News stories like a mummified baby mammoth emerging from the Biscuit Basin explosion and an overturned semi releasing hundreds of King Cobras in eastern Wyoming have gained widespread attention and caused pearl-clutching across America.
Casper Planet, a first-rate satirical website, published these headlines and gullible readers have responded by demanding “save the baby mammoth” and “Biden needs to do something about all those cobras before kids get hurt.”
But Casper Planet is satire (as in none of it is true) and they plainly admit that fact (if you believe ‘em). Nevertheless, folks who have let their bullshit detectors atrophy from non-use continually get sucked in. Its a glorious thing to see!
I love Casper Planet, not just because its funny, but also because it teaches us a great lesson in the First Amendment and in the readers’ responsibility.
Satire is one of the great forms of writing and communication, but we seem to have lost our collective ability to appreciate it. We are very grumpy people these days.
In our latter day seriousness about what is going on around us, we are too ready to believe anything we are told that confirms our own biases. We discount humor as a great mechanism to make sense of the world and we’ve almost totally lost our ability to laugh at ourselves.
Skepticism, another great coping mechanism, is almost universally impugned. There’s an insistent societal pressure to believe one thing or another wholeheartedly. Skeptics are derided when they say that its ALL bullshit.
But a healthy sense of skepticism is an inoculation against being fooled and gullibly believing the lie. It may take skeptics to get us out of this mess.
Think about it. When a power structure, like parents or government, tells us kids that if we don’t eat all our vegetables, Santa won’t bring us Christmas presents. There’s always one kid who hates broccoli enough to risk it. And he gets his presents anyhow.
Another myth gets busted and that skeptical kid will grow up to be an adult that’s hard to lie to.
I like Casper Planet and other organs of satire because they help the reader hone a sharp sense of skepticism. Presented with stories of baby sharks washing up on the shores of Alcova, the reader is given the chance to use their own noggin.
The reader confronts the responsibility to decide what is true and what is false based on innate logic, reason, probability, education, past experience and a whole lot of other factors that make up a healthy bullshit detector.
The First Amendment liberates the individual or the press to say anything. Lies are protected speech under our Constitution.
If the Constitution required people and the press to speak only the truth, then it wouldn’t really be free speech, would it?
So, when folks who read Casper Planet or other sources of satire wring their hands and whine that somebody should do something about all the lies, they’re correct. And the somebody who should do something is the reader.
Unless and until we can get over ourselves and start taking responsibility for what we read; and unless and until we can appreciate the humor in satire, we’ll remain a grumpy, frightened populace who take ourselves too seriously to laugh at stuff that’s truly funny.
The truth of the matter is that I was NOT elected the new Chairman of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus. I fell just a couple votes short. But I don’t believe the results. As we all know, elections are meant to be overturned and my angry followers are fixin’ to take to the street.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
