Gettysburg, PA -
Real and wanna-be dictators and authoritarians in power positions are largely insecure, little men. They are sometimes clownish, but they are often lethal, criminal figures, too.
Authoritarians and those who worship them shrink at the sight and sound of satire, comedy, music, art, theater, books, poetry, journalism, and debate that questions their crude lust for power as well as anything that encourages freedom of expression. Put simply, most authoritarians and their pretenders have little regard for creativity and absolutely no senses of humor. Creative expression and especially humor and satire are powerful tools for undermining thin-skinned authoritarians, and they know it.
It’s no wonder that China’s Xi Jinping is cracking down even further on comedy clubs, rock concerts, and book publishers in fear that their truth-telling will undermine his regime. Putin and his shrinking band of sycophants have been very happy doing likewise. Their reactionary reactions must warm the cockles of the hearts of other blustery autocrats in Iran, North Korea, Hungary, and Turkey.
Orwell once said that, “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” The journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken understood that point well. He made a career of hurling barbs at blustery, fabulist politicians and their acolytes. The Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup" (1933) and Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" (1940) each treated authoritarian blowhards with the respect they deserve. None.
As authoritarians engage in pathological deceit and seek to crush opposing and questioning voices, they have used the same predictable playbook for centuries. It always involves undermining if not persecuting those who speak truth to power such as writers, artists, and comedians, diminishing women, and "otherizing" people of color, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and those of different religions or no religious faith.
In sobering witness of the killing fields here in Gettysburg a disturbing question arises about today’s politics. To wit, what the hell are we doing to ourselves? Shouldn’t we have learned the lessons of slavery, the anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi vomit of Father Coughlin, the putrid bile of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, the Klan’s criminal lynchings of Black people, and the con-artistry of headline-grabbing demagogues and grifters? I guess not. At least not yet. And that's no laughing matter.
The Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” (1933) used humor to skewer mid-20th-century European authoritarians.
Image courtesy of Slate.