by Bruce Thornton
The degradation has reached levels of absurdity not found in even the best satires.
The great Roman satirist Juvenal once said that the “monstrous city” of Rome makes it “hard not to write satire” and “fill a whole notebook” with scenes of corruption, vice, and sheer stupidity. I think of Juvenal more and more these days, as our own moral, political, social, and intellectual degradation reaches levels of absurdity not found in even the best satires.
Indeed, our culture and politics are so bizarre and surreal that the scenes we witness every day make satire redundant.
One example that would shock even a satirist like Juvenal or Jonathon Swift is the “transgender” phenomenon. Swift, in his early 18th century brilliant satire Gulliver’s Travels, describes the Academy of Projectors who carry out various preposterous experiments such as extracting sunlight from cucumbers, turning excrement back into food, and building houses from the roof down.
But our attempts to change biological males into females or biological females into males no doubt would have struck Swift as beyond satiric. Perhaps more incredible would be the credentialed medical doctors who ignore their oath to “first do no harm,” and participate in the poisoning and irreversible mutilation of healthy, if troubled, young people and even pre-teens, including toddlers as young as two.
But that’s just the start of the absurdities. Who at the beginning of the 21st century could have imagined the military services––organizations whose members provide the serious and important service of fighting, killing, and dying for their county––wasting time and money subjecting their members to training in the protocols of made-up pronouns? Or, as Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote in the Wall Street Journal, selecting a “non-binary” lieutenant to read a poem to the whole crew of an aircraft carrier during an “LGBTQ spoken-word night”?
And despite the warning provided by the massive drop in sales of Bud Light, after making a poncy transexual in campy drag its unofficial spokesman, the Navy “tapped another self-described nonbinary sailor to become the Navy’s first ‘Digital Ambassador,’” Tuberville writes. He adds, the “concern is that our new national obsession with sexuality, race and gender is focused on self rather than on purpose, ability or service”–– especially at a time when the Navy, like the other services, is facing record shortfalls in recruitment.
Crying out for satire as well is the establishment’s support for biological males competing against biological females in sports. The incredible part is that universities and organizations like the NCAA support and enable this gross violation of women’s rights and the Title IX laws that provided female athletes the opportunity and support to compete. Now blatantly male ringers are allowed to bully women, invade their locker rooms, and then bask in stolen accolades.
There are many other public policies that are so astonishingly and dangerously stupid that one could think they are the products of a satirist. For instance, Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming, the idea that increases in atmospheric CO2 caused by humans will destroy the planet before the next century. Like the theater, this claim requires a willing suspension of disbelief in order to accept the incomplete and rigged “science” allegedly proving its claims.
Worse, the policies that supposedly will stop this apocalypse are wildly expensive. “Net-zero” carbon use and emissions by 2050 would cost trillions of dollars, ruining the global economy. Currently 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, and the technology needed to fully electrify our energy source is unlikely to be developed by the end of the century, let alone in 17 years.
Yet that scientific reality, and often reality in general, is being ignored in blue states run by powerful environmental lobbies and “renewable energy” companies that are waxing fat while feeding at the government subsidies trough. New York just banned gas-powered stoves, the first step in eliminating abundant, cheap natural gas. This is the same state that passed a law requiring 70% of new power plants emit zero emissions by 2030.
Similarly California, the mothership of feckless “green” folly, banned the sale of gas-powered automobiles after 2035. What makes these policies reek of satire is that replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other renewables requires a vast and expensive increase in transmission lines and batteries big and reliable enough to store energy for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow––in a state that can’t keep the lights on during a forest fire.
Indeed, just acquiring elements such as lithium and cobalt necessary for battery production is a big problem, given that the mining and processing of these elements takes huge amounts of energy provided by fossil fuels. And this industry is dominated by communist China, a geopolitical rival we shouldn’t be dependent on.
Setting impossible policy goals like eliminating the cheap energy that created the powerful and rich modern West in the first place is something more typical of satire, rather than common sense or the “science” that proponents continually insist they are “following.”
Finally, even if the West managed to fully electrify our economy and replace fossil fuels with “renewable” energy, the predicted cataclysmic warming would not be stopped. China, India, and Russia––the world’s first, third, and fourth largest emitters of CO2––are continuing to burn coal to generate energy, while distracting the West by paying lip-service to its climate virtue-signaling and efforts to reduce emissions by switching to “green” energy. All we would achieve would be weakening, if not destroying, our economies, and leaving them and our national security dangerously vulnerable to our enemies.
These ludicrous policies like “transgenderism” and “zero net carbon” are unintentionally satiric.
But the Biden administration seems willfully satiric given its grotesque incompetence, feckless and corrupt policies, and our preposterous and ridiculous president who makes Chance the Gardner from Being There look like Abraham Lincoln.
Even before his obvious cognitive decline, Joe Biden was a satiric parody of a politician. Never the sharpest knife in the drawer, Biden was an opportunist, grifter, fabulist, liar, plagiarist, serial gaffer, and inappropriate sniffer of women and girls. Biden’s weaknesses, moreover, were obvious during his tenure as vice-president.
His trademark unfocused garrulity, for example, was an irritant to Barack Obama. After his first press conference in 2009, Obama said of a Biden comment, “I don’t remember exactly what Joe was referring to—not surprisingly.” FBI Director James Comey, discussing Biden’s lack of focus, commented that when Biden asked to speak, “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z.”
National security advisor Ben Rhodes wrote that “in the Situation Room, Biden could be something of an unguided missile.” Communication director Jen Psaki said, “You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times” when Biden spoke. Politico continues, “Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before. . . . many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.”
Most famously, Obama said of Biden, “Never underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up.” But Obama’s most devastating estimation of Biden was his decision to support Hillary Clinton in 2016. After two-and-a-half years of Biden’s incompetence as president, both the observation and the support for Clinton have proven prescient.
Finally, perhaps the most fertile field for satire is son Hunter Biden and his “laptop from hell.” You don’t have to be a Juvenal or Jonathan Swift to satirize that saga, given how satiric it already is. A ne’er-do-well, unaccomplished coke-head and whoremonger whose only achievement has been internationally monetizing his father’s name, dropped off his laptop at the repair shop, then forget about it even though it is crammed with evidence of his crimes and louche adventures.
What makes this scandal even more suitable for political satire is the role of the FBI in keeping the laptop out of sight, the spaniel media running interference for the Biden campaign, and the corrupt national security and state department hands ginning up right before the election a spurious letter, adorned with their signatures and titles, putting all their experience and authority behind yet another “Russia” hoax.
The writers of Veep must be kicking themselves for their restraint.
But in the end, satire is about calling attention to the bad ideas and policies that put a nation and its people at risk. And make no mistake, we are in danger of losing our unalienable rights and our global preeminence.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center,
an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State
University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of
the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/we-are-living-in-a-world-made-for-satire/
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