Let’s wrap up my look at Tim Kreider’s Twilight of the Assholes with a few quick riffs on some leftover ideas from the work.
A basic function of art is to let others know – you aren’t alone and that there are others like you out there.
This comment made me think about a play on the concept of ‘target audience’. The expression implies one person or group to which an artist intends to present the work. However, in satire I think it works more like a ‘target’ and an ‘audience’ – the target is depicted in the satire while the audience is anyone brought together by their shared support and enjoyment of the work.
It’s the second part that applies to this idea – ‘others like you’ are the people in the audience who share the same perspective about the target of the satire.
A major challenge for political satirists is to make sure today’s parody isn’t outstripped by the absurdity of tomorrow’s reality.
Kreider wrote this ten years ago. I think it’s held up.
Warmongers tend to avoid asking the question about war that they earnestly ask of social welfare programs – where’s the money going to come from?
This might be broadly true – some warmongers surely ignore the finances until after the agreement to fund a war. But I don’t think this is a feature unique to warmongers. I’ve noticed a similar trend among those who push for social welfare programs – their activism seeks first to create the program before working out the funding.
Humans have always been too weak-willed to give up on their vices and no human institution in over five thousand years has been able to do a thing about it.
Most people go to rehab once things hit rock bottom, the moment they realize things are as bad as they are going to get.
These notes highlight the danger of generalization – a semi-truth is stated in vague terms that seem to apply on first pass and therefore encourage people to simply agree and move on. But these kinds of statements can be easily refuted by anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with the underlying details. Sure, I can relate to the feeling of wanting to lie on the couch instead of studying but this doesn’t mean I should nod along when someone dismisses our educational system’s success in teaching millions of students. And just because I don’t personally know someone who has struggled to stick with a rehab program doesn’t give me permission to agree with a characterization that everyone suffering with addiction follows the same bottom-up pattern to getting help.
It’s possible my anti-generalization conclusion is somewhat ironic given that it’s based on my experience reading a collection of political cartoons. It could also be the intended conclusion given the routine way politicians use stereotypes and caricatures to create support for their policies.
The future is uncertain but one thing seems guaranteed – Americans won’t be able to continue living the way we do now, each person an unashamed consumer living an unsustainable consumer lifestyle.
The question we rarely ask about consumerism is the return on investment – for a given use of a finite resource, what do we collectively gain in return? A mindless resistance to all forms of excess will be just as bad as insatiably gobbling up everything in sight like a nation of free market PacMans. If chopping down a forest or rendering a species extinct pushes our disease research forward, we probably have to do it.
There is a technical side to the thought as well – maybe not all Americans will be able to maintain this lifestyle but surely some will. This has always been true to a certain extent. Even today, only some Americans consume endlessly – many others are constrained by the limits of their poverty.
Don’t jump little boy, don’t jump off that roof, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you you’re still in your youth… I’d give anything to have skin like you…
We seem much better at finding the worst things about our lives than we do at finding silver linings. Why not work for small victories instead? At the very least, we’ll develop the resilience needed to forge onward during difficult times.
What?
Well…
OK, fine, that last thought is from Courtney Barnett’s ‘Elevator Operator’. But who better to end a riff off?
Thanks for reading.
