One of the nice things about a reputation for writing satire
is that people will sometimes assume you're joking in bad taste rather than
deliberately offending them. This
can save anything from lunch with your mother to, literally, your life. The drawback, of course, is that if you
ever do want to deliberately offend someone, you can pretty much blow your nose
on their shirt, pee on their date's leg, and call them a Nazi goat-rapist and
people will just laugh a little nervously, as if you'd announced you were going
to let one at your seventh grade class party.
Most of the time, though, the ambiguity is a wonderful
thing; you can draw what you see as truthfully* as you like and leave people to
guess at your intentions, and if they don't always get yours, they almost
always will connect with some of their own. Whether you are encouraging smug self-satisfaction in people
to whose parties you would like to be invited, or dangerously jacking the blood
pressure of some irredeemable asshole, or just admiring your own skill in
drawing what you see, there's a lot to be said for the life of the satirist.**
Chapter 4 of Raise
the Gipper! begins with a quote from John Ruskin:
"... riches are a power like that of electricity,
acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the
guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in
your neighbour's pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you;
the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he
has for it,—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile
economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your
neighbour poor."
And a bit later in the chapter, a right-wing-think-tanker,
boring the crap out of a young journalist at a meet-and-greet, explains that...
"There is very little value in being rich if no one
is poor. Material necessities, piffle. If one is careful about money and has
even a low‑end full time job, one can live without going hungry, or being too
cold or hot, and though one might have to husband resources carefully, go
through a bankruptcy or two, perhaps delay treatment a bit too long and lose a
limb or an organ, even manage some sort of medical coverage as well. And in
that regard one will be fully equal to the also not‑hungry, not‑cold, not‑sick
rich. Better off, in fact, because people worry about the whether the poor are
getting the things they need, but no one worries about whether the rich are; as
for compassionate concern and interest in their well‑being, the rich live in a
vast empty desert. Unfair, of course, as so many things in life are unfair,
particularly for the well off, but nonetheless true. So what incentive does
anyone then have to become rich?
"And of course the answer
is simple, and, as we have been saying, obvious: a high net worth leads to a
strong self worth because the affluent are treated as if they are worth a great
deal. If one has enough money, one's obvious inferiors will all be leaping to
do one's bidding; just watch the behavior of any cocktail waitress, car rental
clerk, or gardener, or for the pleasure of true oneupsoneship, complain about
the service, demand to see a manager, and watch the lengths to which they will
go so as not to displease one. So the question, of course, is how the political
system is to ensure an adequate supply of the right sort of favor seekers and
fawners so that one will have some adequate reward for all the trouble of
becoming rich."***
Now, a couple of rightie friends have chided me about that,
and some other material in that chapter and elsewhere in the book. One very perceptive one also noted that
there are similar themes in Losers in
Space and in my
novels about Giraut Leones, which are sort of linked by being set in a very
post-scarcity**** world. And
those conservatives had, universally, the same reaction: Come on, you know
it's not like that at all.
Well, is it "not
like that?" At all?
I might point out that the incessant Tea Party chant of All
we are saying, is "Pay your own bills," rather strongly characterizes the people who lack adequate health care
as ne'er do wells, losers, and undeserving – and thus, by implication, the
chanters as the superior people here.
Furthermore, in a way exactly parallel to the way the abolition of segregated
drinking fountains and bus seats greatly reduced the acceptability of
expressing casual or petty racist sentiments, the enactment of a genuine
national health plan in the United States would mean that within a generation,
most of the class markers of early health care would diminish or
disappear. Are people seriously
suggesting that it has never occurred to anyone that medical care for the
people who don't currently have it will erase or blur many of the visual
signifiers of class?
And if the symptoms of early poor health care are not the
visual signifiers of class, then why, in pop entertainment, do costumers and
designers express "unattractive in a funny way," "comic because
s/he had no business being attracted to a major character," and frequently
"malevolent for its own sake," all of which have obvious and brutal
implications about class, by displaying some of the consequences of a lifetime
of poor health care? Villains and
clowns have bad teeth, cheap plastic horn-rims rather than fashionable
glasses/contacts/Lasik, obesity, the early aging brought on by poor or no skin
care, the muscle-bound bent body a person gets from heavy repetitive labor (as
opposed to the sleek flexible body that a person gets from the gym or the yoga
studio). In the
entertainment world, pretty people know their place (and if they're pretty
enough, it's at the top); and they became pretty because they had enough health
care when they were young enough.
I might point out that one of the right-wingers who has
griped to me about all this is someone
I know personally, who has a trick of making it clear the tip is going
to be large if the waitress is attractive, and, if "Shut the fuck up"
is not firmly but gently explained to him, will babble happily about all the
cleavages and crotches his well-paraded tips have caused to be revealed to
him.*****
Or in short, when conservatives say it's not about class,
and that class is not about preserving differentials, I find I want to ask, now who's talking silly to get a laugh? And they don't even get paid for it.
§
*Which is not at all the same thing as realistically;
compare almost any competent political caricature with a photograph of the same
person, and you'll see the difference between telling the truth as you see it
and recording the facts. There's a
place for both facts and truth, but any quick random perusal of Congressional
Record will show you which is scarcer and
therefore more valuable.
**There may be more to be said for the lives of people in
other occupations, such as pornography casting director, musical genius, Roman
emperor, world-famous athlete, eugenic culling operative, cult leader, or
decadent hereditary billionaire, but as it happens, satirist is the one I know
something about.
*** I am showing off here, I think – that is, I know I'm
trying to show off but as to whether there is anything here to show off, you
must decide that for yourself. The
reason why I think it's show-off-worthy is that the hardest thing to satirize
is dullness; to depict a person being boring and pointless, one must sooner or
later show some of the boring pointlessness, just as you depict a racist by
having him make racist remarks or a sexually attractive woman by depicting some
combination of her appearance and male-or-lesbian behavior around her. The difference is that depicting racism
may outrage the reader, and depicting sexiness may either titillate or outrage
the reader (please, dear god, let there be no readers who are titillated by
racism), and people will keep right on reading through outrage or titillation
and even hope there will be more of them, but if a depiction of a bore bores
the reader, the writer is truly excrementally devoid of good fortune and at the headwaters of the tributary without means of
propulsion. (Note the anxious use
of jargon-parody here because of further fears on this point). Anyway, I think I did a pretty good job
of depicting something that would be horribly dull in real life as something to
be laughed at. Those of you who
were bored, why are you still reading?
****and thus post-economic; economics is about manipulating
scarcity.
*****He attributes this to his tipping custom; I suspect
strongly that if you stare without ceasing at a woman who is working physically
(and waiting tables is pretty physical, as anyone who has done it can tell you)
you just never miss the rare moment when something is accidentally exposed, and
what the tip is buying him is not a deliberate flash, but toleration that
allows him to sit there and stare like a zoo lion who can see the gazelle
enclosure.
