Satire in a Post-911 World, or How the GWOT Ruined My Favorite Source of Entertainment

Satire, my beloved subgenre, seems to have gone the way of the rest of the grown up world. It has succumbed to realism at the expense of idealism. Perhaps I’m just fearful of my own fall from a similar grace. After all, long before Gary Shteyngart’s ABSURDISTAN, Lucilius, Pope, Rabelais, Swift, Twain, Parker and (insert favorite satirist here) had all used the form to belie horrible truths about mankind that plagued them in their respective days. Maybe it’s not the subgenre that has fallen, maybe it’s mankind. Or maybe it’s just me.

In my more hopeful and naive youth, (and by that I mean sometime last week, when my kids were still babies and I was only 150 pounds) I saw satire as the happy, nurturing, altruistic way of changing the world. Guiding mankind, criticizing each other with humor and gentle linguistic skills rather than barroom brawling or nation invasion. It was humorous. It made us laugh while it reminded us of just how flawed we all truly were. Satire didn’t bother with some silly “born of sin” flaw, but actual, of this Earth, human flaws that we all, all religions, nationalities, races, creeds, colors, all of us, hold in common. Those beautiful distinguishing flaws or rather features that connect us all, that make us all brothers, that create the stories that we tell in bars and back rooms in bad translations and broken accents. The flaws that indisputably, irrevocably tie us to our common origins. The flaws that raise common features to stunning beauty. Like the crooked mouth of that girl in WITHOUT A TRACE, or the droopy eyelid of that guy you shared a cab with. The flaws that make me just like you and you just like that guy you can’t stand from college. Satire pointed out those flaws only by forcing us to confront the fact that it is these very flaws that make us all of the family homonid, and thus we all have stuff in common that goes waaayyyy back.

Satire did this in fun ways, like teaching lessons through fairy tales or by telling jokes. Or, sometimes, it did it in scary ways that shed light on things we really didn’t like to talk about. Satire, in any language, made us think at best and smile, at the very least. From any culture, we recognize the joke. We understand that commonality. We get that we all have so much more in common than we do in contrast. It might take a little more work, a little more humility to rely on a translator in order to become part of the “in crowd” to get the joke, but that’s what satire gave us all a membership card to. It gave us entry into that exclusive fraternity. Once in, we were all friends, remarkably capable of overlooking minor, or even major differences in order to bond and revel in camaraderie that no minor flaws could ever sunder. Satire was the glue. It was it. It was the shizzle.

At least it was for me. I’ll admit that my attraction to it was partially intellectual. Or maybe it was hesitant intellectualism. Satire was the gift my studies offered up that I could accept and share, at least in movies and cartoons, with all of my friends without my having to apologize for my education... or more specifically, my commitment to the study of our language. Satire was that rare place where my obsessive interests crossed the more common thoroughfare of my diaspora of friends. The lawyers, the bricklayers, the doctors, the mechanics, the engineers and the musicians all found something we could laugh about together in one form or another of this maligned subgenre.

But now it’s different. In the post-911 world or maybe the post-modern world, or maybe in whatever derogatory label someone decides to hang on us, it’s just not funny anymore. It’s not that satire isn’t good anymore. It’s not that it doesn’t bring us common ground anymore. It’s not that it doesn’t uncover truths in non-judgmental, but diamond-sharp accuracy anymore. It’s just not as much fun.

OK, that’s not entirely true either. There’s still fun to be had, but only by the most hardened among us. Satire is still fun, it’s just not as funny to me. The reason for this is a loss of innocence. I don’t mind turning 40, but to enjoy today’s satire, I have to accept that I’ve truly lost my innocence and I don’t want to. I still want to see the world through hopeful, faithful, sure, even idealistic eyes. But in the age of the GWOT, laughing at modern satire doesn’t allow for that. I’ve got two choices - pretend that I don’t know the real meaning behind Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” in order to continue being entertained by it upon learning the surprising real truth, or grow calloused and hard in order to pave the way for new satirical creations that chronicle more modern events.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

OK, I’m new to the whole spoiler alert thing and I don’t really know where it belongs, so I’m throwing it in now for those of you interested in, but not yet around to reading the aforementioned ABSURDISTAN by Gary Shteyngart.

It’s a great book. It’s great because it feels very real. The characters, their flaws, their super-humanness, their pathetic situations are so much like a big warm hug from mom, who then kicks your ass for screwing up, that you can’t help but love it just like you love mom. Reading it is like stepping into your happy place, no matter where that is, only to be reminded that your memory of that place is selective and, therefore, there are dark secrets there too that you don’t necessarily want dredged up along with those happy warm memories. That’s frickin reality, bud. Inescapable, irrefutable reality. Not necessarily cold or hard reality, as it is so often described, just real reality. Shteyngart may take some egotistical liberties creating this reality, but his brilliance as a writer lies in his ability to do it regardless. And he does, as well as any writer I’ve read from Tolstoy to King to Ovid. But damn him for doing it so well.

Satire used to make me believe that this reality was a cool place to live. Not overly happy. Not without some problems, just real, real multifarious, and therefore real cool. Satire used to make me think this reality was worth working to save. I used to think satire was the way we could make the world a better place. I used to think people like Shteyngart were the writers who propelled us forth in our idealistic naivete.

ABSURDISTAN, I guess, does that, but without further ado, here’s the scene that led me to this precipice of prescience. But first, 150 pages of background in two paragraphs:

While temporarily detained in his semi-native, “Norway of the Caspian” aka Absurdistan, our hero, Mikhail “Misha” Vainberg, an old-school Russian Jew visiting in order to pick up a black market Belgian Passport so he can get back to the U.S. and steal his girl back from a literature professor/former classmate now professor (Professor Shteyngart by the way) at “Accidental College” (Misha’s been blacklisted by the INS in Russia because his late, mob boss/philanthropist dad is accused of killing an Oklahoman) a coup erupts between the Absurdsvani Svani and Sevo tribes which creates only a minor inconvenience for Misha. The coup is as artificial as it can be since both majority Svanis and minority Sevos have somewhat willingly intermingled for years and agree that only those in power keep track of their differences in order to oppress both and maintain said power. Their primary difference, by the way, is that the “footrests” at the bottom of their orthodox crosses tilt in opposite directions.

Anyhoo, in the course of the coup, Misha is faced with, and rises to the opportunity to save the life of his Sevo driver when they are confronted by a drunken Svani soldier on their way back from the McDonald’s parking lot where Misha received his faux passport. Moments later, back in the relative safety of the Hyatt parking lot, Misha makes a run for the (slightly less relative) safety of the hotel lobby, his 325 pounds dashing among armored personnel carriers that remind him of his youth in communist Russia. Upon reaching the safety (and air conditioned comfort) of the Hyatt lobby, he realizes his driver, Sakha, has been detained along with a dozen other Sevos by the Svani soldiers “guarding” the Hyatt. (The Svanis take great care to ensure the safety of Halliburton employees working on the Figa 6 oil rigs for BP/Chevron) In spite of his foolish attempt to intervene, which requires him to leave both the safety and the air conditioning, Misha returns to the street to narrate the following scene:

The men, some of them heavy, the others bestowed with an academic’s lack of physical grace, found it difficult to arrange themselves in this tenuous position. (an execution-style kneel) Several were tipping over and had to be dragged up by their collars. The soldiers had fallen in line behind them, one soldier to a man, a ratio that did not bode well.

Sakha’s eyes fixed on me. There were tears on his face; I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there.

“Misha”, he shouted to me. “Mishenk’a, tell them to stop. They will listen to a man like you. Please. Say something.”

The soldiers looked to Colonel Svyolka, who nodded. They shot the men through the back of the head, the bodies of their victims jerking up in unison with the discharge, then hitting the driveway with tremendous speed, a cloud of loose gravel swirling around them.

The spent bullet casings rolled down the driveway to my feet. A dozen bodies lay on the ground.

What follows is the start of the next chapter wherein, 40 stories above the coup in progress, Misha contacts his NY therapist who, “with great patience and analytic equipoise, beseeched me to calm the fuck down.” The conversations with his therapist, sad as they are, remind us that Misha represents modern man through is need for external affirmation, his gluttony, etc. The conversations remind us that ABSURDISTAN really is a comedy.

It’s satire to be certain, but it’s only funny if you have a world-weary, war generation sensibility. It’s the kind of humor that to me represents real vulgarity. Not an artificial vulgarity linked to proper behavior or manners or not embarrassing your friends, or some twisted version of biblical advice not actually found in the bible, but truly vulgar, basal human instincts - laughing at truths we all recognize, but like to believe we’re beyond. You can only believe that if you still have hope.

Perhaps if you haven’t seen poverty or the devastation of war first hand, this is still funny in an entertaining way - the way I used to enjoy satire. Perhaps if you can ignore the reality that we pulled our best resources out of Afghanistan only to wreak havoc on innocent Iraqis and in the process let a pinned down Al Qaeda go free only to use our troops as live training aids in Iraq, it’s still funny. Perhaps it’s only offensive to me now in the way seeing the word “fuck” in print was always hilarious to me but offensive to my friends who didn’t study language like I did and were thus never as tickled by deft use of it. Perhaps those of us who manage to ignore CNN, Fox, and USA Today can still laugh guilt-free at Sheyngart’s masterfully crafted prose, but I feel all grown up reading it now and I don’t like that one bit.

Let me clarify that the event included in the above quote is only a spoiler in the sense of that particular chapter. Let me also add that I, through sheer addiction to the story thus far, have no intention of stopping reading at what is only about the halfway point of the novel. It really is that good and I really do still live on the sustenance of satire. It’s just that this scene has moved satire from an intellectual to a guilty pleasure. Perhaps this is yet another step in my developing snobbery. Perhaps I now join literary critics who claim that satire is merely derivative at best, flat out plagiarism at worst.

I doubt it. I think I’ll still like it, but I read on a changed man. Less of a man in my former self’s opinion. I will continue to read the way a group of boys “reads” a stolen Playboy or the way a tough guy reads THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, which is to say, I’ll hide it from anyone curious enough to try to sneak a glimpse of that which so enthralls me.

So I’m growing up. That sucks.

Luth,
Out.

By the way, for a great example of satire that I’d almost forgotten about, but which the Global War On Terror reminds me of more and more as it goes on, check out T.C. Boyle’s “The Top of the Food Chain,” it always cracks me up and it looks uncannily like modern congressional testimony.