Abramoff Cartoon Outdoes Washington Satire: Andrew Ferguson
Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- I think it was the novelist Philip Roth who first noticed that real life in the U.S. is now beyond parody. It is, to coin a clumsy but necessary word, unsatirizable.
Yet nothing in the Abramoff affair is merely crass. The client has to go and do something beyond the imagination of even the most daring satirist -- such as claim victim status through the language of identity politics.
``Abramoff and his partner,'' one member of the tribal council told the Washington Post, ``are the contemporary faces of the exploitation of native peoples.''
Every successful satire is built on the exaggeration of essential truths. And so it is with the Abramoff affair. Indeed you can tell how revealing this scandal is of the way Washington works by the intensity with which Abramoff's fellow lobbyists insist that the scandal reveals nothing of the way Washington works.
``The Abramoff style is so far afield from the normal course of business as to be irrelevant to me and probably most people in my line of work,'' one Democratic lobbyist, Joel Johnson, told the Post.
A Republican lobbyist, Ed Rogers, was equally indignant. ``The whole Abramoff affair,'' he said, ``is not a lesson of how business is done in Washington.''
Finally, in the face of comments like these, the satirist must declare defeat. You can't make this stuff up. It is unsatirizable.
