A Time for Satire

The only ones who get close to the truth are comedians. If you want the truth, go to Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report or any of the late-night TV comedian/talk shows. Their viewers are the best informed audience on television.

Politicians, whether it is Supreme Court Justice to-be Sotomayor or her Republican senatorial inquisitors, whether it is Governor “Soulmate” Sanford or Speaker Nancy Pelosi, none are willing to face, much less state for the record, simple facts that we all know are true. And the mainstream media aid and abet their avoidance of reality.

The agenda media from Rush Limbaugh and the American Enterprise Institute to Rachel Maddow and the DNC frame the facts so that they reinforce the existence of a preconceived world.

Then, the only honest outlet is satire. Satire at its best is the Daily Show putting on comparison video clips showing the shocked outrage of people during the Clinton impeachment and those same people later trying to excuse their own philandering. The mainstream media would have trouble being so accusatory.

That’s the way it is when our world is changing and the people controlling the media are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They deny reality to hold tight to the reins of power.

These power brokers, however, represent a dying system and are in a futile fight to maintain a world that the comedians are exposing as full of hypocrisy and sanctimony.

When the politics and economics of a country are in a state of fundamental flux, as is true now of much of Western civilization, the elites and the people they govern want to keep the world the way they think it ought to be.

This is a reoccurring theme in history and one that is fertile ground for satire.

In ancient Rome the classical satirists (Quintilian, Horace and Juvenal) appeared as the Republic collapsed and the Empire took over. In 17th and 18th century England, the satirists (Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift) ridiculed the disappearing but still powerful role of the king in a changing society. In France it was Francois Rabelais and Voltaire.

In America we had Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanac is now recognized as a brilliant work of satire. Later, in another period of upheaval, Mark Twain undermined the power structures with Huckleberry Finn. Satire hurts. That is why Huck Finn is still being banned.

Each of these flowerings of satire appeared in a time of change where satire was the only available means to confront power. When the powers-that-be are vigorously defending ridiculously out-of-date positions, comedians and satirists have no trouble provoking laughter exposing the self-righteous and sanctimonious denial of reality.

Now as ever, in a societal paradigm shift, we turn to the satirists and comedians to reflect what is really going on in our society. And satire is safe because it doesn’t push an agenda; it only intends to undermine the ridiculous. The best satirists are a-political.

So why is it that when you look around, you see that most of the comedians are Democrats? It is not that Republicans lack a sense of humor. Well maybe they do, but there is always Mike Huckabee to rescue their honor.

The lack of Republican satire arises from the fact that the base of the Republican Party, the very wealthy, the country-club businessmen and the religious right, are the vested interests who are working to maintain the system. They want to support, not satirize, the existing institutional structure.

Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report, twinned up with Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, presents the classic example of what a satirist does. Colbert takes the statements of the politically and culturally powerful and parodies them to their logical extreme. He then mockingly supports this extreme and ridiculous position or demands that his interviewee do so. In the process Colbert exposes the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the opinionated.

It is a time for satire. The pompous and pretentious are everywhere.