"Parody Parity"

Published 01 June 2003

(word count: 750)

How do you out-Mad Mad magazine?  How do you parody reality when reality itself is parody?  I’m never quite sure any more when I see a political cartoon if it’s meant to be a caricature of some contemporary idiocy or just a realistic illustration.

For example, some Brits have decided that the term “brainstorming” is politically incorrect because it might offend people who suffer from epilepsy (!).  Personally, I haven’t read about any epileptic fits being thrown over the use of the word, but maybe I’m just an insensitive clod.  A little brainstorming of my own might have lead me to suggest a couple of tongue-in-cheeky alternative phrases like “word storm” or “thought shower.”  But the Brits, in an apparent spasm of unintended self-parody, beat me to the “Punch.” (Get it?  An old English satire magazine.)  They suggested those very words as serious substitutes for the offending term.

In today’s reality, parody, satire, spoof, lampoon and even burlesque have become extinct.  The only response left is reductio ad absurdum, a snotty Latin expression meaning “anything you can do I can do stupider.”

Therefore, as an alleged writer, I take umbrage with the term “word storm.”  It implies that the ability to arrange words into sentences is nothing more than a meteorological event, i.e., “the wind blowing through one’s ears.”  And philosophers will certainly be insulted at having their mental exertions described as “thought showers.”  Imagine the implication that “A is A,” Aristotle’s Law of Identity, was nothing more than the product of water on the brain.

The only acceptable alternative to “brainstorming” is “encefalosqualling.”  Nobody will be offended by it because nobody will know what in the hell it means.

Not to be outdone, students at all-female Smith College in Massachusetts have decided to purge the school’s constitution of all feminine pronouns because many of them have become “uncomfortable” with such gender-insensitive words as “she” and “her.”  They just want to make all kinds of women feel welcome, including the transgendered kind.  But is that really welcoming?  Imagine the poor guy who went through years of gender identity angst, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of painful sex change surgery only to discover that not only is he no longer a “he,” but that he is now not even a “she.”  The only gender-correct person in the world will be the one who has no genitalia at all.

As crucially important as issues of political correctness and gender neutrality certainly are, let’s not forget the imperative of “diversity.”  Lansing, Michigan certainly hasn’t.  Said city is so poverty-stricken that they’ve had to sack nearly two dozen firefighters and cops.  The truly great news, however, is that $150,000 is still available for diversity programs.  Citizens can now rest easy in the knowledge that when their businesses are torched and people are robbed on the streets with impunity, theirs will be a city of equal opportunity muggers and arsonists.

It’s just as impossible these days to parody zero tolerance in our nation’s public schools as it is to parody political correctness, gender neutrality and diversity.  One example out of an endless supply: an elementary school student in Nampa, Idaho was reprimanded for wearing a patriotic T-shirt of a soldier holding a gun.  You guessed it, the depiction “sent the wrong message.”  The school’s dress code prohibits any clothing that might conceivably be violence-related.  The school administrator, apparently utterly ignorant of the concept of self-parody, explained that they just wanted to provide “a safe learning environment for all.”  Exactly how is a T-shirt “unsafe?”  Maybe he’s afraid of potential newspaper headlines screaming “Students Gunned Down by Fully Automatic Garment.”

For years, Libertarian Party activists and their anti-taxation allies have mounted tax protest demonstrations on April 15th, apparently ignorant of its potential for social transgression.  A Virginia anti-tax organization scuttled plans to re-enact the Boston Tea Party, complete with a contest for Best Indian Costume, after a Monacan spokes-Native American accused the contest of being “insensitive, racist and demeaning.”  So now we can’t even recreate real, factual, historical events.  No more Civil War reenactments, since some re-enactors portray insensitive, racist and demeaning Southern soldiers offensive to Black Americans.  No more insensitive, racist and demeaning Hitler movies offensive to Jews.  No repeat of the 2002 staging of The American Revolution at New York’s Inverse Theater, so insensitive, racist and demeaning to English citizens.

Maybe I’d better quit now, before some insensitive reader calls me a hack and hacks off one of Manhattan’s finest Middle-Eastern cabbies.

- by Garry Reed