a
recrudescence of our culture and of our government, curated over
decades by the Republican Party and transformed into farce by
Donald J. Trump.
I doubt that any satire could possibly hit its mark in America
today because half of America can no longer appreciate irony.
Obviously, Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, can’t appreciate
irony, and certainly Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, can’t
appreciate irony either.
Although Poe’s Law originally referred to fundamentalist
religious beliefs like Creationism, it has morphed to include
extremism in politics, fundamentalist thinking in general, and
the vacuous contemporary culture in which we live. Unless we
insert a smiley face or some other way in which to explicitly
indicate our satirical intentions, nobody gets it because we
live in a post-ironic world. Swift could not have written his
famous satire in the Amurika of today. Nobody would get the
joke.
But like John Kerry in 1971 asking Congress the most famous
rhetorical question of all time… I ask why Americans would
continue to elect Republicans who lie to them about the deadly
plague that has claimed the lives of over 600,000 citizens. Why
would Americans continue to elect Republican Governors who
prosecute parents and school officials attempting to protect
themselves and their children from death? And why would these
same Amurikans storm the Capitol seeking to Make America Great
Again by reelecting these hustlers? Apparently, ours is not to
reason why, ours is just to do and die. (Insert upside-down
smiley face here.) |
