Laughing at Attempted Theocracy
You’ve probably heard by now (via the attorney firing scandal, Monica Goodling) that the Bush administration has appointed more than 150 graduates of Regent (Pat Robertson‘s 29-year-old bottom-tier law school) to prominent positions in the US government. No?
Regent itself estimates that “approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work.” Their students aren’t interested in attending top-ranked universities which might challenge them. They want to become “God’s instrument” in changing the policies – and perhaps even the very nature – of the U.S. government.
Mark Crispin Miller comments on the danger of simply laughing off the agendas of schools like Regent while such institutions continue to place their (undereducated?) graduates in influential governmental positions.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQRucOONJxw[/youtube]
I completely agree with Mark about the dangers of creeping theocracy, but I still enjoyed the comedic takes of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. Humor is also a good way of spreading information; it’s more contagious.
Both of these examples were more informative than the network news programs that I saw. They both used comparisons to frustrate and mutate the stream of associations that people might have with the idea of the “university.” OK, the poke at Univ. of Phoenix was a little mean, but other than that…
I would be willing to bet a hunk of precious pennies that more Americans get their news and political information through satire and humor than via the news. They watch for entertainment, and they get some information too.
What’s the harm? It might spark an interest, and get them to research things for themselves. They’ll google it, they’ll check out the shelves at the library and the bookstore, and maybe even look through some other kinds of publications. They might try to reconcile conflicting information, collect evidence, make judgments. Independent thinking! Woo-hoo!
People need lines of flight – we are complex.
That’s why (for example) fundamentalists are all wrong to try to ban Halloween. Halloween already served their purposes by reframing and trivializing older religious traditions. If you follow the history of almost any community celebration, you’ll find all sorts of interesting overlaps and reversals. Halloween served to absorb and defuse those older traditions, overlaying them with new meanings. Now, by being “purist” or “fundamentalist,” they take away the carnivalesque, upside-down fun time. In Jungian terms, instead of embracing and taming the shadow they repress it and give it strength.
It is possible to take something heavily, and then a bit lightly. We do it all the time, and I believe it is probably part of the toolkit for human adaptability. Humor – and fiction – are survival tools. We tell stories, and we retell stories, and they change a bit in the retelling because the bits that are relevant are in a different context.
That is why there are traditions of the prankster and the jester and the representative of chaos. Life can only exist and thrive on the borders of order and chaos – either one alone will kill us. We live in the magical zone of transformations and patterns.
As others have pointed out, humor and satire can function to reaffirm the status quo by providing a little relief from order and law. Think pressure cooker. A little steam is let out to prevent an explosion. Some kinds of humor can even be hurtful.
Still, I’ve always thought that the complete lack of humor eventually helps to push a movement into its downfall. Think of how shrill people can become when they are focused on one issue that is very important to them. The more fanatical people get, the less they can laugh at themselves, and then humor can attack “from the outside,” so to speak.
Bill Maher and Jon Stewart and Lewis Black and SNL – and all court jesters – create rhetorical layers of understanding through exaggerations here and there. I’m all for it. Plant a seed.
I think we often take everything too seriously.
Performative protest that illustrates and entertains rather than sermonizes and dictates is sometimes more effective.
I like Billionaires for Bush, for example. And I like visual humor – there are some very intelligent and creative people doing editorial cartoons (see the blogroll under Humor).
Of course there have to be people who are able to provide the serious critiques, with all the details and proof and arguments, but these ought not to be drawn as incompatible with more humorous or entertaining approaches. They needn’t be.
They may create a resonating circuit of inquiry and reinforcement that helps to shape the milieu.
In this reality, many things happen at once. Patterns emerge. Networks intersect.