End the war with George Bush jokes

author : Sergei Holmes topic : Iraq occupation

by Sergei Holmes

Let us travel back to the war-weary town of Belsec in 1940 where we see three young Polish adults standing on a street corner. The first attracts your attention with his gesticulations and comical mannerisms. The other two, a tall man and skinny woman, stand bemused looking at what you gradually assume to be the funny imitator of the three. You realize it's a Hitler imitation, so perfect that Charlie Chaplin would take notes. The other two can't contain their laughter, which is loud enough to almost supersede the roar of a train in the background carrying Jews to the death camp.

It's going to happen soon, I just know it. A convoy of military tanks headed to Iraq are going to roll through Plum Street downtown and cross a nearby residential house where some guy inside is laughing along to the Daily Show. "Right on, Jon Stewart. You tell those Fox News idiots what's up" or "Gawd, George W. Bush is such a moron," he might say, oblivious to the background drone outside.

Then the convoy will pass another house with a woman watching online flash animation her friend made of cowboy Bush roping the Democrat Leadership Council onto his vacation ranch. She laughs, it's funny. And just as the convoy turns off Plum, headed for the port, a nearby house of roommates begins the second season on dvd of That's My Bush.

Twenty or thirty years from now, the younger generations will have no idea how much damn satisfaction the US public took from the Bush II years. They'll remain clueless because, hey, who's going to bother reminiscing at the bread lines outside Wal-Mart? Privately, us elders might exchange choice Stephen Colbert interviews -- "Remember that part where he just stared at that guy, with his eyebrow raised?" -- but maybe we'll do it openly wondering whatever happened to the movement on the streets.

There's a debate surfacing among those content to argue (the mainstream media) about the "therapeutic irony" of the Daily Show rendering us "politically impotent." Of course, when this debate surfaces on a corporate network like msnbc, we all know they're the lame press and that the cool Viacom, er, Daily Show press tells what's really going on in the world with an irresistible smirk.

The self-importance of this debate and media analysis of satire as a mobilizing force clings to the sentiment that an alternative undercurrent in capitalism is here to whisk you away from the identifiable ills of society. Jon Stewart "clings to the truth, Gandhi-style" states a column from Minnesota professor Kelly Rae Kramer and "he's pointing us in the right direction." Even The Olympian dedicated a top front page story to local Congressman Brian Baird when interviewed on the Colbert Report in January. Mainstream media sure is horrible but at least my cable satire program substitutes as real news. Okay? Thomas Frank wrote a thorough book called "The Conquest of Cool" about the advertising revolution during the 1960s and how it became almost essential for commercialism to co-opt the radical, broad movement of people expressing their ideals beyond the encouraged nuclear family structure. Cosmetic products hypocritically adopted feminist slogans and so on.

As long as you bristle at this article and defend your privilege to laugh we can continue along our own alienated paths of awareness that don't lead to action. Besides, it's not like I haven't missed a Tom Tomorrow comic strip in years. Make no mistake. These are not the ramblings of a humorless activist with holier-than-thou morals, bearded and hacking away on his big Brother typewriter at an isolated cabin...yet. But every time some friend calls me over to watch a YouTube clip from their laptop involving a character named Ali G. interview Noam Chomsky (check it out, dude!), I can't help but absentmindedly wonder who's dying in Iraq right now and for what. There must be something wrong with me. I should just loosen up. Until I realize it took a complacent public six years to raise the slow-moving issue of impeachment to the Bush administration, when we should have started back in Florida 2000.

Perhaps we can all agree on this: Satire is the most passive form of dissent. As an entertainment-seeking society, our peak hurrah came from Stephen Colbert's roasting of President George W. Bush, two seats away, at a 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. Colbert came far closer to telling Bush of our frustrations than we ever will from our "free speech zones". But it wasn't much of a confrontation when watched unedited, more the comfortable assemblage of press and government momentarily disoriented. The same assemblage that merrily laughed along two years earlier when Bush performed, in an election year, his infamous slideshow of looking for "weapons of mass destruction" in the Oval Office. A photo of the president looking under his desk and narrating "maybe under here?" Why he hasn't shown this slide show to cheer up the mothers of dead soldiers must go beyond the ponderous scope of those satisfied dinner attendants.

Satire hasn't initiated much wide-scale dissent in quite some time now. A Megan Boler article in Counterpunch defends The Daily Show phenomenon and praises the satiric virtues of "Aristophanes' Lysistrata," Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, George Orwell's Animal Farm -- all of these led to new public awareness that then led to protest, even some pragmatic reforms." Hopefully, your great-grandparent can further explain to you how these books impacted society. As for our visual medium of movies and television, society's witty outlets have failed repeatedly to initiate social change. Dr. Strangelove (1964) didn't allow society to offer "pragmatic reforms" to the nuclear crisis, Network (1976) didn't lead "new public awareness" to protest corporate media.

I believe there's a current level of desperation, both institutional and personal, behind our urge to laugh off the worries of the world and maintain the status quo. It's the same institutional desperation that informs you about the nuances to Britney Spears' shaved head or the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith while the war gets bloodier. It's the same personal desperation that cheers on our court jesters in front of the king while we privately consider the possibilities of advocacy or protest. Satire compels us to become knowledgeable about our society, that way we 'get the joke'. But what happens when humor becomes not just a release but apparently essential to our nation's well-being? Especially since "the joke" has been on us for a long time. Bush's slideshow pointed that out and it shouldn't take comedian Al Franken's earnest run at Senate to realize bigger steps need to be taken. So, dance, court jesters, dance! Meanwhile, I have a tank to go sit down in front of at the port.

Sergei Holmes is an Olympia activist and member of the Nanny State Underground, infiltrating school districts across the country.