The Machinery of Night

Posted 9:58 AM by Angie Schultz

And Satire Died

Tim Blair notes some airhead quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald:

"I don't know what it was like in Australia," ["Texan" "playwright" "Kirk"] Lynn says of the years immediately after September 11, "but I know for certain in the States there was this whole period where there was no satire. That was the climate, no one was saying anything, it was all hush-hush and certainly not funny.

Tim points out that this classic Onion issue came out on September 27. (He also notes the word "years" there -- a dread plague of humorlessness which laid waste to the world until, probably, the 2006 mid-terms.) But what he doesn't know is that it doesn't count as satire, or even as humor, because it did not make sufficient fun of George Bush. And thus the heavy hand of McCarthyism fell upon the so-called "land of the free".

This is according to SMH hack Gay Alcorn (sister to Margo Kingston), who wrote an article -- a news story -- to that effect soon after that Onion issue was published. I'm afraid I don't have the link, but I remember the article because it was the proximate cause of my personal (and, no doubt, devastating) boycott of the Sydney Morning Herald. I vowed not to buy it after that day, and did not. I figured any newspaper that could publish something as abysmally stupid as that couldn't be trusted with providing information.