Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/27/the-simpsons-on-trumps-first.html
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As much as I loved it, it was sadly too close to the bone. I feel sorry for people trying to come up with good satire, it’s not easy when real life is already so ridiculous.
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The problem is that good satire can only be written by somebody who loves the object of satire. Somebody who’s really funny, and really likes Trump could write his own ticket, but first would need to be born.
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Like I said to someone yesterday, historians will remember the early 21st century as the moment when political satire became redundant.
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The dog wig bit was pretty good.
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I’m kind of amazed at the Trump references popping in in popular culture. The recent episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. involved a storyline where in, a simulated artificial reality, the extremely evil, explicitly fascist organization Hydra took over the U.S. government. In the most recent episode they had a couple references to Trump - Hydra propaganda was referred to as “alternative facts,” and a Hydra member who was a television personality could be overheard offering to take a female coworker shopping for furniture… I’m wondering if they figured that was a Trump reference that only anti-Trump people would get?
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I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it’s a positive sign that anti-Trump messages are cropping up everywhere, but on the other, it’s just playing into his narcissism. The stories we really need right now aren’t ones that call more attention to how stupid and evil the Republicans are, but ones which show how people are able to persevere when the world is upside down. How do you cope with the psychological toll of being part of a society whose values and priorities are the diametrical opposite of your own?
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I think that it makes parody impossible, but not satire. So no, you can’t outdo the absurdity of a Trump presidency with a parody that pushes something to its extreme in a comical way. But satire isn’t parody. So you can still cut to the heart of what’s wrong in the world around us and do it in a comedic way.
–Jo Miller
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I do wonder how much of this Trump will ever be aware of, but I suppose “rise up and resist, acknowledge real facts and history” was as good as we were going to get from a comic book show. All those serendipitously-timed television shows about living under various forms of occupation hopefully will do a better job of getting into those kinds of issues. (It really is weird just how many shows about living under fascist occupations - both human and alien - have come out in the last year or so.)
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I’m not sure how much it plays into his narcissism. He’s not the “any press is good press” sort of narcissist. He’s the… fly into a screaming twitter rage if a TV show mocks him sort. That being said, the more useful gags are the ones at the expense of the people around him, because he blames them for getting mocked, and demands they somehow fix it.
I suppose it’d be nice to have more stories about perseverance or the like. I’m not sure if they’re the stories “we” need right now. Maybe stories you need, and a lot of other people need. Those sorts of stories tend to make me gag. I can appreciate that they’re helpful for others though.
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This makes me wish Futurama was on the air. The head of Trump + Nixon’s head would be outstanding and that show always cut a little deeper than later Simpsons.
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Or perhaps post-apocalyptic stories where the misanthropic lone survivor of a global pandemic finds himself pleasantly unperturbed.
That could work. I mean, usually those stories end with the guy dropping his glasses and breaking them, but I feel like most people have polycarbonate lenses these days, so they’d probably just get scratched. Which would be annoying, yes, but not nearly as bad.
Really, we should be computing how days it is till his last year, so we only have to survive 3 years, not 4.
We know, from McConnell, that President Trump will not be allowed by the Senate to do anything of consequence his final year.
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