A thoughtful piece by Mehnaaz Momen in the Dallas News titled Even our political satirists cannot keep up with Trump poses an important and sobering challenge to satirists, comedians and other entertainers and writers in the age of Trump.
The piece concludes with this important observation that deserves serious reflection and should help trigger a culture of genuine rebellion against a culture of fascism and normalization:
Satire today, at least for those who are horrified with the Trump presidency, has a healing quality in that it connects people in their collective recognition of a situation. This is also a way of normalizing the absurd and accepting the irrational as the new political reality.
While satire is superb at highlighting the absurd, it becomes helpless when reality turns entirely into a theater of the nonsensical. In the Trump era, satirists are competing with him to make him appear more grotesque than he actually is. Their role has shifted or expanded as the outré has become the new normal.
Satire was traditionally expected to bring out the hypocritical aspects of politics and society and to make us cringe and feel uncomfortable as we laugh along. Now it makes us angry and inspires us to join the tête-à-tête in a degrading manner. When satire provides critique without self-reflection, it distances the audience from the targeted political figures and creates a false sense of superiority. And when satire focuses on incongruity, it normalizes the absurd and starts conforming to existing social and political norms rather than threatening them.
Satire in the Trump era has become an extension of the presidency as the process of critique contains little assessment of our own role in the systematic construction of this bizarre presidency, and instead only mimics his performance. We, the satirists and the spectators, are playing by Trump’s rules and have joined him in his game.
Read the article here.