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.

The Inevitable Self-Contradiction of Charlie Hadbo

Nothing is sacred. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish martyrs, not even people starving of hunger. Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly, to exorcise the old monsters.

One knew that it was going to happen; but not this quickly. This motto of Charlie Hadbo has taken a deliciously ironic if macabre twist.

Patrick Charbonnier, an 80 year old founder of Charlie Hadbo, excoriated its slain editor for jeopardizing the staff of that magazine by excessive forays into

“I really hold it against you…What made him feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it,” he writes in the Left-leaning magazine Nouvel Obs.

Richard Malka, lawyer for the Charlie Hadbo magazine, complains about Patrick Charbonnier criticism of the slain editor:

Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him. My disappointment is immense.

I wonder if they get the irony. If Charlie and its supporters are true believers in the purported principles of that magazine, than the polemical and venomous piece on these corpses of Charlie Hadbo is quite consistent with its principles.

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.