Is the concept of satire as portrayed in such publications as the
Onion dead? Well, if satire is not dead it is surely on its last legs, at least in the United States. With what is taking place in the world today, especially in the United States under the leadership of B. Hussein Obama, it is difficult to see how the concept of satire can possibly survive.
It is not unknown that some satirical pieces are clearly marked “satire” lest some readers believe what was being reported was actually true. Now just the opposite is occurring with real news being labelled as not satire because it is hard to believe it is actually taking place.
A current report involves
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews interviewing US State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. Matthews lamented that with ISIS being attacked by the Shia, the Kurds, the Egyptian and Jordanian air forces, nothing seems to be stopping them from carrying out executions while making high quality videos of their actions. Matthews asks Harf, “[A]are we killing enough of them”?
Harf answers that we and others are killing them and will continue to do so. She then added, “But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity for jobs, whether…”
So now we know; the main reason why people join ISIS is because they can’t get jobs. This is highly insulting to Christians, Hindus and other religions whose adherents live in abject poverty in third world countries, have no way to get out of poverty and yet do not spend their idle time beheading, crucifying or burning men, women and babies. As dumb as Harf’s comments were, they were in line with the administration’s view that the Islamic State has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.
When a person posted a link to the Matthews/Harf exchange from the Young Conservatives website, the poster, with good reason, felt it necessary to say the story was not from the
Onion.
This is not the only recent piece of real news that invoked the
Onion. After President Obama or the vice president failed to join other world leaders in Paris after the killings at the offices of
Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish deli, Secretary of State John Kerry went there about a week later. In what was probably an attempt to show solidarity with the French, Lurch was accompanied by James Taylor who sang 'You’ve Got a Friend'. A lot of people did not believe this really happened and initially thought it came from the
Onion. Columnist Charles Krauthammer described this embarrassing event as “like an
Onion story.”
How can the
Onion, in particular and satire, in general possibly survive when what is really happening in Obama’s America is funnier and more satirical than anything that publication, as good as it is, can come up with? Sad to say, the
Onion will not be around too long.
