Should We Satirists Name Names?

Should the satirist name names or deal only in types? Should he satirize, say, Chastity Powers, the busty NewsCaster for Wealth Bondage News Tonight, or is he permitted to satirize David Brooks, the NY Times writer, by name? You can follow a conversation on this topic between Alexander Pope and his physician, Dr. Arbuthnot, in one of Pope's Imitations of Horace, and you can hear it again, in a comment to my prior post.

Pope defends his practice of naming names, as follows:

You think this cruel? take it for a rule,
No creature smarts as little as a fool.

My own defense of naming public figures in satire is this: When a moral epidemic sweeps a nation, and no cure is known, and people say, "There is nothing that can be done, it is just how things are," then for the free lance physician working out of a back alley, behind a Dumpster,  the particular diseased public figure snatched from the street is immaterial. The therapy trial test is something else again. David Brooks is one of thousands of journalists with his affliction, and as he notes in his article the disease is rampant in Congress, but healing is done one person at a time. To test the cure, you need at least one success story, one prominent figure, one Journalist, Senator, CEO, Lobbyist or Philanthropist, who is healed.  In the process, it is true, many test cases may be botched. 

Repentance may precede penance. Ideally it does. But it can go the other way around too.  (Jesus himself sometimes scourged the sinners in Wealth Bondage prior to their repenting of their sins, and in the hope of getting them to repent, and as a way to make a larger point about morality and markets, and to save others from falling into sin.) In any case souls are saved one person at a time. For some it takes the whip. For others it takes bitter medicine. For some it takes invasive surgery, consensual or not.  For some it may take a straight-jacket and a shock to the system.  Each soul is precious. The good doctor treats each case differently, applying the remedies most likely to work in a given case.  I do not know if my words are the remedy, the moral therapy, David needs at this stage of his disease.  But if he is healed by them, I would appreciate a Testimonial. There is much work to be done, and chasing clients down one by one in a back alley out behind Wealth Bondage is not the most efficient process. I would much prefer they come to me. 

David Brooks has great gifts.  With those gifts and his public position go great responsibilities. The holy spirit is unforgiving of those who betray the gift of eloquence. The gift turns uneasily inside such a person seeking expression.  If David arrives as a client I will do my best to not only heal him, but to discover in him the movement of the holy spirit.  Socrates put this this way. He said he was the "midwife" of the client's soul. That is the role I would like to play with David, if he would permit me, to assist at the birth of what is best in him as painful as that birth might be. But first we must cure the disease from which his soul is dying, lest the disease spread like the plague. Were he to write nothing it would be progress from here. Better, though, that he learn to write well and truthfully.

By what right? You might ask that. By what right do I, who am nobody, presume. I would say only this. Satire is a career open to talent. It is the unlicensed practice of the liberal arts. There is no permit. You do it at your own risk. My conscious models for my post were Seneca, Cicero, Socrates, and Jesus.  You may know that each ended up prematurely dead at the hands of those they had tried to cure. So, rather than criticize or cavil as to how I do satire, be my guest: Cure or be killed.  To attempt a cure and fail is a dangerous job for a physician to power. For example, the physician who tried to cure and failed to cure the consort of Alexander the Great was crucified, according to Plutarch. In context this is clearly an exemplum, an anecdote meant to teach a larger truth. Plutarch is making a point about the riskiness of advising a leader as a moral physician, or counselor. David Brooks takes a far safer course. He takes the easiest way out. Rather than attempting to cure the Senator he visits, he empathizes with and identifies with her corruption, and see both her and him as innocent victims of the evil they embody and transmit.

Thus it has always been in Ages of Empire. We writers live in fear.  Our Senators engage our sympathy as Victims of their own Corruption.  Fear of speaking moral truth is a cancer. And  it is spreading in these United States.  One by one let us heal ourselves, if no one else.  I apologize to David Brooks for singling him out, and for hurting without healing, if that was the net result. I would urge him as a wounded healer to heal himself if he can and go back to that Senator and see what he can do to heal her too. He and she might do well to take my posts to heart. It is not I who am speaking so urgently. It is the great traditions these creatures have betrayed at their own cost.  It is not only David and that Senator who suffer from fear and corruption and lack of will to reform. Many are dying of it. I wish there were enough medicine to go around. I will do what I can person by person, saving a few here and there.

Comments

[Sa'luk]

The afflicted will brook no cure and Brooks will afflict no cure.

[Sa'luk]

The afflicted will brook no cure and Brooks will *inflict* no cure.

doh! I fucked up my Dorothy Parker moment.

[Sal'uk]

I mean, in the case of Brooks, it's not a case that he has betrayed the gift of eloquence, but rather, in a spasm of inversed orifice, he has brayed the gist of flatulence.

[Sa'luk]

Oh dear, grammar still escapes me.

[Sa'luk]

I mean, the tone taken by healers is not urgent but unguent.

[Sa'luk]

David, thank you for your email. I know we have disagreed, but we can trace our little kerfuffle to the distance between Chicago and New Haven (obsolete now). Gifthub, cut this guy a break.

[Phil]

Sometimes in a War Again Wrong you have to make an example of a particular Wrong-Doer in order to get the others to back off. Healing moral disease is done one victim, I mean patient, at a time. If you think I am bullying David, let's be real. Who is the dominant party in this discussion? I am a Nobody. It is he who has the Bully Pulpit. He used it to defend other Wrong-Doers. That practice must be discouraged. A price must be paid. Still, if he says, "Uncle," I will let him up and allow him to go about his business of currying favor with corrupt politicians.