Irony Deficiency

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The controversy over the New Yorker‘s Barack Obama cover once again reveals the humor rift in American politics. Yes, it’s a joke. Yes, I get it. But I don’t think it’s funny. It was a damnfool thing to put on the cover of the New Yorker.

Gary Kamiya complains that we lefties have lost our sense of humor:

After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that “irony was dead.” Seven years later, they’ve been proven right — but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity — it’s been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits.

I see his point, but I still don’t think the cartoon was funny. Yes, we’re frightened, and we should be. Cartoons have power. The Creature “won” the past two presidential elections in part by caricaturing Al Gore and John Kerry and turning them into cartoons. People often joke about dangerous things, but the jokes aren’t funny when the danger is real and imminent.

Jonathan Alter:

In the same way, the New Yorker cover, now being displayed endlessly on cable TV, speaks louder than any efforts by Obama supporters to stop the smears (though it doesn’t help that barackobama.com makes it hard to navigate to the truth-squading). As the author Drew Weston has shown, negative images burn their way into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by facts. With one visual move, the magazine undid months of pro-Obama coverage in its pages.

We live in a nation in which large chunks of the population are irony-challenged. Jonah Goldberg, for example. As BooMan says,

The fact that people like Jonah Goldberg support the literal interpretation of The New Yorker cover explains perfectly why it failed as satire.

Fairy Tales

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E.J. Dionne wrote a column last week in which he said that free-market economic theory has collapsed.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

To which I say, ha. Since when does the Right let anything like real-world experience or empirical evidence get in the way of a good fairy tale?

I’ve been watching today to see who’s commenting on the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac crisis, and it’s mostly been us Leftie bloggers, with a few moderate Right exceptions. The Right is already coming up with creative ways to blame the Left. It’s what they’re good at.

Let’s Hear It for Arrogance

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I didn’t realize this, but “arrogance” is a synonym for “having a conscience.” No, really. I learned this today from Jammie Wearing Fool.

You may have read about L.F. Eason III, who retired from his job of 29 years at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture rather than obey a government directive. The directive was to fly U.S. and state flags at half mast in honor of the late pox upon humanity known as Jesse Helms. Well, Jammie Wearing Fool had this to say about that.

Such sanctimonious arrogance. Just because he’s a liberal twit with his own opinions, in his mind he gets to decide which state directives to follow.

Oh, my dear ones, read that sentence over and over again, and reflect upon it, because it is the true voice of American conservatism. How dare any of us listen to our own wisdom and act according to our own consciences? We are called upon to muffle our inner voices and do what we’re told. This is the American Way.

However, what Eason did is called “civil disobedience,” and it’s a time-honored American tradition going back to, oh, the Boston Tea Party at least.

Civil disobedience is the willful violation of a law or government directive because that law or directive is unjust. (It is not, as some assume, an act of malicious vandalism to demonstrate one’s unhappiness with government.) Rosa Parks’s refusal to obey a segregation law and sit at the back of a bus was classic civil disobedience. According to Jammie Wearing Fool, Rosa Parks was just being arrogant.

Another time-honored convention of civil disobedience is that if your violation of the law requires punishment, that you accept the punishment and not resist arrest. Henry David Thoreau refused to pay poll taxes because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. He spent a night in prison. He was prepared to remain in prison, but an aunt paid his poll taxes over his protests, and he was released. He later said “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

Mr. Eason wasn’t imprisoned, but he gave up a job, which is a terrible penalty these days when good jobs are hard to come by. I wish him well.

And just because these leftists say such things about Mr. Helms does not make them true.

A valid point, but just because Jammie Wearing Fool doesn’t want to believe them, doesn’t make them false, either.

Sure enough, this haughty Eason is a John Edwards supporter.

Clearly, he needs to be sent to the Rush Limbaugh Re-education Camp, so that he can be relieved of his own opinions and think only state-sanctioned thoughts.

Who knows, before long Silky will sue on his behalf for wrongful termination. You can be sure this Eason will be put on the leftist pedestal of worship for his courage. Heck, they’ll probably have him speak at the convention in Denver.

It did take courage, since it cost him his job, and I salute the man. It shows us there are still people with integrity in the world who don’t take the easy road with the rest of the crowd. If only there were more like him.

A couple of days ago I interviewed Zen teacher Norman Fischer, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. And one of the items that came up in our conversation is the extent to which we are socialized into forgetting our own life experiences in favor of an “official” narrative sanctioned by society. We shuffle through life with this sanctioned narrative in our heads about who we are supposed to be and what our lives are supposed to be like, but that narrative may have nothing to do with who we are and what are lives really are or could be. Some people eventually wake up to this, and get real, but others never do.

So Jammie Wearing Fool sees someone who’s awake to who he is and who acts on his conscience, and this looks like “arrogance” to the Fool because it’s overriding the Official Sanctioned Narrative that we’re all supposed to follow and not ask questions about.

Of course, at the other end of the political scale we have the “pro-life” pharmacists who won’t fill birth control prescriptions. It seems to me this is also civil disobedience, since pharmacists are licensed by their states to fill prescriptions. If filling birth control prescriptions violates a pharmacist’s conscience I respect that, but the penalty should be loss of his license and a new career path. Instead, such pharmacists want to keep their jobs and play God with other peoples’ lives. I wonder if the Fool finds that arrogant, too?