"Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke."
-Will Rogers
A little groggy this morning after a day of depositions yesterday followed by a nonstop flight back from Dothan to Corning. The flight, which lasted a little over four hours, was a mixed bag-: aided by tailwinds that at times approached forty knots, I spent the last couple hours picking around in the fading light through thunderstorms, turbulence, and the threat of icing whenever I flew through a cloud. Still, it's pretty amazing to take off from a few miles north of the Florida line at 4:30 eastern, and at nine on the button settle into an armchair with a Jameson and the lovely Peggy there beside me, her favorite smooth jazz station playing on Spotify.
This morning's peruse of the headlines left me thinking about a couple related sets of circumstances in our post-pandemic thaw.
First, observers have begun to note that as we've crawled out of our foxholes after over a year of pajama bottom-clad solitude, our behavior has become boorish and nasty.
Okay, so maybe the fact that we drank a little during the lockdown has spilled over (pun intended) into life on the outside. But I never threw anything at a professional athlete, or tried to start a brawl on a Delta flight because they wouldn't bring me a second bag of Cheez-its. Something else is going on here.
Allow me to posit, for the sake of argument, that our almost complete loss of any semblance of a sense of humor about ourselves and our current plight has contributed mightily to the current state of discourse in this country. Nothing is funny anymore. Everyone is suddenly an overly sensitive tight-ass. And with that inability to laugh, we've lost a couple things.
First, laughter serves as a safety valve. There is a reason I never laughed so deep and so hard as I did in my days flying fighters. Our job was so deadly serious, and the consequences of failure so profoundly eternal, that we had to poke fun at the risks. Have you ever listened to the lyrics of probably the most beloved song in the fighter pilot songbook, "Dear Mom Your Son is Dead"?
It's completely hilarious, at least if you've experienced the abject stupidity of flying in an air war, telling the tale of a young OV-10 pilot diving to shoot a white phosphorous rocket at an enemy supply truck stuck in the mud, marking it as a target for a flight of F-4s who are late and low on fuel. The punch line: he flies into the ground. Bang. Dead.
The song ends on a sympathetic note:
Him, Him, F--k Him How did he go?----Straight In What was he doing?----169 Indicated?
That's quite fast in a Bronco.
Death in the air is always something that happens to someone else, and the guy who buys the farm no doubt made a mistake none of us would blunder into.
But I digress.
Besides being a relief valve, humor is a time-honored and powerful form of political speech. I think back to one of my favorite writers, Jonathan Swift, who in A Modest Proposal ended a seemingly thoughtful and serious analysis of the problem of overpopulation and mass poverty in Ireland by arguing that the obvious solution was for the wealthy and well-born to eat the children of the poor.
He even offered recipes.
Swift was an Irishman himself, and making a point that was so very serious it could only be delivered through satire. One had to laugh to keep from falling into despair.
I've always admired Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, and for years have kept a copy on the bookshelf in my law office (strategically positioned adjacent to my Book of Common Prayer). If you've never heard of it, do yourself a favor and scan a few entries on the internet. This definition seems especially topical lately:
Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
In our own century, Bill Maher seems to carry Bierce's torch, skewering both sides with a biting and incisive commentary on national affairs. And it's gotten him into trouble, this telling of the truth through humor, as when he suggested that the fact that Americans have become so very fat is a big reason Covid hit us so hard.
And there's Colbert, and Trevor Noah, and John Oliver--all casting light on the sources of our troubles by mocking them. SNL's weekend update has long carried this standard, and the last season was maybe the best ever. Do yourself a favor and watch the reruns this summer.
But we're told there are some sacred cows roaming our Agora that are above mockery. There's the whole cancel culture thing. And now the radical right has gotten into the act, aggressively coming after anyone who pokes fun at their excesses.
Which is why events at Stanford University's law school give me hope in the end. A few weeks ago a student published a flyer that purported to be from the school's Federalist Society, a right-wing boys club that has pretty much taken over the conservative establishment legal community, morphing along the way from espousing Madisonian principles to wrapping wingnut MAGA obsessions in the robes of academic legitimacy. This 3L decided to have some fun with them, and advertised a forum on an originalist argument for insurrection, using their own lexicon against them in a devastatingly funny way.
The Federalists were not amused, and abandoned their demand for more free speech on campus by whining to the school's administration, who cravenly agreed to withhold the young man's diploma as a sanction for having the temerity to engage in satire.
But in the end, the merry prankster appears to have prevailed, and he'll get his diploma and his chance to sit for the Michigan bar exam in July.
Unfortunately for him, the prize at the end of all that is a career in law. Have fun with that.
And I don't know why this made me laugh so loud this morning, but the pranking of a mayoral candidate in Albuquerque with a drone dangling an enormous, ahem, "marital aid", in front of him tickled my late middle-schooler funny bone.
I don't know what's funnier, the sight of a giant black dong flopping around in the air at a campaign event, or the candidate's determination to get through his stump speech while everyone around him is staring up at Steely Dan hovering over the dais. Or maybe the sight of the security guy leaping to grab it around the shaft and pull it to the ground.
Then again, the guy who flew the drone lost all his cool points by taking a swing at the candidate, bringing us right back to where this essay started.
I guess the lesson here is that if you want to display your disdain for the swirling stupidity that surrounds us, set aside the urge for a pugilistic exhibition or a screaming rancorous rant. The bastards can't stand being mocked, particularly if it's done cleverly. And no one much likes angry discord, so you're more likely to persuade if you can get folks laughing with you and at the absurdities of the moment. Take it from a crusty old fighter pilot--it'll do wonders for your mental health.
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