As it turned out, Orwell was only off by about 10 years. 1994, the year of the Republican Revolution in Congress, ushered in an age of newspeak beyond which the “political correctness” of the 1980s could never gather the testicular fortitude to go. It began with Newt Gingrich’s “Contract on America” (I use the parodic reformulation of the actual title purposefully, mainly because of its accuracy, but also because it illustrates my point). Through this document, Gingrich promised the “restore American civilization” by systematically shifting control of America’s assets to the rich, by disinvesting government from responsibility for the poor and the suffering, and by creating an atmosphere dismissive of basic civil rights and increasingly bellicose internationally. If by “American civilization” Gingrich meant “feudalism” he got it just about right, but with corporate interests replacing an aristocracy. But he didn’t. And satire, as a result, was never the same.
Jump to the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton in 1998. The problem, as usual, wasn’t that the president fooled around with an intern, but that he lied about it. Now, I have no problem calling Clinton’s podium-pounding pronouncement that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” lying. Jedediah Purdy, however, in his broadside against irony, seemed to think that Clinton’s statement fell under that category, that it was with a wink and a nod that the president said what he said, and that the audience (the American people) was knowingly complicit in allowing Slick Willie to fall into the ironic mode.
We all knew he was lying, of course, but that in no way implies we were Clinton’s accomplices in his lame attempt at deceit. Clinton simply lies badly. The American people were no more implicated in that lie than a parent is upon finding her four year old denying his hand is in the cookie jar even though he clearly has his hand in the cookie jar. Purdy conflates dissembling with irony, further eroding the distinction. (You’d think an ivy-leaguer and a law professor would know the difference. This makes my fourth-tier state college education seem not so bad.)
By the time you reach administration of George W. Bush, the erosion is complete, and the nuanced landscape of meaning required for the ironic ecosystem to thrive has been strip-mined and filled with the tailings of pure fantasy. This administration does not even bother to plant back a monoculture: they just leave it a wasteland and call it a wilderness. A “Clear Skies” initiative that increases pollution, a clean water policy that increases arsenic in drinking water, a war “protecting freedom” that leads to illegal wiretaps and indefinite detentions of American citizens, a call to “save” Social Security by making it neither social nor secure are all put forward by the administration of George W. Bush with neither irony nor, apparently, any notion of the blatant fact that these policies represent the complete opposite of their labels. Those within the executive branch who came up with these terms to describe their policy proposals seem to be genuine; they are so very divorced from reality–perhaps by their very love of the rhetoric itself–that they simply can’t fathom the depths of their own delusion.
This is tremendously disturbing, but not politically unprecedented. What’s difficult for people like me is that Americans have been hearing this crap for so long that we start believing it ourselves. Satire only works because it is not all that far off the mark: the nature of satire is to take a borderline absurdity and take it that one or two steps further and, right into the Land of the Preposterous. This is meant to expose the silliness of the real-life situation. Thus, when Swift wrote in “A Modest Proposal” that the rich of Ireland should eat the children of the poor because “as they have already devoured most of the parents, [they] seem to have the best title to the children,” he was showing not how absurd the eating of children would be, but how close to that reality the rich of Ireland already were.
But in order to keep up with the fantastical rhetorical output of the current administration, the satirist is pushed to create more and more outlandish scenarios. She is left, despite her best efforts, not the one or two steps ahead that she needs to be, but one step behind, as her target feels no shame in lying and no factual constraints in reportage. So when EastWesterly Review runs a piece like “Foundling Theories Fund: Evolution,” we find ourselves easily matched by the actual arguments (if you can call them that) of the proponents of Intelligent Design. Not only is the piece decreasingly funny, it reveals nothing: the actual absurdity of the ID community’s ideas create their own following, and Wombat’s satirical essay becomes just another diatribe against evolution that seems not too far outside the mainstream.
In a way, the right wing has gotten so unable to accurately reflect reality that the satirist is forced to simply give up and, like Orwell found himself doing, create allegories and purely fictional settings in which to display the evils about her. Barred from poking serious fun through an artistic reductio ad absurdum, the satirist is forced to reveal truth through analogy, to create models of the perfect farm or the Yeatsian universe whose center cannot hold. Anyone up for a good old-fashioned witch trial?