Satire and understanding it

This character is Thorstein Veben.  He was writing in the early 20th century and you can find his work free on the Internet.  He writes in satire and my take is he tries to open minds rather than prescribe life.  Think about the following statements (of mine) for a while:

1. Harold Wilson was a Soviet spy.

2. Tony Blair was CIA.

3.  Winston Churchill was an American agent.

Can you really pass any knowledgeable opinion on these matters?  Have you read or watched and relevant material?  The honest answer for most of us is no.

Most of us, by now, are pretty sure that Blair lied to us and led a small faction that sought  to take Britain into an illegal war through false intelligence claims.  Most of us still have little clue why Iraq was invaded and the carnage we are responsible for.  Few have much idea of British and later American history in Afghanistan to South East Asia and its connections with the drugs trade.

In fact, pretty much anywhere we look in public dialogue, facts and their context in history and the present, are not what we have to deal with.  One of the teases in Veblen is that democracy is merely a way to enforce the judgments of a small elite.

It is possible to write essays and books on such matters as Winston being an American spy. The question for me in this is quite what the world would look like if contentions like this were true.  I would be very annoyed if claims were made that I had sold my country down the river.

Take the thought that instead bureaucracy, we have cuntocracy – hence cuntocrats rather than bureaucrats.  Which is the better term after you’ve just suffered customer service?  We are supposed to have a meritocracy and meritocrats.  Yet what ‘merit’ do our well-heeled media and political class have, or even our vaunted entrepreneurs?  In satire, people are now making money by calling them a bunch of cunts.  We laugh.

Satire is good, yet we now have even a corrupt form of this that twangs the funny-bones yet leaves little changed.  Is a new form startling enough to change our medieval society possible?

I hope so, because the standard model of economics leaves us on the brink of wars more serious than Korea, Indoneasia, Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.  Satire might help set the context of our modern ignorance, but what we get is ‘Grumpy Old Men’.  Real satire is probably too serious for our doped brains.

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