Tag Archives: satire

In living satire

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A few years back I heard someone say that we are living in the timeline that is the laughing stock of all other timelines, and I’m routinely reminded of this.

I read a quote from the leader of the most powerful nation in the world today, shared in a social media post commenting on it, and my BS detector went off. This had to be fake… satire to anger those not intelligent enough to get the joke! So I went onto the web version of this man’s social media propaganda machine that bears the word ‘Truth’, (again this screams satire), to see if the quote actually came from the horse’s mouth.

It did.

He actually said this ridiculous statement. I know what you want to ask. I know I’m being too vague, and you are wondering, ‘What did he say this time?’ But here’s the sad truth: I could have written this a week ago, a month ago, a year ago… the only thing that would be different is the quote itself. Not the fact that it’s so obtuse that it is offensive. Not that it’s a disgrace to the office he holds. Not that it’s so off colour that you’d think it was satire if you didn’t read it at its source.

So here we are in living satire. Living in a joke of a timeline, where we can’t distinguish the difference between the truth and what is satirical, fake news shared on ‘The Onion’. And here I am writing a post that will be just as relevant a week, month, or year farther into our comical, if not sad timeline.

From comedy to sad reality

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I first saw it as a joke on TikTok, African content creators making comedic posts about sponsoring needy children in America. I got the humour, Americans not being able to afford healthcare is a serious concern. After growing up seeing ‘sponsor a child’ ads on TV I can remember my parents putting a picture of a kid we sponsored, to help feed and educate her, on our fridge… to see this same sort of thing about a kid in America is clever satire.

Today that satire came to life. Sitting in a hotel room, watching an American movie television station with my wife, we saw an ad with a bald little boy being featured. A voiceover of his mom shared how hard it was to have her child diagnosed with cancer. Then the true purpose of this ad came to life, this was an American hospital asking for monthly pledges to change a young kid’s life. This is no longer comedy, it’s pure tragedy. An American hospital is asking for $19 a month to change the life of a young American child.

It’s no longer a comedic bit… This is the reality we live in today.

McBean and the Propaganda Machine

I used to think that Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches was about discrimination. Either you have a star on your belly or you don’t… and the book was about learning a lesson that superficial traits really don’t matter.

I’ve come to realize that I was wrong.

The book is about being grifted. It’s not about the Sneetches, it’s about Sylvester McMonkey McBean putting Sneetches through a propaganda cycle, which in turn leads them through the machine, again and again and again until they are broke and disillusioned.

I also realize that we are all Sneetches right now.

Schoolyard rules

There have been hundreds of movies made that include schoolyard bullies. Basically they rule the roost and get away with everything until either one brave kid or a band of misfits decide they aren’t going to take it anymore. Then the bully gets what’s due to him and is put in his place. The movie bully always gets served a good dose of justice and everybody feels good about it.

In the grown up world, away from the playground, away from the movie, big screen happy endings, it doesn’t always end up that way.

No, here a corporation can get away with polluting the land, and causing people to get sick for decades. Here, in the real world, hundreds of people can knowingly cause a housing mortgage crisis that bankrupts millions of people and one, just one scapegoat gets some jail time, while the rest got years of bonuses.

And now we have the Prime Minister of Canada being disrespectfully called the 51st Governor, and the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. We have a man in the most powerful position in the world conducting peace talks with another bully, while simultaneously leaving the victim out of the talks and wrongfully identifying the victim as starting the fight.

I don’t see a movie ending to this. I see a bully getting away with what he wants for about 4 years. Sure there will be pushback, but all bullies do when they are pushed back is double down. No apologies, no remorse, no change in behavior. The world has digressed to schoolyard rules, and is severely lacking in adult supervision.

We aren’t living in a feel good revenge of the nerds style movie, we are living in a Shakespearean tragic comedy. There will be laughs along the way, but when the show comes to an end the outcome for those involved will be very disappointing.

If we want to see the feel good movie ending, it won’t be one hero protagonist saving the day. No it will be the band of brothers all standing up to the schoolyard bully. It will be all the kids in the schoolyard saying, ‘That’s enough!” It will be his own little gang deciding that he’s not worth supporting. It didn’t happen the first time around, maybe it will happen this time… but I’m not betting on it. I’m looking around the school yard and I just don’t see enough kids banding together, and I definitely don’t see enough adult supervision.

Strange days indeed

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — strange days indeed

Everybody’s runnin’ and no one makes a move.

~ John Lennon

If you go back to the end of 2019 and made predictions of the future, there’s no way you would imagine the situation we are in. Imagine going back in time 5 years and taking a newspaper with you. Let’s make that 50 years, and describe something as ‘simple’ as a cell phone.

I remember seeing this commercial and marvelling at what people would have thought to hear such a prediction.

I’ve been humbled by world events recently. I tend to be someone who is confident about my opinion but I don’t feel like I can talk with any sort of authority about what the world will look like in six months. I have no idea where we will be in the fight to contain Covid-19? I don’t know what school will look like on a day-to-day basis? I couldn’t intelligently guess who will win the US federal election?

I read news articles and they are filled with bias. I often fact check things before I share them. I actually spend time calling out friends when they share misinformation. I see clever, comedic articles like this:

And I wonder just how many people will share them, thinking they are real?

There are days when news seems more fiction than reality. I foolishly thought that in the Information Age, the information available would be accurate. I think it’s funny that people used to worry about Wikipedia being inaccurate, and now it’s the first place I go to confirm facts. I didn’t think I’d regularly use Snopes to fact check articles before sharing them. I didn’t think people of authority would call news they didn’t like fake, and that I’d consider major news agencies propaganda pushers. I didn’t think science would take a back seat to bizarre, unfounded theories. If you went back in time a decade and played a clip like this one, nobody would believe this is anything more than comedy… Pure satire.

These are very strange days indeed… and I don’t see them getting less strange any time soon.