Writes Adam Gopnik (dealing mostly with Michel Houellebecq’s "Soumission," a satire about Muslims getting elected in France and imposing Sharia law, with the collaboration of the French élite).
Like most satirists worth reading, Houellebecq is a conservative. “I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values,” he has said. Satire depends on comparing the crazy place we’re going to with the implicitly sane place we left behind. That’s why satirists are often nostalgists, like Tom Wolfe, who longs for the wild and crazy American past, or Evelyn Waugh, with his ascendant American vulgarians and his idealized lost Catholic aristocracy....But...
The next thing is just never likely to be the same thing. The fun of satire is to think what would happen if nothing happens to stop what is happening. But that’s not what happens.
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Please remember when the Nazis, a minority Party, was put into power!
Imagine Europe's Jews all lived in Israel now and Iran used the nukes Obama has arranged for them to build safe from the threat of attack. In one day the second and largest Holocaust would be finished.
That's not satire since that is where we are at thanks to Obama.
Frankly I don't give a damn about the Franks.
Control was more important than pleasure in BNW, excepting the pleasure controlling the plebes gave the controllers.
Part of the savageness of the savages was the lack of control; dirty, bloody-boiled nature with stinkin' teeth.
Satire is based on genuine understanding, if it's good. There needs to be a preceding need foe the message for good satire to be good, sticking satire.
The need can come after the original publication, but never (ever) before.
If I need to dumb it down think about this: you go over on The Price Is Right and you lose, even if only off by a single unit.
The fun of satire is to think what would happen if nothing happens to stop what is happening. But that’s not what happens.
On the other hand: "See, whatever happens can be said to have happened for the reason you've already reasoned is the reason for whatever happens to have happened."
I'm not a lawyer
I didn't make any sense, so, as I have done before and shall again, I am trying over. It's a do-over.
Steel Panther wouldn't be apropos before 1983 or so, and only then to a very few lifestyle rockers. The Spinal Tap phenomoma was great for that timeframe, but Gangbang at the Old Folks Home or Death to All but Metal in that era would be idiotic, and I mean much much more idiotic (to most) than SP is now, being in the process of nailing the timing.
Now SP is more than what it is, it is what it is at the right time, and Buckley was known to have said "timing" is of utmost importance.
The attitudes toward sex, death, art and religion depicted in Brave New World seem to me to be permeating our culture. Just imagine John Savage as a Great Books schooled conservative with evangelical leanings on a modern college campus.
Leora is right.
Huxley wasn't a satirist, he was a prophet.
And Wolfe doesn't extrapolate the future, he accurately describes the present.
As did Waugh in his day. No extrapolation.
When I think of Jonathan Swift, and good satire, I don't think of Adam Gopnik, and the New Yorker.
Good writing, maybe, but too much piety.
I don't even know if Dorothy Parker would like it nowadays.
What would be so bad about appointing Obama president for life?
A benign dictator.
Okay like I. Said I need second dues.
The Super Bowl is satire.
It is altogether reasonable to conclude what smart sets have concluded smartly for some time.
If you don't know, your lazy ass Pat Condell lesser-than-a-ranter than I should perhaps start figuring YOU OUGHT TO KNOW.
"Imagine Europe's Jews all lived in Israel now and Iran used the nukes Obama has arranged for them to build safe from the threat of attack. In one day the second and largest Holocaust would be finished.
"That's not satire since that is where we are at thanks to Obama."
It's not satire, or reportage, but complete fantasy.
I've read Houellebecq's first two novels, WHATEVER and THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES and they're quite good, and I have his subsequent three novels sitting on my bookshelf, awaiting my attention.
Swift was surely a satirist, but I would never have thought of "1984" as a satire -- "Animal Farm" perhaps -- nor Orwell as a conservative. Nor would I call "Brave New World" a satire (and where to put Huxley on the right-left spectrum is beyond me).
Dystopian literature is a category of its own. Writers in that genre do imagine "what would happen if it kept on happening", and that's more apt for them than of satirists. Raspail's "Camp Of The Saints" is a particularly apt example today.
http://youtu.be/UiE06Ughc-Q
I agree with Leora and Buwaya P. And would point out that the Adam Gopniks of France are precisely those (apparently; Amazon was out of Soumission the last time I checked-- I haven't read it) who fall all over themselves to embrace the novus ordo saeculorum in Ben Abbes's France. I don't recall the Flyte family life being particularly ideal, either, in Waugh, nor is it historically accurate to affirm categorically that Constantinople would have withstood the Islamic armies for any long term future had the Fourth Crusade not happened; quibbles, I suppose.
Slouching toward 1985:
"It was the week before Christmas, Monday midday, mild and muggy, and the muezzins of West London were yodeling about there being no God but Allah: ‘La ilaha illa’lah. La ilaha illa’lah."
Haven't read the Houellebecq yet but looks like it pulls punches compared to Raspail, perhaps even Burgess.
In any case, not all such dystopian novels are "satire," used by Gopnik et al. to cordon them off.
Huxley did a better job of predicting the 80s than Orwell did. (Not that either was actually trying...)
AlanKH,
Au contraire, both were trying!
Huxley got it more accurately for those west of the Iron Curtain, Orwell for those east.
> Michel Houellebecq’s "Soumission," a satire about Muslims getting elected in France and imposing Sharia law, with the collaboration of the French élite)<
This was actually first speculated upon in Jean Raspail's prophetic 1973 novel THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS.
The fun of satire is to think what would happen if nothing happens to stop what is happening. But that’s not what happens.
Well, if there being a satire about it means nothing like it will happen, then let's start mass producing satires about every bad thing in society. Just imagine how much time and money we'd save over trying to actually fix anything!
"Huxley did a better job of predicting the 80s than Orwell did. (Not that either was actually trying...)"
Orwell's "predictions," so-called, better fit today's America than that of the 80s, but then, so do Huxley's. We live in a world in which Huxley's and Orwell's visions have both become as real as a six-day binge or a punch in the face.
Huxley's vision of prepubescent sex ed hasn't caught on yet.
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