The Globe and Mail, September 9, 2006, A23
Satire has forgotten its function
REX MURPHY
We throw the term “satire” around rather too generously these days. Satire is a high art, but it is becoming a stand-in term for making obvious fun of a popular target. Jay Leno's tepid sarcasms, or Jon Stewart's smirks — especially when George Bush is their object — are class-clown stuff. Satire is an intelligent and imaginative reframing of experience, with the intent of detonating, through laughter and scorn, the prejudices of complacency or consensus.
It's a free upgrade when making simple fun of someone passes as satire. Could anything be more obvious or safe than mocking George Bush? He's a one-man malapropism factory, who's also the American president. Even Bill Maher and Al Franken, who have long confounded attitude with humour, can exploit that combination. The reach of sheer visceral contempt for Mr. Bush, inside America and outside, is a phenomenon of our time. Feeding that appetite is a cheap, apparently inexhaustible, industry, whose success depends on confirming its audience's predispositions, which may be brutally summarized as holding these self-evident truths: that George Bush is a second-rate idiot; an anti-intellectual daddy's boy; a warmongering, stereotypical Texan, who stole the White House and then carried America to war to please his buddies and fatten their bank accounts, and to distract the country from just how adolescent and inadequate he is.
Every joke that plays off this impression confirms the attitude of the audience that holds it. It flatters those large minds George Bush has such a small one.
Satire is not in the business of confirming preconceptions. Historically, it is in the service of exploding them. Animal Farm, George Orwell's dense satirical fable of socialist utopia, to take a classic illustration, was a red-hot iron thrown into the laps of all the conformist intellectuals, who nursed such naive fantasies about the Communist experiment from the days of Lenin's inaugural terror to the unimaginable butcheries of Stalin.
Today's satire has forgotten its function, or more precisely, reversed it. It confirms where it should challenge, seeks laughter as a bond rather than a challenge. We seem to have passed some invisible point in the discussion of public affairs where it was merely sufficient to register disagreement with the other side, and to set out arguments, with respect, against it. We ridicule rather than counter; vilify rather than contend.
All of which brings to mind the success of Michael Moore, the toast of every progressive south of the border and beyond, when he launched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was ludicrously labelled a documentary. Sure, and bubble gum is uranium. |
F 9/11 was another predictable, self-pleased slash at the incompetence and cupidity of the Bush presidency, giving great cheer at the time to those many who despised it and its occupant. Its tools were the editing room knife, and full-bore attitude of its begetter.
In a previous, less-fevered time, an attack on a presidency or a government might have taken the satirical mode. But satire demands mind and imagination. Fahrenheit 9/11 was all assembly. Bush reads to elementary school kids — cut to the falling towers. Slice and juxtapose is a teenager's kit, not an artist's technique. With a good editor, and miles of footage to work with, Gandhi can be made to appear a mass murderer, and Hitler a pacifist birdwatcher.
F 9/11's real art was the art of gratifying already determined sensibilities. It exercised the age-old guile of courtiers everywhere: that of sycophancy to the monarch. With this difference: The monarch today is the like-minded audience, not the man in high office.
I suspect something of the same is on order in Death of a President, a film about to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival that offers the assassination of George Bush as its premise and central conceit. It is being called by its director a “fictional documentary,” which has as much meaning as a “fur-bearing fish” and inspires as much confidence as the obliging tag phrase from the Dan Rather saga — “fake but accurate.”
I read that it is “meant to inspire discussion” and it's “brave.” Throwing bricks from a lighted screen at Mr. Bush, à la Mr. Moore, or confecting a film on Mr. Bush's murder, these days has all the bravery of falling asleep after the ninth drink.
A really good attack on George Bush has not yet been done, mainly because resentment is being asked to do the task of imagination, and contempt the work of inspiration. The people who work him over are far too pleased with themselves to bypass self-congratulations over how superior they are to their target, to bring either wit or cogency to what they fondly conceive of as their mighty indictments.
Here's a good joke. In dispensing only scorn at George Bush, they infallibly satirize themselves.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup. |
