Tom Scocca

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No one outside of NYC literary circles may care about this, but over the last couple of weeks there’s been a debate in that world about the value of satire and its pesky little sibling, snark. It started with Tom Scocca’s Gawker essay “On Smarm” which argues that those opposed to impolite humor are really just trying to protect an unfair status quo that profits them. A few days later, Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker blog post “Being Nice Isn’t Really So Awful,” retorted that satire actually aids the powerful even if it’s aimed at them. Two quick thoughts starting in reverse order with Gladwell’s piece. 

1) There’s a gigantic pothole in Gladwell’s reasoning that satire is ineffectual and that more serious criticism is preferable. He quotes a famous Peter Cook line (via a Jonathan Coe essay) about “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.” Um, no, stage satire didn’t stop the Nazis, but you know what else didn’t prevent that horror? Serious criticism, op-eds and solemn political speeches. German resistance groups were likewise unable to stop Hitler’s ascent. Does that mean that serious criticism and protest are meaningless? Of course not. They just sadly didn’t work in this case. But they are good and useful things that have helped open eyes, hearts and minds in many other moments and so has humor.

Satire isn’t the main action but a call to action. It’s the weather report that tells us it’s pouring outside before most of us have yet taken notice of a cloud in the sky. (Though, no, it won’t unfold your umbrella for you.) It’s the first salvo, not the coup de grâce. It’s written about the present with an eye toward the future. And it doesn’t need to deflate dissent unless it’s written that way, and the best of it is not. There’s no measurement to quantify how much satire has helped accomplish, but it seems a trusty tool in the long march toward progress.

Ultimately, I think Gladwell is trying to knock down what he feels is a false narrative with a false one of his own.

2) That being said, I take an argument that there’s a dangerous effort to upend satire with the same seriousness as I take the so-called “War on Christmas.” Yes, there are some hypersensitive souls who confuse a punchline for an actual punch, but there has never been more satire or snark in the country than now, nor more channels, stages and outlets to practice this “dark” art. It’s under no threat and an argument that worries about it excessively seems hysterical. There is certainly no consensus against biting criticism. It, not smarm, is actually the hallmark of our times. I think that’s a reassuring thing.•

The opening of Scocca’s piece:

Last month, Isaac Fitzgerald, the newly hired editor of BuzzFeed’s newly created books section, made a remarkable but not entirely surprising announcement: He was not interested in publishing negative book reviews. In place of ‘the scathing takedown rip,’ Fitzgerald said, he desired to promote a positive community experience.

A community, even one dedicated to positivity, needs an enemy to define itself against. BuzzFeed’s motto, the attitude that drives its success, is an explicit ‘No haters.’ The site is one of the leading voices of the moment, thriving in the online sharing economy, in which agreeability is popularity, and popularity is value. (Upworthy, the next iteration, has gone ahead and made its name out of the premise.)

There is more at work here than mere good feelings. ‘No haters’ is a sentiment older and more wide-reaching than BuzzFeed. There is a consensus, or something that has assumed the tone of a consensus, that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snark—that the problem of our times is a thing called ‘snark.'”

From Gladwell:

Earlier this year, in the London Review of Books, the English novelist Jonathan Coe published an essay titled ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea.’ It is a review of a book about the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. And in the course of evaluating Johnson’s career, Coe observes that the tradition of satire in English cultural life has turned out to be profoundly conservative. What began in an anti-establishment spirit, he writes, ends up dissipating into a ‘culture of facetious cynicism.’ Coe quotes the comedian Peter Cook—’Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea’—and continues:

The key word here is ‘giggling’ (or in some versions of the quotation, ‘sniggering’). Of the four Beyond the Fringe members, it’s always Peter Cook who is described as the comic genius, and like any genius he fully (if not always consciously) understood the limitations of his own medium. He understood laughter, in other words – and certainly understood that it is anything but a force for change. Famously, when opening his club, The Establishment, in Soho in 1961, Cook remarked that he was modelling it on ‘those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War’.

‘Laughter,’ Coe concludes, ‘is not just ineffectual as a form of protest … it actually replaces protest.’

Coe and Scocca are both interested in the same phenomenon: how modern cultural forms turn out to have unanticipated—and paradoxical—consequences. But they reach widely divergent conclusions. Scocca thinks that the conventions of civility and seriousness serve the interests of the privileged. Coe says the opposite. Privilege is supported by those who claim to subvert civility and seriousness. It’s not the respectful voice that props up the status quo; it is the mocking one.”

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You can feel deep sympathy for the parents, wife and children of the late Atlantic journalist Michael Kelly, who was the first member of the press to be killed covering the Iraq war, and still be critical of the wrongheadedness he displayed which led not only to his demise but also contributed to the death of tens of thousands of other human beings. Like many pundits and politicians, Kelly, in the wake of 9/11, developed a blind spot–a lethal one. Unless we figure out why that happened, why so many otherwise smart people became dumb at a really bad moment, it will happen again.

In a provocative Gawker post, “A Stupid Death in a Stupid War,” Tom Scocca examines Kelly’s thought process in the run-up to the invasion, ten years after his death as an embed. An excerpt:

“People who supported the invasion of Iraq and now regret the results tend to say that it was a good idea that was badly planned or poorly managed. Yet there was no idea but the planning and management of it. The decision to invade was not a change of principles, a repudiation of mushy-headed pacifism and appeasement; it was a change of strategy.

Even that gives it too much credit. It was half a change of strategy, really: regime change with nothing to change it to; an invasionary force without a plan for occupation; an open-ended commitment of military personnel by a nation too politically cowardly to draft enough bodies to do the job. Thousands of reservists and National Guard troops found themselves serving multiple tours abroad, trapped in what Kelly had envisioned as ‘total limited war…brutally effective in its killing power while being miserly of American life and property.’

‘You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,’ Donald Rumsfeld said, thereby sparing Kelly and Andrew Sullivan and everyone else in the press from the shame of having said the single most fatuous and destructive thing about the invasion of Iraq. It is hard to find a shorter, clearer description of how wars are not won. The United States did not attack Berlin or Tokyo with the army it had in December of 1941. The U.S. Navy did not sail up the Thames in 1812. You fight the battles you can win with the army you have.

That Kelly was brave in going to cover the combat does not change the fact that he chose to be bold with other people’s lives. It was time to do something about Iraq—’to turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,’ as Rupert Brooke wrote in 1914, in a sonnet celebrating the chance to go fight the Great War. A year later, Brooke died of an infected mosquito bite on a troop ship, taking his place among the 16 million corpses.

The premise of Kelly’s argument for invasion was that escalating the war, carrying it to Baghdad on the ground, would settle the problems ‘easily and quickly.’ Like his fellow poets, Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, he presented his romantic vision as clear-eyed advice. Evil must be opposed. Good would triumph. Anyone who disagreed was benighted, mistaken, immoral.”

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