The Nature of Good Satire

My city has several “no-go” zones. People are literally banned from entering these neighborhoods and the government is complicit in arresting people that enter them without permission. The Arabic term for them is apparently “gated community.”

And they operate under Pariah Law, a strange set of rules unfamiliar to you and I. If you decorate your house the wrong way or become friendly with the wrong person, you become a pariah. The punishments for such breaches of the religion of wealth are severe and unforgiving.

They must always follow the great Profit, a piece of it be upon them always. According to their holy book, there are five pillars of their faith: (1) everyone must declare that there is no God but mammon, (2) everybody should do a line of coke five times a day facing the pool, (3) everyone should give to charity, provided the entire amount is tax-deductible and the bulk of it goes to pay friends and relatives as ’employees’ (4) all hired help should be paid a wage that encourages fasting and going without (5) everybody must make a pilgrimage to the plastic surgeon at least once in their lifetime.

I found the following script in the commentariat in an article by The Atlantic “Why the Muslim ‘No-Go-Zone’ Myth Won’t Die”. In three successive messages, a person with the label sweetjazz3 gave a pretty decent demonstration of apparently gentle, but derisively savage art of satire.

All hail sweetjazz3!

Should he/she ever wish to stand up, they are welcome to claim their prize, which is honorable mention in an obscure blog; because I believe in giving honour to whom honour is due.

Charlie Hebdo – 21st Century Sans-Culottes

 

The Zenith of French Glory –  The Pinnacle of Liberty

by James Gillray

Publisher: Hannah Humphrey (London)

Date: February 12, 1793

Charlie Hebdo and the Rank but Unconscious Hypocrisy of the Americans

The largest number of unthinking apologists for unlimited free speech and expression emanate from the United States; whose quasi-religious dogmatic devotion to a constitutional creed continues, despite widespread infractions of the principle sanctioned by their courts. For, in the minds of the adherents of these various religions, these Entities are real. But in America, corporations and corporate brands are knowingly fictional entities, constructs and concepts by their very creators and followers.

And yet the courts seem fit there and elsewhere to protect these alleged realities from defamation and libel, which are less scurrilous than those depicted of religious figures by Charlie Hebdo. Walmart does not actually exist as a flesh and blood, material and/or even conscious being. Yet the monkeys on the U.S. Supreme Court saw fit to classify these fictions as legal persons, just a few decades after denying that same designation to flesh and blood blacks (1857); a fairy tale, which continues to be aped  to this very day.

If a mere untruthful and untruthfully held published opinion, which is deemed to cause damage to the reputation of these fictional non-entities, with ensuing loss of customers and revenues, is liable to civic suits; how is untruthful and untruthfully held published opinion about entities, which some hold to be true, and which likewise causes damage to reputation and ensuing loss of congregants and tithes/offerings any different? If the CEOs of the various Churches can be subject to such blatant editorial and pictorial infamies, then only selectivist hypocrisy prevents a similar defamation of corporate CEOs. If Charlie Hebdo can gratuitously display nuns masturbating; rational consistency demands that we can likewise flood the zone with generic depictions of computer code writers in Silicon Valley or Seattle, engaging in various acts of zoophilia.

© Copyright Johnny Hutchinson

On the Matter of the Pictures: A Critique

I have respected Peggy Noonan in past, partly because, unlike other journalistic courtesans of the American elite, she sensed that the disturbing disquiet, which existed on the other side of her ideological and socioeconomic gated community, might threaten her community. But yet another talking head zombifies.

In her recent offering “On the Matter of the Pictures”, concerning those gratuitous cartoons against Mohammed, Muslims and other religions, she offers this gem of reasoning for their widespread release.

You kill to stop a cartoon? We flood the streets with cartoons.

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie Hebdo – I Am Not Charlie Hebdo

 

Blessed is the man, who sits not in the company of mockers.
(Psalm 1:1 – parsed and paraphrased)

How repugnant is this thoughtless stampede to self-identify with those journalistic mongrels at Charlie Hebdo. Or these pompous European and North American scribes, pontificating their right to blasphemy and chafing at the bit that their corporate masters are pixelating these cartoon images of Muhammad or the Entities of other Faiths. Or even of obtuse Crusaders, whose antipathy to Islam drives them into the arms of their secularist adversaries. True Christianity ought to have no interest in choosing between radical Islamists and radical secularists; the equivalent of a Stalinist-Hitlerian choice.

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie Hebdo.