Solange Uwimana over at Media Matters draws our attention to an interesting conjunction between Glenn Beck and the late Richard Hofstadter : The year Glenn Beck was born, Harper’s published an essay by Richard Hofstadter in which the historian explained a “style of mind” common among “extreme right-wingers” of his time. He referred to it as “the paranoid style” for …
Political satire has a long and effective history of highlighting important social and political issues, going back at least as far as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Contemporary satire has taken many forms, from political cartoonists like the late Paul Conrad; the sixties Yippies throwing burning cash from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange, performance art that …
When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant.
[T]he ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. –Marshall McLuhan Notwithstanding that people who suffer damage to the right parahippocampal gyrus are incapable of registering sarcasm (sometimes equated with satire, an arguable difference being the use of irony by the former to merely demean versus …
