AND ANOTHER THING…
SATIRE – ‘the use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm etc., to expose folly or vice…’ All too often the satirist is represented as the cynic who stands by the edge of the highway, parodying, lampooning, belittling the best efforts of the Great & the Good to fulfil their difficult & thankless tasks.
Well, I’d be lost without vintage satirical fortnightly magazine Private Eye. I’ve been buying it on & off since its inception in the early ‘60s. It’s never lost its raffish, cut-and-paste (glue & paper style) format, nor has it ever shaken off the sense of being run by a group of undergraduates with too much time on their hands. But behind the not infrequent wielding of blunt instruments & the sometimes prurient glee that informs their reports of breaking scandals, there is often a fierce moral fervour. Private Eye is not afraid to ‘speak truth to power’ & private cant, hypocrisy & plain crookery made public seldom escape its scrutiny. A couple of stories caught my attention this week, one to do with the naked exploitation of poser, the other the implied exploitation of naked flesh.
Dick Cheney, it reports, was warned about the use of torture by American troops as far back as 1992. When he was George Bush Snr.’s defence secretary it was brought to his attention that during American ‘counter–insurgency’ activities in Central & South America abusive interrogation techniques were being routinely employed. Indeed, two CIA manuals being used to train interrogators recommended the use of torture, notably techniques similar to those recently exposed as being widespread in Abu Ghraib prison. Although these manuals were subsequently amended, Spanish language versions, appropriate for the theatre of operations, were being issued unaltered.
A memo passed by Cheney’s desk to the effect that ‘offensive & objectionable material in the manuals undermines US credibility (that) could result in significant embarrassment’. The memo was stamped ‘SECDEF HAS SEEN‘ & Cheney had scribbled on it, ‘I concur’.
An interesting coda to the story is that the then ambassador to Honduras, location of torture revelations that led to a senate investigation, was implicated in the scandal. His name is John Negroponte & he is now the US ambassador to Iraq.
A turn of the page revealed a neat little paradigm of the relationship between noisy moral outrage & cynical exploitation. The Sun newspaper is an ugly journal whose sweaty-palmed obsession with sexual revelation sells millions of copies a day. Current editor Rebekah Wade last year led the paper into a stridently shrill campaign to expose paedophiles’ addresses so that concerned local citizens might then arrange for their removal. In the face of near-universal condemnation on the part of the news media & the police, the campaign continued its crusade with the entirely predictable effect of driving large numbers of paedophiles underground.
Private Eye reports that, having last year featured 12-year-old Emma Watson (Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films), The Sun this week presented a double-page ‘World Exclusive’ with photos of the 14-year-old showing how she is ‘growing up… into a teen beauty’. Reporter Grant Rollings grilled her on the adults that she fancied & reported breathily that ‘she will have romantic scenes in the fourth Harry Potter movie’. Nice…
10:53:30 PM 
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