The main problem with those on the postmodern Left is that they take things too seriously. If they were joking around, getting drunk, and sleeping off hangovers all day, they wouldn’t have time to legislate nonsense and limit freedoms, and we’d all be happier. All a conservative asks of his politicians in government is that they be late for work and as lazy as they can be. Any American would want that. Any American except leftist politicians, because they think they have one mission: to hate the half of the country that doesn’t think like them. Maybe it’s time to remind them what James Thurber says about those who work too hard: “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy, and dead.”
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The opposite of seriousness is humor, perhaps. But what is for sure is that the opposite of humor is hate. For a long time, the best humorists have been conservatives because progressive comedians put hate before laughter, and that ruins their work. This helps me to predict a conservative victory in the cultural battle. I will try to explain.
What do James Thurber, S.J. Perelman, Dave Barry, and P.J. O’Rourke have in common? They constitute an invincible army: the army of laughter. When I think of Antony Blinken, that shattering definition by P.G. Wodehouse immediately comes to mind: “He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.” When I think of socialist tax policies, Dave Barry comes to mind: “It’s income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.” And if I recall the Hunter Biden scandal, I think of half a dozen writings by P.J. O’Rourke, such as: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators”; or: “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.” Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on Hunter Biden; the Left promised to improve the purchasing power of disadvantaged girls and support the world of culture and the arts, and he did it his way by describing the payoff in the Venmo transaction to a stripper as for “artwork.”
A famous Spanish cartoon from the last century depicted a ruler shouting to the masses, “Either us or chaos!” — to which the masses responded in unison, “Chaos, chaos.” Then the speaker would say, “It’s all the same; that’s us too.” Humor has always been effective against totalitarianisms. And what we are experiencing, from wokism to single thought, is a postmodern form of totalitarianism. The good thing is that you are no longer shot against a wall; the bad thing is that you will be stoned on Twitter, first, and they will get you fired from your job next. At least when they shot you, they saved you the paperwork of a thousand stupid notifications per hour and having to look for a new job at 40, with your face passed around the media titled “fascist,” “homophobe,” and “climate denier.” (READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: A Climate Change Believer’s Curse)
The old class-struggle Left could be fought with reasoning. The postmodern Left of gender ideology, transsexualism, and blind faith in science as long as it tells them what they want to hear can only be fought effectively by laughing out loud. How else can you debate on television with someone who claims, with a very serious expression, that being a man or a woman is a personal choice, a feeling, and that biology is sociological fascism? The only effective way to kill that reasoning in the midst of a televised debate is to start scratching your ear with your foot and bark a little, proclaim that you now feel like a dog, and demand your right to pee lifting a leg against your opponent’s pants.
Everything would be better if we listened to more of Hunter S. Thompson’s old confession: “Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.” The satirical key to conservatism is that, before laughing at everything else, one laughs at himself. “We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world,” wrote Dave Barry, “unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.” No room for hate there. That’s how cultural battles are won.
The best critique of far-left environmentalism came from P.J. O’Rourke: “The bullying of citizens by means of dreads and fights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than the tribal Wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses. ‘Oh no, Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out.” G.K. Chesterton offered us the funniest advice against relativism: “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” And H.L. Mencken’s savage satire not only manages to win battles more than 60 years after the author’s death but prophesied what we are living today almost a century before it happened: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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