Short Take: If Kafka Wrote Satire

In a column about some entertainer holding no interest for me, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg begins with a curious reference.

In a sketch on the German comedy show “Browser Ballett,” a man in a Nazi uniform, replete with jackboots and a red swastika armband, is marching down a street in 1933 when another man hisses, “Nazi.” The Nazi, aghast at the insult, confronts him.

“When you’re running out of arguments it’s easy to play the Nazi card,” says the Nazi. He continues, “Just because someone doesn’t share the mainstream opinion he isn’t automatically a Nazi.” Flustered, the other man replies: “But being a Nazi is already mainstream. You National Socialists already have the power.” To which the Nazi, with a condescending grin, says: “Oh, I forgot. In your world everyone is a Nazi.”

From this anecdote, Goldberg draws a conclusion.

It’s a perfect satire of how the modern right operates. The right-winger starts with a bigoted provocation and, when criticized, defaults to aggrieved claims of persecution and accusations of oversensitivity. He revels in the power he’s amassed even as he poses as a victim.

And, of course, based on that satire, Goldberg is absolutely right. The problem is the same satire could be performed in the exact opposite way and be similarly correct. Replace the Nazi (I blame Godwin for this) with a person wearing an ordinary business suit who says that hard work is a virtue. Replace the man in the doorway with a person in a Che t-shirt, tats and purple hair who mutters “racist” as he walks by. See how that works?

The view from one end of the spectrum toward the other dictates which “lens” is more real to you. Goldberg isn’t wrong about what she decries. It’s just that her view is from the left looking right, and from that perspective. She uses this gimmick to condemn a celebrity of questionable mental health for his flagrantly anti-Semitic statements.

Like Goldberg, as has been the case since Tom Lehrer sang about National Brotherhood Week, I share her concern the Jews have been a convenient whipping boy for pretty much every radical excuse for Jewish hatred. At the same time, I refuse to be blinded by self-interest to the fact that this isn’t a problem with only the right or only Jews. This has become the ordinary rhetoric of the unduly passionate, whether right or left, and wins plaudits from each tribes sycophants, as if that makes anyone who isn’t part of their tribe want to change their mind and sign up.

When or whether the angry activists of either side will recognize their reliance on self-serving anecdotes to justify their illiberalism and intolerance, I don’t know. But for those of us caught in the crossfire of warring fascists, if we don’t reject this lie, recognize it as the  self-serving bullshit it is, and do what we can to stop its spread among the unduly passionate, things will only get worse. We might not have the ability to make it better, but we can stop it from getting worse, even if we’re the target of invective from both right and left for failing to bow to their orthodoxy.

26 thoughts on “Short Take: If Kafka Wrote Satire

  1. Paleo

    Goldberg needs to get out more because she clearly does not know anybody on the right. I bet she couldn’t tell you where Memphis or Laramie are.

    She is what she hates and doesn’t recognize it.

    1. B. McLeod

      I wonder if she knows where Los Angeles is. Biden is trying to call in a few party cards today. Not because the LA council members are racist hatemongers, but because they got caught.

      1. Paleo

        Sure, Jay. Every non-progressive in the country starts every conversation with a bigoted provocation. Without fail.

        I live in Texas, which as you know is chock full of right wingers, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone start a conversation with a bigoted provocation. In 48 years.

        You and Greenburg should actually at least talk to a few conservative people before you attempt to describe their behavior.

  2. Jake

    Being the brilliant man you are, you know violence is presently a tool for those with real power. However, things will worsen if the price of bread gets so high that the toughs feel like they have nothing to lose but to seize control. And if that sad day comes to pass, only a fool will believe there will be any equivalence between the toughs on the extreme right and left regarding human rights.

      1. Jake

        Laugh it up, my friend. But I would also be thinking about a plan in case the tiki torch guys decide they’re done being pawns.

    1. Elpey P.

      Maybe if our “left” weren’t so right wing there’d be less to worry about. When they tell us their Killing Fields will be equitable, don’t believe them.

      1. Jake

        Yes, yes, if the American kids out rabble-rousing for police reform and equity of treatment somehow stumble into power I’ll be sure to keep a keen eye out for signs of a murderous dictator somewhere among their holacratic ‘ranks’.

          1. Jake

            You’re missing the point, intentionally, I think. There are no dictators on the extreme left in the United States. There’s no structure, no command and control, and certainly no political establishment encouraging us to commit literal sedition. We control no courts, no law enforcement, and no subculture within the military. And, to top it off, ElpeyP’s comment got one thing correct, by global standards, the left in the US is more like the center-right. However, this is not Vietnam war era Cambodia and no amount of imagination is going to conjure a true threat out of what passes for the extreme left in contemporary American culture.

            The extreme left is a disorganized, amorphous collection of kids and dreamers, misguided though we might be, hoping for a better world, and occasionally getting mad enough to march around to wail and gnash our teeth about it. We are little more than a boogeyman for the right. But you know that.

            But I get it. Somebody has to provide intellectual cover for the colossal fuck up that is the right’s otherwise fascinating alignment with Ye West this week. It might as well be you.

            1. Jake

              Like I said, keep laughing. But you can not deny, one side is out there armed to the teeth and committing acts of sedition, vociferously spoiling for a second civil war, and proudly aligned with an ideology that will murder you for going to the temple on Saturday. One side.

            2. Elpey P.

              “”We are little more than a boogeyman for the right.”

              And the extreme right is a boogeyman for the center-right left that empowers it to clamp down on the far left. We have less to fear (and much more to gain) from the Freddie deBoers of the world than the MSNBC Twitter bluecheck identitarian pseudo-left and its own army of authoritarians and “stochastic terrorists.”

              What gets fearmongered and what gets memoryholed is a function of teams and identity. If we switched up the identities involved, a lot of news stories would disappear from view and other, even more alarming ones would come screaming into the headlines.

              But if we’re talking about when it goes to the barricades, it won’t be the church ladies or the community organizers who take the reins.

  3. Jay

    I don’t necessarily mind these little witticisms of yours, but it does get tiresome. Everyone is oppressing everyone and everyone is mistaken that anyone is oppressing everyone and also there’s a group caught in the middle. Yes. That’s pretty much the history of America. You might pick up a copy of the Dawn of Everything, good book, might give you some new perspective to bring to this constant refrain of yours.

    Meanwhile of course, while there’s no reason to think we’re any more socially disastrous than we’ve ever been, we are in fact watching the environment become unlivable. But that doesn’t bother you. No, in fact, you’d prefer to pick on those who think that’s an issue as being a member of an oppressive group, because the actual facts behind climate change and environmental degradation aren’t something you’re interested in learning about and which you’ve decided are beyond you. Despite this conclusion, you continue to pass judgment on those “unduly passionate” about the issue.

    Which group do you really think you’re in Greenfield?

    1. SHG Post author

      I’m sure there are people qualified to opine about climate change. You should seek them out to avoid reading my tiresome witticisms.

    2. Skink

      Jay, I’m so glad you brought this up. You see, a big blowy thing came and tossed the fuck out of my little section of the Swamp. Have you every seen a boat on top of a restaurant? I mean when it ain’t like a decoration, but just tossed up there, miles from where it started. Maybe you’ve seen like a million power poles busted! How about shit flowing in the street? And not regular shit, but old people shit. That shit smells different, like old Ensure.

      Like you, I have a theory: the big blowy thing came because the nazis on both sides were talking too much and saying too little, at least when it came to sensible stuff. They were saying their stuff and it made the wind go round-and-round. Pretty soon, there was boats on restaurant roofs. I think it’s just natural.

      Jay, what do you think of my theory? Pretty spot-on, right?

  4. JR

    To SHG’s point, the irony is not lost that Goldberg’s employer has been accused of the very same thing she accuses the “right”. That the accusation towards the NYT came from a Lesbian Jew, who has increased her stature demonstrably since exposing the NYT, is delicious. I used to read the NYT. Now I read Bari Weiss instead.

    Dear A.G. (Arthur Gregg Sulzberger)….My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” …..

    It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.

    The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

    – Bari Weiss, Letter of Resignation to A.G. Sulzberger

  5. David Meyer-Lindenberg

    “replete with jackboots and a red swastika armband”? jfc. Is the editor’s art finally dead at the NYT?

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