Satire is Dead. Good Riddance.
Satire is Dead. Good Riddance.
I grew up on shows like Family Guy, South Park and all the Late Night Shows that were airing through the late nineties and two-thousands. For some weird reason I never really watched The Simpsons. Which I can only put down to, there was something else on TV at that time Mum wanted to watch instead.
During an interview with Australia’s 7.30 (via ABC) in 2017, Parker and Stone said “satire has become reality” in reference to not really being able to make fun of Trump on the show.
“We were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn’t keep up and what was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with,” Parker said.
Collectively Liberals and those on the supposed left, have been attempting to make fun of Trump since 2015. Orange man with the small hands, a literal plethora of small dick jokes and there was Jimmy Kimmel’s 78 Hilarious Nicknames for Donald Trump On His 78th Birthday. In 2017 there was Kathy Griffin's photo of a bloody replica of President Donald Trump's head. Most recently it was alleged that Stephen Colbert’s Late Night Show was cancelled by CBS to appease Trump, after Colbert had been consistently critical of Trump for years. Colbert has just been given a new hosting gig with CBS though, so maybe it was just ratings?
South Park managed to break back through into relevance after years of toiling in the periphery of popular culture. Post 2017 and lets be honest prior to, they’d made their bag targeting the much easier subject of wokeness which really just meant vilifying trans bodies as opposed to lets say Trump and the rising right wing capture of mainstream western society.
When South Park finally decided to go after Trump it is by recycling a small dick joke and the Adolf Hitler in bed with Satan bit from their early seasons. After ten years of making fun of Trump's body has anyone not realised this hasn’t worked? If anything, the Liberal media class consistently choosing to make fun of how Trump looks, instead of say, kidnapping citizens and sending them to forever jails in El Salvador is actually strengthening his outsider image?
In a post-woke, post-truth society satire is dead. Which gets me to Scottie Marsh.
Scottie Marsh is a meme artist with a background in graffiti based in so called Australia, specifically so called Sydney for the most part. He was shot into the stratosphere of social media virality in 2016 with a mural titled ‘Kanye loves Kanye’, which based on the article I’m referencing, supposedly Kanye’s management offered $100,000 to have painted over.
A quick scroll of Marsh’s instagram and you’ll see a million murals making fun of Trump, one of Peter Dutton as a buttplug and a strange obsession with painting the late chef, Anthony Bourdain as Jesus. Marsh’s work was at the peak of its relevance from 2017 to early 2020 and has really just been chasing that early virality of the Kanye work or the “Scott Morrison Merry Crisis” since.
To me, Marsh’s work is the visual art equivalent to watching The Project or reading Cheek Media or even South Park. It’s a great outlet for people to project their frustrations with society onto but that's as far as it goes. It rarely if ever manifests into real critique let alone change. Liberals and slightly more progressive leaning people feel seen and heard then move on with their days. Staying comfortable in their lanes, pacified by these outlets, never inspired enough to push for real change.
Just yesterday, it appears Scottie Marsh either wrote or used genAI to fake a mural of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a subsequent Daily Mail article around its removal. In the time since he’s flipped it into a shirt you can buy with the profits going to the Gaza Children's Fund. The post was a clear attempt at satire which may have worked in 2017 or even 2020 but to quote Parker and Stone again, “satire has become reality”.
Instead what I saw was almost every other artist, friend and Palestinian activist page in so called Australia repost the fake as something real. Resulting in roughly; 9,636 likes, 777 comments and 5,839 reposts. More engagement than I’ve probably seen on any other post in relation to Palestine. With the vast majority of that engagement treating it as real, celebrating Scottie Marsh for his heroic mural and deception of a fake Zionist organisation in Waverly.
Judging by the merch flip and attempt to redirect funds to Gaza Children's Fund, Marsh has realised left rage baiting for engagement farming on Instagram off the back of an actually genocide is at best, in poor taste. There’s so much real, horrendous stuff actually happening I just don’t see the need, let alone ethics, to make shit up when people like Marsh could directing eyeballs and engagement to real stories of real people, instead of made up ones that paint him as a hero.
I originally started working on this piece in response to South Park's most recent episode taking aim at Trump and the podcast “Post Woke Cinema” by It Could Happen Here. Then Marsh posted his fake article and attempt at satire. I had to scrap the second half of this because to me it all sits in the same conversation. In a post truth world, where the bad guys have all the power while still pretending to the outsiders, satire is dead.
To me though, I hope this opens up a bigger conversation around digital literacy in a post woke slash post truth world where engagement turns into billions of dollars for the same people enabling and benefiting from the said genocide of Palestinians. It's an age old adage but if something's too good to be true, it probably is.
No one's immune to disinformation or propaganda, myself included, especially if it confirms our biases. try take a beat before engaging.
If you did engage I'd recommend donating to Community for Para or any of the other Mutual Aid funds currently supporting Palestinians right now.
