At the level of our media saturated group-mind, political jibes, by their very ubiquity, make familiar the unacceptable. The more familiar a circumstance, the more likely it is to become entrenched, and the harder it is to change. From this perspective, might the pervasiveness of political satire unwittingly serve to normalize the very practices it would condemn?
This line of inquiry started to gel a few years ago as I listened to my savvy ten-year-old nephew gleefully recount a scene from Scary Movie II. The protagonist, prowling through a dark, creepy basement, comes upon a pile of ashes: It's the Florida ballots! The presidency and entire course of history turned on this monstrous act of fraud and it's reduced to a sight gag in a kid's movie.
It's all very clubby when everyone's in on the joke. But if it's a joke, how can we take it seriously? And if we don't, why would the man behind the curtain?
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On a deeper and more ominous level, the principles of neuroplasticity suggest that the more time we spend laughing at things like the tortured logic of torture memos, the more we come to associate such insanity with positive feelings: even as we hate the content of the news we're hearing, we love the comic delivery. These neural linkages are created below the level of conscious awareness, whether we like it or not. And, night after night we program ourselves-just as methodically as Pavlov trained his dogs-to salivate in anticipation of the next blistering critique from Comedy Central . . . and the physiological relief it will bring. Because a spoonful of humor does help the injustice go down. But indiscriminately applied it belittles the truth and robs atrocity of its full weight by making it a source of amusement.
I think Colbert's address to the White House Correspondents' Dinner was brilliant and brave, and I even continue to appreciate the humour of "The Daily Show" which occasionally succumbs to stupid liberal attempts at "even-handedness." But if their humour isn't directed towards something more than entertaining people, and earning a pay-cheque, then more and more of what flows from it will be empty and meaningless.
Satire is supposed to serve a purpose I'd say.
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