When I read Frank Liberal’s diary article about how to respond to the obvious rebirth of Total Information Awareness with the passage of the Protect America Act, I thought a great deal about the question that he implied: What is the best response to the degradation of the American government into a tyrannical, abusive entity that demolishes our freedoms without any apparent regret?
It’s a serious question, and up until now, good American liberals have been responding in earnest. The problem is that most of the rest of America is decidedly against earnestness. Irony, and sarcasm, and nihilism, and just plain being too hip to care about anything much seem to be the predominant values of the day. Idealism is so, you know, boring.
There’s a reason that the most powerful political responses to the Bush Administration have been accomplished by comedians. Americans want to be entertained. They want to laugh.
Maybe there’s a reason for that. I don’t think that most Americans have thought it through very much, but I suspect that the changes in their country over the last seven years have been so profoundly disturbing that many people are unable to deal with it in a straightforward manner. They don’t have the discipline to do it, and they don’t have the emotional stamina to do it, and they wouldn’t know what to do with the problems even if they were to seriously dedicate themselves to solving them. So, they laugh. They simultaneously acknowledge the threat, and within a few seconds, release all the anxiety caused by it.
Maybe they’re on to something. Maybe the best thing to do when confronted by a terrifying monster, is to laugh at it. Certainly, earnest, rational activism hasn’t worked. Maybe the people in the Bush White House love being feared, but I don’t think they at all appreciate being laughed at. There is some kind of banishing power in a laugh. A laugh refuses to acknowledge the power of the thing being laughed at. Laughter is a challenge to authority, along with the implicit statement that authority won’t actually have the courage to follow up its threats with violence.
I’m not abandoning serious analysis of information, and decision-making, but I think that we liberals need to add more humor to our arsenal. I’m giving it a shot with a new set of posters I’m releasing this week, starting with this one, entitled: Is Osama Bin Laden hiding in your refrigerator? With this first design, I’m trying to have a good laugh both at Osama Bin Laden and his ridiculous legend of greatness, and at the Homeland Security overreaction to the Bin Laden threat.
The text on the poster, much of which is too small to be read in the image below, is as follows:
Is Osama Bin Laden hiding in your refrigerator?
Homeland Security starts at home!
When Osama Bin Laden attacked the United States of America on the 11th of September, 2001, everything changed – and that includes your kitchen!
United We Stand in front of the refrigerator, looking for something to eat, until a suicide bomber comes along, and brings the expiration date for all your packaged goods with him.
The terrorists could be anywhere! Have you looked inside your refrigerator?
National Security Agency electronic surveillance now exists almost everywhere, but not in your refrigerator. Osama Bin Laden knows that, when you close the refrigerator door, the light bulb turns off.
He is ready to take advantage of this gap in security when you aren’t looking. So look, already! Don’t let the evildoers win. Open that refrigerator door when Osama Bin Laden least expects it!
Declare a Code Orange Alert in your icebox!
Postscript: Yes, I tried to use as many exclamation points as possible. The age of Homeland Security is definitely the age of the over-used exclamation point.
