NAC’s first-ever helpful link to the definition of satire occurred on December 19, 2004. We’ve been periodically baffling New Albanians with satire, often impenetrable, ever since. Doonesbury’s cartoonist recently mulled the position of satire within the larger topic of free speech.
The Abuse of Satire, by Garry Trudeau (The Atlantic)
… Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.
But to borrow Trudeau’s usage, have we at NAC always “punched up”?
No.
Even if underachieving local officialdom has tended to offer the best targets, phenomena like the defunct Kitchen Table Issues blog and others before it, as alleged to spring from the hearts and minds of “the little people of New Albany,” always provided material too rich to ignore, as on April 10, 2007.
Sunday evenin’ comin’ down … way, way down.
… Damned if it didn’t look like a genuine backwoods, old-style camp meeting. The cigar boxes were lined up like dominoes, and luminous pocket pen lights covered the walls. Kids were roasting Lucky Charms over a Sterno blaze in back, and the way the light came peeping through the cracks from weathered linoleum covering the barroom floor upstairs looked like stars twinkling.
History will record that during the last three years of Jeff Gahan’s term, prior to his primary loss to David White in 2015, New Albany’s “little people” seemed to disappear from the map. Perhaps that’s because there were only three of them to begin with, given the persistent anonymity involved — itself a topic sure to fertilize a bumper crop of satire.
Lately a bountiful new vein has opened. New Albany has a Trucker Class, and by gawd, it wants to preserve the Eisenhower-era street grid for its own enrichment, because Trucks Come First.
Padgett Inc. appeals for National Guard deployment to maintain civil trucking rights.
“As a Republican, I’m completely opposed to federal intervention in local matters, but I’ve given a lot of money to Todd, so now’s the perfect time for me to demand federal intervention in local matters.”
Satire … and alcohol. It’s how we survive in this decrepit theater of the absurd.
