Americans must sugar coat the truth

Heya Joe:

In response to the Vietnamese fan ("Reader says humor dilutes seriousness"), I say: Don't apologise for clowning, mate! If you can address the serious topics of these terrible times with a slit of a grin, it shows you still have some lightness in your soul. Like the bluesmen say, "Gotta laugh to keep from crying ..."

Bucko in Australia

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True my friend!

But despite the cultural differences, the Vietnamese kid had a point. We mix fact and humorous fiction because we cannot take the truth on the chin. In daily life, when I am not depressed as hell, I like to think I am a pretty upbeat, and often funny guy (especially when drunk, I think, though opinion seems to vary on that one.)

But lots of time when I am writing I feel compelled to crack a joke after the most dreadful facts. This trivializes the truth of that fact. See, most readers in America just scan along for entertainment value and looking for things we agree with. Any uncomfortable fact had better have a funny punchline. America's punchline mentality is a product of 50 years of immersion in television and the behavior modification that results from that immersion. For example, liberals in America prefer to get their news as comedic performance by Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, who manage to find punchlines even for bombings in Iraq.

More important, when the facts are left to stand glaringly alone without comedic relief, (or at least a television commercial to break the intellectual and psychological tension) Americans are left to consider their meaning, or god forbid, what action must be taken. We have no intellectual tools or experience in changing our nation from the grassroots level. Thankfully for the government, in our learned learned helplessness, we tell ourselves, "There is nothing I can do about such a big and terrible things." Well, of course there is. But the susper-state message we have received all our lives tells us we are small. It tells us that we are cloaked in goodness, right in all things, so we should just relax and let our military corporate state protect our goodness. And by the way, we should go out and buy something to support the economy.

Along about June of next year I will have a brief and small place in the media, due to the book. Will I be able to resist sugar coating the truth with humor because all acts of media, radio, television, Internet and magazine print are entertainment acts? I doubt it. I was raised in the same blue light of the TV screen as all other Americans.

In the meantime, the death toll rises in Iraq, bankruptcy now befalls millions of sick Americans, who've lost their homes, jobs and insurance (the weak are eaten alive in this country, then discarded) and gangsters have stolen the American treasury and left every full-time working American with $300,000 in present and future national debt, not to mention the mortgages and credit cards they were hyped into creating to further puff up the collapsing balloon of our economy.

How does one write a punchline for that? Well, you can't. And so no one in the media is going to tell anyone about it, assuming they even know. Which they do not.

You guys in Aussieland better watch out. This sort of thing sneaks up on a nation while they are basking in their goodness and believing their own seemingly innocuous media. Click here for a clip on orgasmic Australia.

Australia is no more symbolized by big titted beauties throwing a shrimp on the barbie at the beach than America is summarized by a sunset on the Grand Canyon. In truth we are a nation of automobile gridlock, gritty strip malls, and polluted air and water. By that same measure, I doubt seriously that Australians stroke koala bears on their front porch in the evening and enjoy the bloody Crocodile Dundee lifestyle. (But then maybe I better come down there and check out those babes on the beach.)

We were once a nation of cowboys, canyons, bustling cities full of opportunity, and free like eagles, or so we were told.

Better watch out. And always know that a punchline is there in political writing or news because someone put it there on purpose -- too often it is to avoid the truth.

In art and labor,

Joe