Satire Versus Hate
Lauren and I were driving in the car over the weekend when we saw three men dressed in bicycle gear riding on the side of the road for exercise. As we often do, we turned our current conversation about healthcare reform (yes, we really were talking about it) into some jokes about how most people who ride bicycles are communists. After all, they have a lot of bicycles in China, and Europe, so maybe they are socialists too.
It was these kind of jokes that helped make eight years of George Bush tolerable. We took his rhetoric and satirized it. This helped take the sting away and, we hoped, make his speech into a joke. If every time he said terrorist, people thought not of 9/11 but instead of how his use of that word had been satirized, maybe his words would lose some power. As these jokes still live on, well after Bush has left office, I’d like to think that the efforts were successful.
But then I started thinking about the people who are busy shouting down debate about healthcare reform. They are calling Obama a fascist, a socialist, and worse, with no sense of irony. They aren’t attempting to satirize Obama’s efforts toward providing health insurance to all Americans; they are attempting to derail his plans with hateful words and blatant lies.
How can we compete against this? When George Bush was in office, protesters didn’t have the stomach to shout down conversations about the Iraq war (most, anyway). Indeed, I would have welcomed a conversation with someone who supported the war. We used tried to use satire to take Bush down, not hate. Even the talk of “blood for oil,” et cetera, was based on protecting the lives of US soldiers. But the discussion never shifted to arguments about whether or not Bush was actually a dictator. Today, on major news networks, you will see stories about whether or not Obama is a socialist. Both Obama and Bush have people protesting their policies, but only those fighting Obama have made it onto CNN regularly and had their views presented as regular news.
How can we compete against this kind of language? As much as I would like to believe it, I don’t think that satire can defeat this hate. Try as we might, mock the protesters as much as we want, it won’t make them go away. Sarah Palin learned this lesson (albeit a little too late): the moment you stop yelling is the moment Tina Fey mocks you into defeat. Maybe it’s time for those who know we need health insurance for all to elevate our volume as well. If we really care, then it’s time to show it in a more straight-forward way. It’s time to put aside the satire and start with the logic. It still won’t match the volume of the opposition, but it’s got a better chance of being heard for what it is. After all, if the other side can’t even see the satire of Stephen Colbert, then I highly doubt my own satire will be effective.
Related posts (automatically generated):