Dyspepsia doesn’t strike me as a particularly attractive flavor for a pundit to emit. I mean listening to someone like me carp about all the things that are going wrong or will go wrong sounds like the height of boredom. But it’s also kind of the world we live in. I guess that marinating that flavor in humor might make it more palatable for the audience. And I do try to add gallows humor and mockery of all the truly awful villains we face whenever I can. But sometimes it’s almost impossible to paint a smile, even a wry smile, onto my face, when considering the catastrophically damaging events that seem to happen more and more frequently every day.
But we must laugh. Despite the fact that it is very likely that Joseph Biden will be re-elected president of the United States, or maybe because it is so likely, we must laugh at Joe Biden. All of the gaffes, the incoherent mumbling, the lies about everything from COVID to cannibals eating his uncle, to his creepy personal interactions with everyone from small children to the Pope. All of this needs to be mocked and laughed at.
Because we need catharsis. In ancient Athens, comedians like Aristophanes would rail against the politicians and accuse them of all manner of dishonest and even scurrilous behavior. And the politicians had to take it with no recourse to the law courts. Because the Athenians believed in the almost sacred right of the people to mock their elites. And they were right. There has to be a place where the high and mighty get taken down a peg. It’s necessary, it’s healthy. If that doesn’t exist you end up with Soviet Russia where the legitimacy of the state is slowly lost to cynicism and eventually when the social capital reaches zero everyone just ignores the leaders and wander away to become bandits.
Now maybe that is our fate. With Donald Trump being stripped of his money and his freedom by kangaroo courts it won’t take long before even comedians will be hauled off to the gulag for mocking Joe. I fully expect in the next Biden administration laws against disinformation will probably begin to mushroom around the country. Maybe we’ll all have to refer to Biden as “the dear leader” instead of Dementia Joe.
But in the meantime, I intend to continue mocking these turkeys whenever they do something especially absurd. And that’s bound to be any minute. Why just today I read that during the White House briefing Haitian Shirley Temple claimed that videos of Joe Biden staring in the wrong direction from the parachutist that landed practically at his feet at the G7 conference was a “deep fake.” We watch as the Italian Prime Minister takes him by the arm and turns him around to see what everyone of normal intelligence has already seen. Karine Jean-Pierre is sort of like the voice of the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
And who knows? There’s always the slimmest of chances that something goes wrong and Trump gets elected. And that would be the funniest joke of all. Can you imagine if Trump actually did drain the swamp? Hilarious.