At the dawn of the satirical blog you could tell the writer was exaggerating for effect, and readers could enjoy the comic absurdity, if not the message. Like when Bishop Swift suggested in his weekly blog (called a sermon back then) that the English should just eat the Irish babies rather than starve them to death, even the inbreds in the House of Lords knew old japist Johnnie was putting them on to make his point. He was taking his argument to the point of absurdity.

Today’s satirist has the problem that every news cycle brings a new action from our President’s haterist opponents that does more than border on absurdity. It doesn’t even sneak across the border of absurdity in the dead of night. It crosses the border of the absurd while doing a frenetic Guitar Hero to a metal band soundtrack.

A few years ago if I had satirized about congressman yelling “You Lie!” at the President during a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress, it might have been funny. If I had a visual of congressmen wearing protest signs on their ties during the session, you’d think it was a political cartoon. Well, it appears the cartoons are sitting in the U.S. Congress. Their absurdity is just too absurd.

If a writer from the 40s was typing out a Capra movie script, and he wrote that a black man was elected President and that his opponents were showing up at his speeches wearing guns, and nobody hassled them, let alone busted them, it wouldn’t fly. Frank would have cut it because no one in the audience would believe it.

If you wanted to portray our recent raucous town hall meetings realistically, they’d have to be set in some mythical country like the Duchy of Grand Douchewick where the screamers had heavy Germanic-Ruskie type accents, because all those seeing it would know that Americans don’t act that way.

Even Gore Vidal could not have created a character like Glenn Beck. Nobody could.

So I hereby protest on behalf of all us writers whose imaginations can’t go beyond the machinations of today’s haterists. I’m sorry, but in the real world the satirists just can’t compete with the haterists, that is assuming this is the real world. Personally, I’m beginning to have my doubts.

I keep listening for the music from Twilight Zone as an underscoring to what I’m seeing and hearing. If and when I do, it’s going to make me feel a lot better, because at least, it would allow me to make some kind of sense of what’s going on.