Wither satire?

Satire died on 16th October 1973 when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But is a thing really dead if it can die again, and again, and again?

Now, pretty obviously, Tom Lehrer’s remark about Kissinger was in itself a satirical one. And a pretty sophisticated one at that. But satire really is dying today, and Lehrer himself (unless he was being satirical again) struck a blow in 2008: ‘just tell the people I’m voting for [soon-to-be Nobel laureate] Obama’.

For satire, when it is alive, is the tool of the weak against the strong; the powerless against the powerful. The nature of the powerless is that we have our ideas – justice, freedom, humanity, solidarity – and they have their power. When the powerful adopt our terms and our arguments, we should be automatically suspicious. Sceptical, rather than cynical: occasionally, a Lumumba, an MLK, a Morales manages to flourish for a little while before the fatal blow is struck. Sometimes, the people are unified and purposeful enough for long enough to keep the powerful on their toes. But the default is: generally, we are losing.

So, I ask myself, in the Anglophone West in spring 2021, where are the satirists? Here in the UK, a thousand absurdities have bloomed: to move from health threat to food shopper yesterday, I had to put a literal sock on my face (thanks to a repurposed factory); you can go to TK Maxx with your friend, but they can’t come into your house, even for a moment – unless you have a garden, in which case that’s fine – but no lingering!; I regularly see neighbours driving alone in the car wearing a mask to… keep them safe?; millions of schoolchildren are being tested (invasively) every week – with a test that currently yields more false than true positives – for a virus that doesn’t affect them (OK, so that one is more child abuse than entertainment). So we can’t blame lack of material.

With one caveat – it’s temporary (like the Enabling Act) – the following is fairly indisputable. We live in a police state. Our government has been using its many, powerful levers of communication with the express purpose of scaring us. Not only is our government authoritarian, but the enabling tools are being expanded (notably vaccine/health passports, already fully-functional in Israel and Denmark, and promised in various other places), even as the ostensible crisis comes to an end. Speaking of which, the goalposts as to what constitutes the crisis are constantly shifting. Aren’t these the sort of things that satirists generally stand against?

For me, the reason for our silence is fairly simple: we’ve been co-opted. All the above, you see, is being done in the same of kindness and solidarity. Sure, it’s led by a political class who have made their life’s work the upward distribution of wealth and power, but when the chips are down, they’re with us; they’re of us. And, if you don’t toe the line, why: you selfish bastard. You granny-killer. I wear my mask to keep you safe; the minimum requirement to be considered human is that you wear yours to keep me safe.

Personally, I can’t satirise this because it stands for itself as satire. Can someone more talented than me please paraphrase: when the rapacious neo-liberal elite stood together as one and told us that we needed to abandon the most basic freedoms in our society; become actively anti-social to the point of avoiding human touch in all circumstances and companionship of any sort where at all possible; cover our faces whenever we couldn’t avoid the presence of a fellow human, we not only believed them (accepting their assertions in lieu of meaningful evidence), but used our language of compassion, kindness and solidarity to police each other far more enthusiastically than they ever could. Would that then be satire?