A Satirist’s Sighs

by Lee Duigon

December 29, 2022

Once upon a time in ancient Wales, kings and chieftains were very careful in their dealings with bards, for fear they might be made the subject of a satire. It was believed that a sharp satire, driven by real passion and following all the formal rules of bardic satire… would come true! And you’d wind up blind, or silly, or walking backwards for the rest of your days.

Some twenty years ago, on a now-defunct website, I wrote a satire about the New Utopian Translation of the Bible—the N.U.T. Bible, featuring wacky theology cobbled together by Far Left crazies in a fictional seminary. A pastor in Seattle read it and gave a sermon about it. His daughter wrote a report of it for school. He was upset enough to contact me for more information.

“Uh… it was a satire,” I said. “I made it up, to poke fun at jive theologians who try to replace God’s Word with their own.”

After a long pause, the pastor said “What have I done? Oh, my! That’s why everybody in the pews was staring at me. N.U.T.—that spells ‘nut’. The Nut Bible! And my daughter had a hard time with it, too!” But he was a good sport about it. “It’s all my fault,” he said, “I should’ve realized it was satire.” I’ll bet his next sermon was a doozy.

It happened again. This time it was a satire that proclaimed “The government will pay you $100 cash to try gay sex! (Proof of intercourse required).”

The site’s editor was pumped up to write a scathing editorial about it, but first he called me to get more information.

“You can’t write that editorial,” I said. “It’s a satire. I made it up.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes. Look at the names. There is no Congressman named Izzy Kiddin. No assistant secretary of whatever named Y. B. Sane.”

It dawned on him, then, that he’d worked himself up about a hoax. He thanked me for not letting him touch off a broadside that would’ve sunk his own ship.

In the years between then and now, satire has become harder to write. No sooner do you invent something preposterous, even outrageous, than some expert or some public figure comes out with something just as foolish. How are you supposed to satirize people who are already satirizing themselves? How do you even begin to satirize “transgender”?

Sigh! And double-sigh.

Today’s new, forward-thinking and progressive public policies are yesterday’s satire. They were funny back then. They’re not so funny now.

I write satires because there’s nothing that libs and leftids hold dearer than the conviction of their own intellectual superiority. They need to be mocked! They need to be laughed at. And the public needs to see how ridiculous these people are. When we take them seriously, we give them the keys to the wrecking ball with which they’re battering our country—heck, our whole civilization.

It would be among the greatest things in the world if someday we all realized that we don’t have to listen to these windbags. Of course, what we laughingly call our education system has created a public that’s been made distressingly vulnerable to all manner of political quackery and pseudoscientific twaddle.

The day we finally refuse to allow teachers’ unions to “educate” our children will be our second Independence Day.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Visit us there and enjoy our annual Christmas Carol Contest. My articles can also be found at www.chalcedon.edu/ .

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net