Does parody even work anymore?

This has been on my mind ever since I wrote a post last year about the dangers of breast feeding. In it, I began by describing, for those unfamiliar, the recent trend in which mothers of infants and toddlers put their breasts in their children’s mouths, as if to substitute the sexually deviant act for nourishment. Through interviews, scientific studies, and even a graphically detailed description of the practice as personally witnessed, I provided evidence, proof positive, that breastfeeding is a real threat that everyone must be aware of and vigilant against. It was incontrovertible, airtight, and a great service to good conservative Christian morals.

And no one got the joke.

I wrote it in an exaggerated investigative style. I used AP standards to mangle invented quotes to serve an asinine thesis. I cited clergy as scientific sources. I used the word intercourse to refer to breastfeeding, for Magic Space Wizard’s sake, and somehow, it just wasn’t ever absurd enough. Hardly anyone realized that it was a parody of investigative journalism and conservative morality. People thought I was being serious.

I was baffled for weeks before my short attention span came back and I found something else to be outraged by, but the whole thing stuck to the back of my mind like an atomic Band-Aid. How could something that I thought was so obviously satire be construed as genuine?

The same problem can be seen in reactions to The Onion’s editorial cartoons and the Onion-affiliated parody conservative Christian blog ChristWire.org. In the former case, many people think that The Onion is creating genuine conservative satire, and in the latter case, people think the blog author honestly is “extremely terrified of the Chinese” and believes that prom night is “Satan’s plan to get your daughter pregnant“. Both spout endless absurdities that no sound-minded person could ever honestly believe in, and no one gets the joke.

Many months ago, I discovered Conservapedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia founded by conservative Andy Schlafly, who felt that Wikipedia contained “liberal, anti-Christian, and anti-American” bias. Fair enough, was my first thought. I’ll give anyone my attention for a minute or two if they don’t sound crazy, so I clicked around the site for a bit, figuring there can’t be much harm with hearing an opposing argument.

What I found though, was in many instances bizarre. Bible verses cited in arguments against homosexuality; criticisms against feminists for going against tradition; McCarthic links between Atheism and Communism; a note that President Obama uses mind control in his speeches.

That was when I realized… this is why the parodies don’t work. These people really do sound like this.

Conservative far-rightists should find this terrifying. Their rhetoric has become so ridiculous that, when we as satirists try to make fun of them, people think we are them. When one cannot make it through a conservative treatise without thinking it might be a joke, that it’s just too out there to be real, while at the same time interpreting a piece satirizing those same conservatives as sincere, something must be wrong.

There was a time when conservatives just wanted minimal government and fair laws. But then, at some point, they found morality, and now, they themselves have become a parody.

Entertainment, Humor, Opinion, Philosophizing, Politics 9 Comments »

In March of 2006, I had to shell out $3000 to not die. I’m still sore about it, and I’m sure there are millions of people in this country who have worn even worse fitting shoes.

There’s no mistaking the problem of healthcare costs in America. While a mere 5% of the average income in 1960 was spent on medical care, it is estimated that Americans spend 16.5% of their income on it today. It’s not surprising that we’ve grown to tolerate it — dying is bad, after all. But how did we get into such a situation in the first place?

A study at MIT in 2006 suggests that the issue can be traced back to health insurance providers. It makes sense — It’s easy to imagine that a person is more likely to opt for an expensive procedure if someone else is paying for most of it. So the healthcare industry always has an incentive to create new technology and charge a premium for it, because they know that they can count on the country’s broken medical care system to foot the bill.

A frequently suggested and debated solution is Universal Healthcare, and while I agree that we do need to take care of everybody, what we do not need is higher taxes and a bigger federal government to manage the paperwork.

But perhaps as a temporary step in a long-term solution, it could work.

Imagine this: The federal government establishes a Universal Healthcare program, instantly making all medical care free for all legal citizens, but sets the program up under one important stipulation: It will only pay 90% of what the medical institutions are charging. The industry has to absorb the rest, without passing any financial burden on to the patients.

In order to compensate, the medical industry, over the next couple of years, cuts a few non-vital jobs, streamlines some of the more cumbersome processes and procedures, and learns to live with slightly less egregious markups on pharmaceuticals.

Then, the government tells the medical industry that it will now pay even less than it already is. Again, the industry is forced to absorb the loss of revenue by streamlining and cutting costs.

Repeat for about a generation. As the cycle of strongarming the medical industrial complex into lower costs continues, the cost of maintaining the Universal Healthcare program decreases, and the tax burden placed on citizens to fund it decreases in turn. Once this tax burden reaches a point where it’s equivalent to what people are likely to spend on medical care in the first place, drop the program entirely.

The biggest flaw that I see in this is the end result, in which we return to a system whereby sick people are stuck paying more money for medical care than healthy people, which I don’t think is particularly fair. Going back to my own case, I didn’t get appendicitis through any fault of my own. I’m in relatively good cardiovascular shape, I eat healthy, and I don’t do drugs. I just ran into a spot of rotten luck. And I had it easy! Far worse off are the elderly, accident victims, and parents of children with major medical problems.

Would the insurance companies step in and make the whole thing start over again?

Maybe keeping the Universal Healthcare plan in place in the end would be the only safe solution after all. What do you think?

Opinion, Politics 2 Comments »

I just figured out exactly what the government needs to do to fix the economy: Say that the economy is fixed.

Recessions are perfectly capable of beginning organically on their own, but once it starts, once the people get it into their heads that there is a recession, the recession gets even worse. It’s what caused the Great Depression, and it’s what’s digging the world’s economy deeper than it already is. All the government accomplishes by proposing more bailout and self-stimulation packages is to convince people that there really is a big problem that somehow only the government can fix.

So we get the whole government to just lie, WHICH SHOULDN’T BE TOO HARD, and tell everybody that everything is fine. Most people will think it’s horseshit, but if enough people are reckless enough to believe it, the increase in spending will notch sales figures up just enough to make the second most reckless people go shopping again, and it’ll just cascade all the way up to the people who think it’s horseshit, at which point it won’t matter anymore, because those people have zero effect on bubbles and recessions anyway.

Bam. Economy fixed.

Or, you know, they could just stop trying to artificially regulate the thing…

Opinion, Philosophizing, Politics 3 Comments »

It just occurred to me that it makes perfect sense for the US government to be in crippling debt. Indeed, we should celebrate it.

FACT: The US is a constitutional republic, a representative government. As such, the behavior of the government should reflect the behaviors of the governed.

FACT: In the US, the governed are, by and large, financially irresponsible, holding, on average, more than $8,000 in consumer debt per person.

THEREFORE: The government of the US is Constitutionally obligated to spend more money than it has.

So it’s cool, guys. It’s supposed to be this way.

Also, the government should be irrational, ornery, unintelligent, obese, and should follow way too fucking close on the highway.

Humor, Opinion, Politics Add Comment »

A few days ago, What They Play did a little survey on their site, asking parents which of four things they found the most offensive in a video game: a severed human head; a man and a woman having sex; repeated f-bombs; and two men kissing. The results amazed me, but in no way surprised me: More people would be offended by the sex than the severed head.

I find this astounding. I can certainly see why people (and not just parents) would be offended by a graphic depiction of violence. It’s unpleasant to look at. It makes us think of similar things happening to us. Humans, by and large, do not like violence. Fine.

But I can’t use that same logic to explain why people find depictions of sex so offensive. People like sex. When we see images of sex, we think about having sex ourselves, and we enjoy that. Sex is great! Right? Or have I been doing it wrong?

So, we basically have a culture here in which people would prefer that their children see an act committed out of hate and rage that usually results in pain or death, rather than see one of intimacy in which fun is had by all. Are you serious?

So many people argue that they want to preserve children’s innocence by shielding them from exposure to sexual materials, and I cannot imagine how they can think that ignorance equates to innocence. Parents in the audience, I have some bad news for you: your kids are going to have sex. In fact, lots of them already are. Some of them might even be doing so as you read this! It could even be your kids that are doing it! Oh no! Take them to Church, quick!

Now, all right, I obviously don’t want my (possible) future children to have sex at too young of an age. But if my 13-year-old daughter is mature enough to walk into a drug store, buy a box of condoms, and use them correctly, then by gum, she is ready for sex. I don’t want to know about it, and I sure as hecks don’t want to think about it, but I’m just going to have to face it. I have to be able to know that she’s safe. It’s sort of why parents exist, see.

And, sucks as it does for me, that means I am going to have to talk to her about sex, and it is there that parents derive their aversion to sexual content for their kids. When little Amy Lynn and Jimmy Tom accidentally see the man and the woman on HBO taking their clothes off and hugging with their legs, they’re going to wonder what is going on, which is going to lead them along that treacherous path that is the Quest For Knowledge.

“Why doesn’t she have one, Mommy?” little Jimmy will ask, and you will, most likely, let your personal discomfort get in the way and answer with, “Because she’s a girl,” before turning the TV over to Eureka’s Castle. Congratulations. Your son just had a huge opportunity to learn something extremely important about life from you, and you yourself had an equally huge opportunity to forge a bond of trust with him, and you failed.

You’re going to have to talk to your kids about sex. Deal with it. Yeah, it’ll give you the heebie jeebies, and it should! It’s that exact aversion that keeps 99.9% of us from wanting to have sex with children! But unless you want Amy to get knocked up in high school, you will just have to teach her how to wrap a Trojan around a throbbing cock. But she will be smarter for it, and all it will have cost you was a couple minutes of discomfort and a trip to your sock drawer.

Opinion, Politics 5 Comments »