Trump and Satire

Original

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 14th December, 2024

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In September this year, Saturday Night Live began its 50 season on the air. The show is an American institution, one fifth as old as the USA itself. Like America, SNL has had its ups and downs. Like America, it has always pulled through, at least so far.

Just six weeks into SNL’s birthday season, reality spoilt the party. Donald Trump won the presidential election. On the first show back after his victory, the tone of the opening sketch was sombre, even funereal.

The cast, one by one, delivered a stony-faced speech to camera. “To many people watching this show,” they said, Trump’s victory was “shocking, and even horrifying. Donald Trump, who tried to forcibly overturn the results of the last election, was returned to office by an overwhelming majority.”

After about a minute of such grim stuff, SNL’s longest-serving cast member, Kenan Thompson, cracked the show’s first joke of the second Trump era. Given Trump’s propensity to punish his enemies, Thompson wanted to clarify something. “We at SNL would like to say to Donald Trump … We have been with you all along.”

The joke, of course, was that SNL had strenuously opposed Trump’s return. Kamala Harris herself had made a cameo appearance on the last episode before the election. The studio audience gave her a rapturous ovation. SNL had done its best to stop Trump, but its best hadn’t been good enough.
 
Hence the mood of despair on that first post-election show. This mood was widespread among America’s TV comedians. On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel cried during his monologue. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart got angry. “This is not the end,” he insisted.
 
We can only hope he’s right. But one thing that’s surely finished is the idea that American comedy can still make a political difference. Here was an election that America’s entire entertainment community, minus a few pro wrestlers, had ardently wanted Trump to lose. America’s sharpest minds threw their best stuff at him. And it bounced right off.
 
What will this do to the self-confidence of American comedy? At the age of 50, SNL may be plunged into a mid-life crisis. If it can’t take down a barn-sized target like Trump, what is the point of it? What place is left for satire, in a country where Linda McMahon will be Secretary of Education?
 
Jason Reitman’s movie Saturday Night, currently playing in cinemas, offers a reminder of the crackling sense of self-belief that fuelled SNL at its birth. Set backstage on the night of the show’s debut, the film captures the boundless cockiness of that first group of SNL writers and performers. The show was live. Network TV was central to the culture. America was watching. Anything could happen.
 
In SNL’s early days, the political satire was broad. During the show’s first season, the bumbling Gerald Ford was president. Chevy Chase, who looked nothing like him, became the show’s resident Ford impersonator. He didn’t wear any special makeup or anything. He just fell over a lot.
 
When Jimmy Carter succeeded Ford as president, Dan Ackroyd portrayed Carter without even shaving off his moustache. In later years, SNL got more serious about its political impersonations. Dana Carvey, wearing all the appropriate prosthetics, did a bang-on George Bush Sr. Darrell Hammond did a candidly libidinous Bill Clinton. Will Ferrell played Bush Jr as a gibbering ninny. Tina Fey did a withering Sarah Palin.
 
In 1976, the real Gerald Ford made a cameo appearance on the show, inaugurating a tradition of comity between SNL and the politicians it pilloried. Bush Sr invited Dana Carvey to the White House, and the two became close friends. Bush Jr claimed to enjoy Ferrell’s mockery of his verbal misadventures. Brutal as Tina Fey’s impression of her was, Sarah Palin was gutsy enough to appear on the show and face the music in person.
 
This was all very civilised: it showed that America’s politicians were on the same page as its comedians. They had the same basic values, the same innate commitment to democracy. “The fact that we can laugh at each other,” said Bush Sr, “is a very fundamental thing.”
 
All this changed during Trump’s first term. Before becoming president, Trump hosted SNL twice. Once he was in power, relations between him and the show curdled. When Alec Baldwin played him on the show, Trump rancorously denounced him, via Twitter, as an unfunny hack with a “mediocre dieing (sic) career.”
 
In reply, Baldwin vowed to keep playing Trump until the job was done. “I’d like to hang in there for the impeachment hearings,” he tweeted, “the resignation speech, the farewell helicopter ride to Mar-a-Lago. You know. The good stuff. That we’ve all been waiting for.”
 
Many American norms were eroded or upended during the first Trump administration. Certainly the norms at SNL changed. The show had always gone after American politicians. But never before had it suggested that one of them posed an existential threat to democracy. With Trump, the gloves came off.
 
Baldwin played Trump 46 times on SNL between 2016 and 2020. Halfway through that stint, he was already wondering if there was something counter-productive about his Trump impression. “I think I’m going to do some [more] of it, but not a whole lot,” he said in 2018. “There is a lot of fatigue here.”
 
Fatigue was right. Half the people in America didn’t need Baldwin to keep reminding them that Trump was absurd. They could see it with their own eyes. The rest of America either didn’t agree, or didn’t think absurdity was an undesirable trait in a president. 46 impressions of Trump was both too much and not enough. There was something about the man that defied or defeated satire.
 
“Ours is a useful trade,” Mark Twain wrote in 1888, speaking on behalf of America’s humorists. “With all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose … the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.”
 
Hard as America’s satirists tried to laugh Trump off the scene, the underlying logic of their trade no longer seemed to apply in the Trump era. The exposure of pretentious falsities? If you were listing Trump’s flaws, pretentiousness wouldn’t make the top fifty.
 
Previous American politicians had always at least pretended to have qualities – intelligence, decency, integrity – that everybody agreed were virtues. But Trump was cheating the satirists. He wasn’t playing by the old rules. You can’t be false to an ideal if you don’t even acknowledge that the ideal exists.
 
With Trump, there was nothing for the satirists to expose that hadn’t been grotesquely visible for years. The problem isn’t that his faults remain hidden. It’s that not enough people consider them to be faults.
 
In 2021, the all-star disaster movie Don’t Look Up took satirical aim at Trump. A giant comet was heading towards Earth. Doom was inevitable unless the world, led by America, could get its act together.
 
But the American President, played by Meryl Streep, was a female Trump – an unserious oaf with a dangerously short attention span. Instead of blowing the comet out of the sky, she urged her base to chant the reality-denying slogan “Don’t look up.”
 
Meanwhile Leonardo DiCaprio, playing an exasperated astrophysicist, vainly tried to make his fellow Americans see sense.  
 
“If we can’t all agree at a bare minimum that a giant comet the size of Mount Everest hurtling toward planet Earth is not a f—ing good thing,” he said, “then what the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves?”
 
Don’t Look Up failed to avert Trump’s second coming. But at least it succeeded in diagnosing the underlying problem. Nowadays, there is no bare-minimum proposition, no matter how flagrantly true it would seem to be, that all Americans can agree on. That makes it hard for satire to function. But forget about satire. Democracy itself is in trouble, when people stop believing in a common reality.
 
On the last SNL before the election, the show’s current version of Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, addressed a rally. “I’m out of gas,” he said. “I’m exhausted … Make it stop … Who cares? Nobody cares.”
 
That sounded more like the writers talking than Trump. Trump never runs out of gas. It was everybody else who did: the fact-checkers, the satirists, the voices of reason. Trump was indefatigable. The comet hit the Earth.
 
Were the satirists right to fear that its arrival will end American democracy? It’s too early to know. When the dinosaurs died, it wasn’t the asteroid’s impact that killed them. It was all the poisons it released into the atmosphere.

Video referees

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, September 16, 2024

The NRL’s longest serving coach, Wayne Bennett, is a man of few words. But the words he grudgingly parts with are always worth hearing.
 
Last week, after Bennett’s Dolphins exited the finals race, the laconic SuperCoach delivered an uncharacteristically lengthy speech about the NRL’s video refereeing system, known colloquially as the Bunker.
 
Bennett’s argument was simple. Video referees are human beings. They make mistakes, just like the referee on the field. The only difference is that the mistakes of the video refs take much, much longer to be perpetrated.
 
How do we fix this? Bennett’s answer was concise. “Get rid of it,” he said.
 
In four crisp words, Bennett spoke for multitudes of sports fans. Get rid of it. Lose it. Deep-six it. Video review technology is changing the character of the sports we love. Its overuse has become a form of madness.
 
Everyone seems to know this except the people who run sport. According to them, the real act of madness would be to have this technology at our disposal without using it an awful lot.
 
The NRL’s CEO, Andrew Abdo, said as much last week, as he swiftly moved to assure the public that Bennett’s eloquent appeal to common sense was in no danger of being heeded. “I think it’s ridiculous,” Abdo said, “to consider a sport not using technology to make decisions.”
 
It was bold of Abdo to portray himself as a foe of the ridiculous. For Bennett’s whole point was that the situation is ridiculous already. It’s ridiculous right now.
 
In one recent match, play stopped for several minutes while the Bunker pondered the staggeringly insignificant question of whether the ball, after being kicked into the air, had illegally brushed the pinkie of an attacking player on the way down.
 
The tape was played over and over, as if it were the Zapruder film. Maybe, if you rewatched it often enough, evidence of the microscopic infraction would reveal itself.
 
After all, the technology to do this exists. Therefore it must be used.
 
If that’s the argument, why not send a CSI team onto the paddock to dust the ball for prints? If utter certainty is the goal, let’s get David Caruso out there to do some DNA swabs.
 
Fanaticism, said George Santayana, consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. Somehow George came up with this line without ever seeing a Bunker referee in action. In their quest to enforce the rules with sub-atomic precision, the video refs seem to forget what the rules are for.  
 
Surely they exist so that play can generally be got on with. If a player breaks them in a way that’s visible to the naked eye, in real time, that’s an offence. Otherwise, play on.
 
Video refereeing puts the cart before the horse. These days, play is constantly being suspended so that enforcement of the rules can be got on with.
 
Why do we watch sport in the first place? Because it’s a heightened version of life. In sport, as in life, there are goals, striving, disappointment, ecstasy. But in sport, the lulls and complications are edited out. Life is messy. Sport isn’t. Or anyway it shouldn’t be.
 
Take soccer. The object of the game is beautifully simple. Get the ball into the opposition’s net. This is very hard to do. So when your team finally does it, it’s time to go unequivocally off your nut.
 
But wait! Not so fast. Put your frenzied celebrations on ice. Some unseen bureaucrat is speaking into the referee’s earpiece. It seems that the goal you’ve so rashly allowed yourself to feel happy about may not be a goal after all.  
 
Now the referee is walking towards the sideline. There’s an alfresco TV set over there. The referee starts watching replays of the goal on it. Many, many replays.
 
The players stand around on the field, talking among themselves. 40,000 fans in the stadium twiddle their thumbs. They’d thought they were there to see a soccer match. Instead they’re looking at a guy in a bright yellow shirt watching a very small TV.
 
Time passes. Glaciers melt. Eventually, the referee either awards the goal or erases it from history.
 
Either way, the moment of jouissance has been lost. One of life’s most straightforwardly glorious experiences – the experience of seeing your team bang one into the onion bag – has been fundamentally altered. A goal isn’t a goal any more. It’s something that may or may not become a goal in about four minutes’ time.
 
Next time around, you won’t make the mistake of celebrating so much, or at all. Sport is becoming more and more like real life, and not in a good way.
 
Things don’t have to be like this. If we’re smart enough to invent the technology, we’re also smart enough to decide whether it’s working for us. If it isn’t, we have the power to get rid of it. We can always bring it back, if we find that we miss it. I don’t think we will.

Sweet Jesus, not Sweet Caroline again ...

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, June 1, 2024

First let’s get a couple of things straight. I have no issue with Neil Diamond per se. Far from it. I like his stuff more than most people do. I like it to an extent that some might even consider uncool. 

I don’t even dislike the song “Sweet Caroline.” Or rather, I didn’t dislike it before. My beef – and it’s a very intense beef – has to do with the grotesque overplaying of “Sweet Caroline” in public places.

You can’t get away from it. When you go to the football, they play it at half time, so loud that you can’t conduct a conversation with the person beside you. During the chorus, the DJ (and who decided we need DJs at football games?) whips down the volume after Neil sings the titular phrase, so that assorted enthusiasts in the crowd (who are these people?) can sing the missing horn part (bom, bom, bom).

Then the volume goes back up, so Neil can sing the next bit: “Good times never seemed so good.” Then the volume goes down again, so the people who are still enjoying themselves (again, who are these people?) can interpolate the words “So good, so good!”

Nor can you evade the song by staying home and watching the match on TV. You’ll still hear it in the background, blaring impertinently over the PA. If you switch channels, you’ll probably find yourself watching an ad for a certain brand of bourbon, in which “Sweet Caroline” starts playing in a pub. A boisterous singalong ensues, complete with many an excruciating “so good” and “bom”.

The ad’s point seems to be that if you drink enough hard liquor, you might find that you quite enjoy being made to yell “bom bom bom” in a social setting. But I’m not looking for ways to enjoy saying “bom bom bom.” I simply don’t want to say it at all, under any circumstances whatsoever. 

Besides, there’s no time between the opening bars of the song and the chorus to get drunk from scratch. So what’s the suggestion? That we should all walk around with a permanent skinful just in case a Sweet Caroline situation should arise?

How did this idiotic tradition begin? Apparently it started in Boston, in 1997. At Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, the music director knew someone who’d just named their baby Caroline. The song was played as a tribute. The crowd seemed to like it. That crowd has a lot to answer for. 

If that kid in Boston had been named Jolene, presumably Dolly Parton would now be driving us up the wall on a weekly basis. If the kid’s name was Bruce, it would be ELO.  

But the kid’s name was Caroline. The rest is history, except that it isn’t yet over. It’s globalisation at its worst. Some kid named Caroline gets born in Boston, and 27 years later I can’t have a civilised halftime conversation with my footy pals without being forcibly drafted into a mass Neil Diamond singalong. 

Good times never seemed so good? Actually, Neil, they seemed way better just a moment ago, before some unseen twerp started blasting out “Sweet Caroline.” They will seem good again in thirty seconds, when the singing stops. But for the moment, I’m suddenly having an infinitely worse time than I was before. 

Even in America, the home of questionable taste, Red Sox fans found that Diamond’s song began to pale after several million iterations. A backlash set in. “Sweet Caroline sucks,” wrote one Boston journalist. 

I see what he meant, but I think his verdict needs some tweaking. “Sweet Caroline” didn’t always suck. It doesn’t suck inherently. It only started sucking because certain entertainment officers, who do suck, started playing it with ungodly frequency so that certain other people, who arguably suck too, can convince themselves they’re having fun. 

One Bostonian wag, when asked what song should replace “Sweet Caroline” at Fenway Park, said: “Anything.” I disagree. What should replace “Sweet Caroline” isn’t anything, but nothing. Sporting contests don’t need a musical score. If the ball goes over the sideline, let’s see if we can all cope with ten seconds of silent reflection before play resumes. At halftime, let the dying art of conversation rebloom.

Good times, by definition, are already good. They don’t need to be artificially improved. That’s what sucks: the very American idea that if you’re consuming one form of entertainment, other forms of entertainment must be inserted into every spare cranny of the action, lest people with very short attention spans start dying of boredom or demanding refunds. 

Am I saying we’ve reached Peak Caroline? Dear God, let’s hope so. Imagine if we haven’t. Imagine a future with yet more unasked-for renditions of “Sweet Caroline” coming at us from even more angles. 

Together, we can prevent that future. Next time some grinning DJ invites us to sing “bom, bom, bom” in a public place, let’s not do it. Let’s yell out something else instead, like “Enough!” or “Shut it off!” or “If you can’t begin to know when it began, why do you keep telling me about it?” Or even, as Neil himself cried in another context, “Good Lord!” 

Kafka

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, June 14, 2024

A century ago this month, Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of 40. He had published only a handful of stories and novellas in his lifetime, none of them over 60 pages long. His startling fictions had earned him a small circle of admirers in his native Prague, but had made little splash in the wider world.

When Kafka’s illness became terminal, he made preparations to erase himself from literary history. He left written instructions for all his unpublished papers – including three virtually complete novels – to be “burned unread and to the last page.”
 
As for his published works, Kafka ordered that they must not be “reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary,” he wrote, “should they disappear altogether that would please me best.”
 
Fortunately for the world, Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, disobeyed his late friend’s instructions. Far from disappearing after his death, Kafka became recognised as the 20^th century’s most prophetic writer. Indeed, posterity has paid him the greatest tribute a writer can receive. His name has become an adjective. In more than a hundred languages there is a word that corresponds to our word Kafkaesque.
 
Even people who haven’t read a line of Kafka know what that word means. Modern life is full of Kafkaesque moments. Trying to speak to a live human being on a help line can be a Kafkaesque experience. The Robodebt affair was deeply Kafkaesque. Arguably, the world is more Kafkaesque now than it was in Kafka’s own day.
 
The secret of Kafka’s enduring relevance is that his fiction resonates on two levels. First it affects you privately. Kafka taps straight into your unconscious, in a way no other writer does. Reading him, you get the sense that he has eavesdropped on your strangest dreams.
 
Above and beyond that, Kafka seemed to tap into the unconscious mind of history itself. Somehow, by writing about his own worst dreams, he forecast the great public nightmares of the 20^th century – the deranged, murderous bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  
 
George Orwell earned his own adjective – Orwellian – for anatomising the methods and psychology of Stalinism. But Orwell made his diagnosis on the basis of historical facts. He wrote 1984 in 1948, when the evidence about Stalinism was largely in.
 
Kafka achieved a far spookier feat. He described the 20^th century’s terror states before they even existed. When Kafka died, Adolf Hitler was still nine years away from becoming chancellor of Germany. Joseph Stalin had only just assumed power in the USSR.
 
And yet you could swear, when reading Kafka’s eerie fictions, that he had observed the workings of modern totalitarianism from the inside. “His most hallucinatory discoveries,” said the critic George Steiner, “turned out to be the grimmest reportage, but reportage before the facts.”
 
How did Kafka achieve this feat of clairvoyance? For a start, he wasn’t like everybody else. He was an acutely neurotic man. “He is absolutely incapable of living,” said his lover Milena Jesenska. “He’s exposed to all those things we’re protected against. He’s like a naked man among a multitude who are dressed.”
 
One thing Kafka was nakedly exposed to was the authority of his domineering father. Hermann Kafka was a sturdy and successful Jewish businessman who found his sickly son a grave disappointment. As a child, Franz bore the brunt of his father’s tyranny. Outside the home, he was subjected to the anti-Semitism that was ominously routine in Europe at the time.
 
Trained as a lawyer, Kafka worked as a paper-pushing civil servant by day and pursued his literary ambitions by night. He wrote in German, the official language of Austro-Hungarian Prague.
 
Kafka was morbidly self-critical, and fanatically choosy about what he published. He wrote the best part of three strikingly original novels – Amerika, The Trial and The Castle – but never finished them to his satisfaction. He considered them “bungled pieces of work.” He threatened to burn the manuscripts, but never got around to it.
 
Instead he left the task to Max Brod, who wisely failed to perform it. Soon after Kafka’s death, Brod licked the unfinished novels into shape and had them published in German editions. English translations followed in the 1930s.
 
In The Trial and The Castle, Kafka’s vision received its fullest expression. In both novels a defenceless individual is progressively crushed by the weight of an irrational, labyrinthine bureaucracy. Here is the famous opening sentence of The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
 
In deadpan prose, Kafka plunges you straight into the middle of a living nightmare. The nightmare deepens as the novel proceeds. Since Joseph K. has been arrested, it follows that he must be tried. Everything unfolds with the logic of a bad dream. As K. desperately produces his identity papers, he sees that the arresting officers have sat down and started helping themselves to his uneaten breakfast.
 
It’s a typically surreal Kafka touch. And yet such surreal scenes soon became the stuff of everyday reality all over Europe. “Give us a man and we’ll make a case,” Stalin’s secret police used to say. When they came to take people away, they would soften the blow by offering them a lolly from a box kept in their pockets.
 
Is it possible to be so sensitive that you can foretell the future? Not quite. But Kafka’s temperament made him hyper-susceptible to human cruelty and mediocrity and brutality. And those were precisely the elements that Stalinism and Nazism – the systems that were about to immiserate half of Europe – were made of.
 
In Kafka’s novels the state is always right, the individual always wrong. A similar dynamic had governed Kafka’s childhood. The father, even at his most arbitrary, was always right. The son, by definition, was always in the wrong. Hermann Kafka had zero sympathy for his son’s literary ambitions. He wanted him to marry, work in the family business, and generally behave like a normal bourgeois person.
 
Kafka failed on all counts. His father’s disapproval left him with a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority and shame. In 1919, at the age of 36, he itemised his grievances against his father in a long unsent letter, posthumously published as Letter to My Father.
 
In one telling passage, Kafka described an episode from his childhood. One night, lying in bed, the young Franz had whined for a glass of water. His father’s response was to pull him out of bed, carry him out to the balcony, and lock him outside in his nightshirt.
 
“I daresay I was quite obedient afterwards,” Kafka wrote. “But it did me inner harm … For years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that a huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, could come, almost for no reason at all, and take me out of bed in the night.”
 
That primal sense of dread would echo through all Kafka’s fiction. Joseph K. isn’t the only Kafka protagonist to suffer a sudden violation in the privacy of his bed. Gregor Samsa, the unfortunate hero of Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, wakes up one morning to find himself “transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.”
 
A reader once asked Kafka if he’d done “extensive research in a lunatic asylum.” “Just in my own,” Kafka replied. His sense of inner harm enabled him to imagine, and unwittingly predict, the rise of entire states dedicated to the persecution and extermination of the individual.
 
In a way it’s unfair to Kafka to read his books through the lens of the barbarities that came after him. His best work is touching, funny and humane. To speak of him in the same breath as Hitler and Stalin is to make his stuff sound far grimmer than it really is.
 
Still, the historical resonances of Kafka’s work can’t be ignored. When the Nazis came to power, they banned and incinerated his books. They would have incinerated Kafka himself, had he still been alive. All three of his sisters were murdered in concentration camps. After the war, his work was banned behind the Iron Curtain, including in his native Prague.
 
Most writers want their work to be universal. Kafka was terrified by that prospect. In what kind of world would his hellish visions come to seem representative? His friend Gustav Janouch, who wrote the book Conversations with Kafka, once put it to Kafka that his work might be “a mirror of tomorrow.”
 
Kafka reacted by covering his eyes with both hands, and rocking his whole body back and forth.
 
“You are right,” he said. “You are certainly right. Probably that’s why I can’t finish anything. I’m afraid of the truth … One must be silent, if one can’t give any help … For that reason, all my scribbling is to be destroyed. I am no light. I’m a dead end.”
 
As usual, Kafka was selling himself short. It was totalitarianism that was the dead end. But it was a dead end created by human beings, which means it can always happen again. One way of ensuring it won’t is to stay in touch with the legacy of better human beings, like Kafka. He will always be a light, whether he wanted to be one or not.