When Time Magazine declared the age of irony dead following the Sept. 11 attacks, its conclusion was right, even if it was working from faulty premises.
Time foresaw the Clinton-era zeitgeist of a lackadaisical global hegemony being replaced by a new age of sobering national purpose. There would be no more cynicism among the people, and certainly no more of that sociopathic opportunism among our leaders. How could there be?
Of course, we now know that plans to focus public outrage away from the actual culprits behind Sept. 11 and toward the unrelated goal of controlling Iraq began literally hours after the worst terrorist attacks in American history, with the twisted wreckage of the World Trade Center still billowing asbestos-laced ash, the acrid smoke only temporarily veiling a forever-altered New York City skyline. So Time got that one wrong.
But one element of irony has indeed been on life support in recent years — political satire. Not because we’ve all become angels; just the opposite. Events have become so outrageous that it’s becoming harder to effect a decent parody anymore.
It began before Sept. 11 — the purest example being the Clinton impeachment farce — but has steadily gathered steam in the past decade. In 2004, at a White House correspondent’s dinner, President Bush participated in a skit where he was “looking around the White House” for the weapons of mass destruction we never found in Iraq. Trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost, and Bush — and the press corps — was having a laugh about it. How do you parody that?
Guantanamo Bay. Torture. Rendition. The surveillance state. These are the things of Orwellian nightmares, and yet they’ve all come to pass — in most cases with widespread public acceptance. Satire works through the use of exaggeration, but how do you improve upon a scenario like snatching a person up without explanation, taking him to a strange country, inflicting upon him continuous physical and psychological pain, and then refusing to let him go because he might now be radicalized against you — even if he wasn’t before — all done in the name of freedom? It’s impossible.
Things have only gotten worse since Obama was elected. Recently, I saw a sign being proudly waved at one of those tea party protests complaining about Obama. I honestly couldn’t tell if the middle-aged, gray-haired man holding it was serious or just slyly commenting on the clown show taking place around him.
It’s hard for me to even keep up with the talking points each week. To hear some tell it, Obama is an elitist, overly intellectual know-nothing who’s so thoughtful and nuanced that he’s all rhetoric and no substance. He’s a radical Christian-Muslim terrorist sleeper-agent who calls Osama bin Laden Sundays after church.
He’s certainly the most stridently socialist ironman since Stalin even though he doesn’t have any kind of real power and is just being controlled by his suspiciously Semitic advisers. And just for good measure, he’s probably sleeping with all the nation’s young white women even though he’s a black supremacist who is agitating for the Afro-revolution.
It’s impossible to parody. And the fact is, it’s becoming impossible to ignore this growing community of fellow travelers that is completely untethered from what was once called consensus reality.
They believe what they want to believe — whether it’s that health care reform is akin to Nazi death camps or that global climate change is really a worldwide conspiracy of scientists out for research grants — because it fits their preconceived ideological commitments. To these mostly old, mostly white, mostly insane people, there are no truths, only interpretations. Empiricism has become an obstacle to be overcome rather than a philosophy to be embraced.
It’s scary. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Sterling Barnard is a philosophy senior.
