What satire is for

In fencing there is a move called a stop hit. It’s like that Indiana Jones moment when a towering figure in black robes and hood challenges our hero with a complex and terrifying exhibition of swordplay. Indiana watches the flashing blade whistling past his nose with an expression somewhere between irritation and ennui, then he mutters, “Oh, sod it,” takes out his pistol, and shoots the guy in the guts.
That is basically a stop hit. Your sword-fighting opponent performs all sorts of feints, taps, changes of guard, the whole suite of moves ending in a graceful lunge which should put the tip of her épée against your heart. As she’s in mid lunge you stick out your own sword, gracelessly, and stab her in the tripes.
At some point I realised that in disagreements on important points of principle (racism, monarchy, nuclear disarmament were the kind of thing) there was no point at all in trying to put my case by serious argument (I’m talking about canteen-type situations here, not the bosom of the loving family) because you could lead the opposition logical step by logical step, with their complete agreement, to your conclusion, whereupon they’d stare at the ceiling with a vacant eye, then something beautiful and simple would dawn, they’d perk up and say, “Aye, but we need cruise missiles/a monarch/a sense of unquestioned racial superiority (the last not expressed quite in those terms), don’t we?” - the exact proposition they’d started with all those minutes or hours ago.
For a long time I couldn’t understand this. Then I stopped trying. I realised that there was no point in trying to change people’s deeply held beliefs by syllogism or any form of logic. All I could do, and it was much more effective, was try to ridicule, belittle, show an amused, amusing and utterly superior sneering derison for their most cherished convictions, with such sudden, brutal and often obscene rudeness that they were at a loss for words. This meant they didn’t express those views again in my presence - and hopefully felt slightly hesitant and uncomfortable about doing it at all.
This technique was not foolproof. It either didn’t work, or maybe my moral conviction diminished to vanishing point, with very big and violent rugby players. But as a way of advancing peace and respect for all people it sure beat the shit out of rational argument.
And that is the best and maybe only purpose of satire; to humiliate, grotesquify, belittle, make suicidal or mad or otherwise ineffectual, people who have become a curse to humankind.
Satire is not parody, it is not the kind of thing that the satirised could watch with chortling pleasure. They may watch it with complete incomprehension, so skewed are their ideas of themselves, their worth, their place in the world and their effect upon it. But the satirist’s hope should be that even if the victim gets only the slightest inkling of what is being done to them, they will flee screaming into the desert, to emerge months later as harmless saints, or preferably not at all (peace to their bones).
I mention this because I am in a day or two going to say something about the Member of Parliament who represents me, however fractionally, in the House of Commons. She is a Blair Babe, but more in the eponymous film sense, one of the short fat ugly lying ones who would be put at the back of any photo so only the top of her head showed.
Nice people may be shocked by even those perfectly objective, non-satirical observations on her person and character. But she is a politician. A New Labour Politician. She has invariably voted the Blair line.
New Labour has done some good things. I have some experience of the good things New Labour has done in regenerating one of the most disadvantaged parts of the country. But I reckon that those good things have been achieved by a very small fraction of the government. For the rest, which includes most Cabinet Ministers, they need...
...When a caterpillar pupates, it doesn’t just change shape and grow legs and wings, it melts into a primordial soup and from that soup the lineaments of a butterfly and then the butterfly itself emerge.
New Labour needs to be liquidised, reduced to the same primordial soup. The emergence of anything like a butterfly is neither likely nor desirable, we are talking about politicians here. But at least the toxic secretions; the totalitarian tendencies, the contempt for democracy, the stupidity, arrogance, mendacity, staggering incompetence, servility to America, the Hobbesian distrust of liberty, the gated estate of power, all these might be encapsulated, excreted and partially destroyed.
New Labour is long past any engagement in rational argument. They have tipped over a catastrophe fold and they are in their present form irredeemable. Discussion, debate, are no longer options.
Satire will not bring them down, but it will help to soften them up.
I say all this because kind-hearted people do not like to see others hurt. But remember, these are politicians. When they give up the status of politician they will, given time, regain the status of human being, as most politicians do (a few Tories have to be excepted, and Home Secretaries as a class seldom make it). But as politicians, we must question whether they merit the decencies of our species. Satire fodder now. No more.