Blood Libel: Donald Trump, Mika Brezinski, Genesis 9.5 (and Leviticus et al. passim)

I'm not going to write a formal post on the subject — with a draft on MS-Word and revision and proofreading and all that — but this much I'll add to the commentary on Donald Trump's tweet of 29 June 2017 on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski, as reported on Business Insider: "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!"

To tweak for the tweet an old snarky comment: we knew Trump was a bully and sexist when the Electoral College hired him, so we have only a limited right to complain. Even allowing that limitation, however — and as an American I claim complaining as a God-given right, Constitutionally protected — even allowing that limitation, there are three serious problems with the tweet, in addition to its being a tweet (and sorry folks, but the President of the United States shouldn't be tweeting, period, except maybe an occasional "Happy Thanksgiving" or such).

First, blood comes with taboos in our culture and others: Biblically, it's the life of an organism and forbidden as human food in God's covenant with Noah. (So religious folk all upset over homosexuality shouldn't speak on the subject while eating blood sausage.) On the positive side, as the life of the organism it's a crucial point of Christian communion: "Take; drink." / "for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins." And there are concerns with menstrual blood in the cultures of the Israelites and Jews and others.

Trump's mentions of blood, though, are unusual nowadays, and creepy.

They move from creepy into dangerous with at least two other considerations.

That Mika Brezinski and Joe Scarborough would track down Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago three nights running would indicate a great need to get to Mr. Trump; that they'd do it while Brezinski was undergoing complications from surgery would make them nearly desperate to contact him.

Whatever else was going on, such insistent attempts would indicate either pathetic stalking or a pathetic attempt to get to the Mr. Trump for one reason or another. As an absolute certainty, it would indicate a power relationship in which Mr. Trump is the superior.

Trump is the President of the United States; it's weird he'd brag about power in such a relatively trivial relationship.

It's weirder that he'd brag in such a way that he can be easily and quickly be shown to be lying.

Mike Brezinski is a TV personality only, so she's without significant power; she does have significant exposure and people could see whether or not "She was bleeding badly from a face-lift" on or about New Year's 2016/17. News outlets simply need to publish a photo, such as this one.

People lie for many reasons. For a person in power to tell a blatant lie is a power move. As George Orwell and Eric Hoffer pointed out primarily about "the old monster," Stalin — descriptive phrase from a Marxist opponent of Stalinism — Stalin's twists and turns functioned among other things to make intellectuals go into contortions to follow the Party Line. And more normal folk would have to show their faith in the great leader by showing it as unquestioning faith, ignoring logic and reason and sometimes their senses.

If "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," then Power is the power to get people to say, and ultimately believe, otherwise. If Trump says Brezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift," that is that, whatever photos and other witnesses might say. For authoritarians and totalitarians and bullies and power-freaks from Shakespeare's farcical sexist Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (4.5) to tragedy-producing tyrants: for their inferiors "To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason" (The True Believer, §56).

And that means heresy against the word of the leader and treason as disloyalty, e.g.,  to assert that Mika Brezinski wasn't bleeding.

Men's, Women's, Boys'/Girls', Transgender, Faculty, Executive … Toilets

            It was the mid-1960s, and I was finishing up my undergraduate work and preparing to move out of the Midwest to the wilds of upstate New York. "You'll have to establish credit," my father said to me. "I know you," he went on, "and I'm sure you pay cash for everything." I did pay cash, in part because my father had been in credit clothing when I was a child, and I had a very strong first impression of buying on credit: avoid it. Also, I was a War baby and not cheap but tight: I had a mild horror of waste —"Children in Europe are starving!!" — and considered it a waste of money to pay interest; unless desperate, one saved up for purchases by putting money in a bank account and received interest; you didn't pay interest and give extra money to strangers just because just wanted something now.

            Now my father used to say, "You never listen to me," which was inexact. I always listened to his advice; I just didn't always choose to do what he advised: that's the difference between "advice" and "orders." Establishing credit was good advice, so I opened an account at a local men's clothing shop in Champaign, Illinois — which I'll call "Schumacher's" — and walked in to buy something, charge it, pay off what I owed, and then repeat the process a few times to show the world I could incur modest debts and pay them.

            I entered Schumacher's wearing a cashmere V-neck sweater-vest I'd received as a present and looked around for a crew-neck long-sleeve sweater. Seeing none, I asked the clerk — a guy about my age — if they had any in stock. He looked down in my direction and said unto me, "We at Schumacher's like to think our patrons are two years ahead of fashion, not two years behind. We do not stock crewnecks …. However, I could get you a V-neck such as you're wearing." To which I replied, "You at Schumacher's do not carry goods of the quality of the sweater I am wearing," and left to charge something elsewhere.

            A few months later, of course, the Great Wheel of Fashion turned and crew-necks were again "in" —there are only so many variations on the theme of "sweater" and the essence of fashion is trivial change — and I probably went and charged a V-neck at Schumacher's.

            Anyway, I am used to being out of sync, and in matters more important than clothing fashions.

            For example, American public bathrooms were part of the desegregation battles of "the long 1950s" into the also-long 1960s, but the toilet issue (and much else) had moved into the background during the early 1970s as racial conflicts became more intense and US military adventures in Vietnam continued into our longest war until Afghanistan.

            Not for the religious right, however: bathrooms were big for them in the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment for women, or "the 'Common Toilet Law,'" as they saw it; and without my looking for this particular windmill to joust at, public toilets became important for me. In 1969-70 (or so), I fought small battles over johns at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and similarly in the early 1970s at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

            At the U of IL, the initial battle was over the few toilets in the massive stacks of the massive main library. The single-toilet, lockable bathrooms in the stacks were gendered "MEN" or "WOMEN," with a single toilet on each level of the stacks, alternating male and female. At the time, there were considerably more male graduate students and faculty than women at the U of I, so toilet-access was more of a problem for men than for women, but finding a relatively close, unoccupied toilet was a unisex hassle that could be easily ameliorated by labeling the toilet unisex, as in "TOILET." The objection from the Lord of the Libraries was that Illini women wanted tampon dispensers in their toilet rooms, and Illini men couldn't handle the presence of tampon dispensers. (Nowadays I'd resolve the issue by having compact dispensers in all unisex TOILETs for [a] tampons and [b] condoms — but that suggestion wouldn't have gone far at ca. 1969.) In today's terms, the library johns raised issues of Gender Politics.

            Later at the University of Illinois, I wanted the remaining Faculty Only bathrooms — most persistently at the Law School it turned out — opened to the general public of women and men, or what in 2016 I'll call the two modal sexual dimorphisms: Most people are "cisgender," identifying socially and culturally with their biological sex (genetically — generally — XX folk and XY, although that can get complicated). The special faculty johns were an enforcer of something like class and definitely a preserver of status in the Great Chain of Academic Being. A U of I professor of law might bring a lawsuit to mandate Black and White together at Old Confederacy urinals, but heaven forfend he — pretty much always he back then — heaven forfend he would have to piss in the company of law students.

            At Miami University, I got into trouble with the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences ("Liberal" was conspicuously absent from the College name) for getting a motion passed at Miami's Student Affairs Council to desegregate Faculty johns, including the Executive Toilets in the Biz School building. In B-School gendering, there were MEN and WOMEN and — at some expense to build and maintain — also FACULTY MEN and FACULTY WOMEN. (I'm not sure B-school administrators urinate or defecate.) I thought the vote of Student Affairs Council relatively minor, but the debate on The Executive Toilet at the B-School made it up to the cabinet of the President of Miami U. The upshot was the signs on the B-school Executive toilets were indeed removed, but the toilets were then locked; the Chosen were issued keys; and the johns were informally re-named "the Erlichs," which I took as a compliment.

            In the building I first worked in at Miami, I later discovered, the toilets were labeled MEN, WOMEN, and, for one toilet, an asexual FACULTY, which I declined to take as a compliment.

            Toilets are serious business with more people than I had thought, and who pisses and shits where and with whom nearby seems almost as important with humans as it is with our furry (and territorial and hierarchical) friends: dogs and cats. Status and power were the crucial things in dealing with faculty johns of the "Executive Toilet" persuasion, and a crucial part of bathrooms (water fountains, swimming pools, schools, jobs, etc.) segregated by race. Something else was going on with racial segregation, however, and that "something else" is a set of fears central to the current argument over which toilets transsexuals should use.

            I'll identify the set with the title of a book by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

            To paraphrase and oversimplify, and ignore Douglas's revising some of her views later in her career — The idea I'll use here is that early men in patriarchal societies had only recently gotten the world organized and categorized in their minds and felt danger in the transgressing of the boundaries of categories. So along with the Great Commandments of loving your neighbor as yourself, and foreigners as if they were neighbors (Leviticus 19.18, 19.33-34), we get the injunction in the Holiness Code, "You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff" (Leviticus 19.19, RSV). To keep categories firm and, well, categorical, they must be kept pure.  

            Hence, there is a strong philosophical/psychological motivation for purity of categories, especially when it came to sex and gender issues, where male fears of undermined categories were justified: if you're enjoying male privilege in a world that wasn't all that great even for men, anything that undermines the category "man" is a threat to one's status and advantages.

            And so we get the surprisingly strong injunction in Deuteronomy, "A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God" (Deut. 22.5). And along with forbidding screwing the livestock, we get the prohibition, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18.22).

            Now prohibitions against male homosexuality make sense in terms of a set of pronatalist injunctions and prohibitions — down to forbidding male masturbation in later misreadings of the Onan story (Genesis 38.8-10) — that encourage reproduction by channeling sex into reproductive sex between people married and therefore probably in a relationship stable enough to raise kids. Still, such prohibitions will be much more effective if public policy considerations like encouraging reproduction are reinforced with a deep fear of transgression, including transgression of category boundaries.

            And before you think that such fears died out a couple centuries back with the Enlightenment, consider the various things that scare people in movies like the Alien(s) series and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). Part of the creepiness of the Alien in Alien(s) is his/her/its gender complexity, plus its combination of the organic and mechanical; part of the horror of The Fly is the final combination of human, fly, and machine.

            Some people are more upset than others by boundary transgression, and conservative, orthodox folk in the Abrahamic traditions — e.g., in America, fundamentalist Christians — are likely to be very upset by "trans" people whose mere existence undermines man/woman as an absolute category. Now if an anatomically male XY person enters a bathroom with women, or an anatomically female XX person enters a bathroom with men, that "trans" existence is put into action in the world and is going to be difficult to ignore. Combine that with traditional fears of "the rape of our women" and cultural-feminist prioritizing concerns with rape, and we will see a continuing argument on bathroom signage: what signs go on what toilets regulating use by sex and/or gender.

            Personally, I'd like to see some numbers in the transgender debate, and I'd like to see more common sense. "Man" and "Woman," male and female human, are not absolute types, but the "modal phenotype" for human beings is sexual dimorphic: carefully throw a paper airplane at a crowd of human adults and the people you're likely to hit will be "cisgendered" and either men or women. My guess is that there are relatively few transgendered people, and however significant they are philosophically, theologically, ideologically, politically, and symbolically, as a practical matter their legitimate needs can be met pretty easily.

            In 1979, I attended a conference on "Narrative" at the University of Chicago and stayed with my nephew in a university dorm with unisex group bathrooms of the old-fashioned non-luxury variety. There seemed to be a few simple rules including no nudity in the public areas, and "Guys: Put it away and zip up before turning around at the urinals." There also seemed to be no problems.

            I doubt most American will be able to carry off bathroom mixing of sexes and genders with quite the aplomb of U of Chicago students in 1979. Still, if men can get used to invasive music in bathrooms featuring female vocalists, we can share bathrooms with XX people who experience themselves as men — and can even have tampon dispensers for them, preferably next to ubiquitous condom machines. And if the biggest threat to American genetically female women becomes genetically male people who experience themselves as women, then we've taken a large step toward a crime-free America; anyway, if bathroom attacks by males masquerading as females become a problem, then legislators and other authorities — and the women immediately threatened (vigilante style, if necessary, on occasion) — can deal with it.

            With some sensible actions — starting with more unisex signs on washrooms and common sense and common decency — trans folk can get recognition; women can have shorter lines to get to a toilet; and men can finally get bathrooms a little cleaner and a little fancier, like women get at upscale restaurants.

            And this round of The Great Toilet Debate, those of us in faith traditions can recognize that God gave us, not absolute categories, but evolved populations with variation. Old theologians called it God's "plenitude" and celebrated the variety. We, today, can use categories when they're useful, but try more to think statistically — and accommodate variety in our abstract ideologies and in such mundane activities as "hitting the head."

            And since the Trans Movement will force us to deal with bathrooms anyway, let's pass already the ERA amendment to the US Constitution and at least guarantee on paper or parchment equal rights for women, and, in the classic formulation of the amendment, for everybody.

Blasphemy, Satire and Other Language-Taboo Violations

            The numbers say I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still a little disconcerted when some of my former students tell me they are taking early retirement. And with retirement, for many, comes clearing out files and some exercises in nostalgia. One of my former students wrote me a while back (early spring 2015), "I was going through some boxes in a closet and came upon one full of folders of old class material from MU [Miami University, Oxford, OH] - including my freshman English class!  Could you still assign 'The Student as N*gger' in class today […]?"

            The reference here is to Jerry Farber's once famous and infamous essay/screed/satire from 1967, a piece I taught some years in courses in Composition and Rhetoric. Farber intended to provoke, and the essay was useful for stimulating class discussion on topics in education and "student life" and demonstrated nicely some rhetorical strategies (Farber was an English teacher and knew what he was up to).

            I wrote back to this former student that his was a "Most excellent question. I taught the essay as late as 2002, but only in a Senior Capstone, and early enough in the semester for people to drop the course if they were too grossed out.  (The other option would be to work up to the more challenging and/or problematic materials, such as Joanna Russ's The Female Man [1970/75].) Also, I taught 'S as N' the week where the texts included the Prophet Amos and the primary reading was the Book of Jonah. (MORAL: Morality ≠ Decorum and 'sensitivity.') […]." And I sent on to him the two opening questions for class discussion: "(1) Rich Erlich's first [public] speech at Miami University corrected Jerry Farber, arguing that US students' central problem wasn't the hyperbolic 'The Student as N-gger' but the related, less grotesquely stated oppression of 'The Student as Child.'  I'll still argue my formulation is more correct — but why might Farber's allow for satire" in ways my more restrained, more expository, less figurative, approach did not? To which I could add the question of the many reasons why Farber's inflammatory, transgressive piece got wide distribution and my more scholarly one sunk without a trace.  Related to this was the question "(2) Should we see the origin of satire in insults, wise-ass cynicisms, taunting songs, and the rant?  If so, has part of those origins become part of the 'essence' of satire?"

            Later in our exchange of e-mails, the student noted that one of my syllabi had the line, "WARNING: YOU MAY PERCEIVE THIS COURSE AS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR MORAL HEALTH." (I also had warnings on my advanced expository writing course that I taught the Plain Style, the habitual use of which could be hazardous to careers in business, the military, and the academy.)

            Farber's satiric essay demonstrated directly how Satire as an attitude and artistic mode could invade even the essay and demonstrated emphatically the Satiric risk of transgressing taboos so much that the work doesn't provoke readers as much as turn them away — and how the revulsion/repulsion factor varies with audiences, including audiences over time. One Black woman in my 2002 class said she couldn't get beyond Farber's title and opening lines ("Students are n*ggers.  When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense") — which is unfortunate, since the essay, if anything, is anti-racist and (if occasionally misguided) definitely pro-student.

            As a quasi-official of the English Graduate Student Association at the University of Illinois (Urbana) ca. 1969, I defended teaching assistants' teaching "The Student as N*gger" against vociferous attack. (One message to me said, "The Governor called." I responded that that had to be "as aide from the Governor’s office called"; I was told I was undoubtedly correct, but the message they received for me was "The Governor called"). We were successful in that defense of teaching "The Student as N*gger"; today, as my former student implied, I'm less sure a defense would succeed.

            I'm a Professor Emeritus in English, and I spent much of my professional life, and my political one as well, dealing with words, and, partly as a joke, partly to meet a joking challenge, I once delivered a conference paper on "The Modal 'Must' in the Writing of Ursula K. Le Guin": I spent twenty minutes, plus some follow-up dialog with Le Guin, on what she meant by "must." So I'm into words, but nowadays too many people are to far into words as words (and overly concerned with attitudes) and miss larger contexts.

            The most significant context is actual politics and policies, and I've challenged Leftist comrades to perform a thought experiment asking them to decide between two candidates — all else being equal. Candidate 1 tells you, "I respect my friends in the hard-working African-American community too much to insult them with handouts; so they have my best wishes for all their programs of self-help." Candidate 2 says, "Well, I don't like colored people much, but a debt of honor is a debt of honor, and we White Americans owe the descendants of slaves reparations; now let's work out how to pay those reparations equitably and sensibly."

            The sainted George Carlin said, "All we have is words." Nah, that's bullshit, George; actions speak a whole lot louder than — and systematic action, like public policies, use words but are more important than the words as words. Besides, good ol' racists et al. can learn to talk the talk and talk it persuasively, while walking, as the expression goes, very different walks.

            (Keep an eye on Republican proposals for dealing with poverty in 2015-16.)

            Even with just literature, however, people can get too hung up with just words.

            E.g., I did some initial research and then had two groups of students check and expand those findings on changes made between the two-part original Buck Rogers stories in the late 1920s, a revision in the 1960s, and then a second revision in the 1980s. How was the science updated between 1929 and the late 20^th century? More important, what changes were made in a somewhat sexist, virulently racist, genocide-promoting book to make it more acceptable in the 1960s and 1980s?

            Answer: some words were changed and, otherwise, the 1980s version was, if anything, more Right-wing since it added a Thatcherite/Reaganesque attack on labor unions.

            The "girls" references got cleaned up a bit, as did the "Yellow-Peril" language. The happy ending of the book, however, still remained the extermination by atomic ordnance — yeah, some SF nerds knew the possibilities of nukes by 1929 — of the Asiatic invaders who'd taken over the USA. (There's a kind of coda to the genocide saying nice things about some Asians, and Africans, and suggesting a "taint" of truly Alien "blood" in the enemy — but the happy ending remained literal genocide, as in the total extermination of a very large human — if not American, if maybe not totally Terran — population.)

            Far more recently, as in 2014, I attended a scholarly session at a science fiction convention (the feminist WisCon) where people were still arguing Ursula K. Le Guin's use of masculine pronouns for the androgynous species who are almost all the characters in her 1969 classic The Left Hand of Darkness. Indeed, she should have come up with something more interesting and progressive than falling back on "the generic 'he'" for references including both human sexes — almost always two — for people in Left Hand who most of the time are both and neither. (They'd become male or female when they went into rut [although nowadays we should assume that a small number — "0.14 per 100,000 inhabitants over 15 years of age" if they were like Swedes — were in some sense "trans").

            The Left Hand of Darkness was a major feminist work in 1969, all things considered, and very useful for getting people — especially men and young women — thinking more flexibly about gender. More relevantly here, if you wanted to attack Left Hand for gender problems, there are more immediate problems than pronoun usage — looking back from the 21^st century — including an entire long scene of sexual harassment that the cultural feminists missed (Erlich, "CRITIQUE: Kulturkampfing on the Left with The Left Hand of Darkness"). "Can't see the forest for the trees," as the cliché has it — and some people can't see what's going on in a work of literature because they get hung up on individual words.

            It's probably just as well that "n*gger" becomes nearly totally tabooed to say for a while, as least for White folks and maybe most Blacks. But high school juniors and seniors would do well to study Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; and, since my much better argued "The Student as Child" isn't and has never really been available, college students should be passing around underground — i.e., on the web — Farber's "The Student as N*gger." (And they are free to call one another "bitches" and "girl" but damn well shouldn't do it! And given how regularly and thoroughly they get screwed over, students had better learn some solidarity. [Just thought I'd throw that in, given that there really isn't a transition to the next section anyway.])

            What I've written so far might go over well with conservatives verbally attacking political correctness and coming out strongly for free speech after the assault-weapons attack on Charlie Hebdo in January of 2015 and the more recent attack on the "First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest" contest in Garland, Texas, sponsored by "the American Freedom Defense Initiative" (AFDI) as part of their resistance to "creeping jihad" in America.

           I'm a life-member of the ACLU and continued to support the ACLU after their principled defense of the right of neo-Nazis to parade in Skokie, Illinois — even though I'm also a Jew who grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago, not far from Skokie, and had been greatly angered at seeing uniformed neo-Nazis parading in downtown Chicago seventeen years earlier. So I'll be consistent and easily assert the right of Charlie Hebdo to do transgressive satire, as I grimly assert my right to say that AFDI are publicity-hungry assholes and add to that my usual apology to the anus for such a comparison. (The anus is necessarily unconscious and innocent and was a great breakthrough in evolution; none of that can be said for Pamela Geller and her co-conspirators.)

            Still ….

            Still, since the virtual book burners who closed down the blogs (including mine) at OpenSalon.com, and the algorithms at Google, have made my initial offer pretty much impossible to find, I'm going to suggest to recent converts to The Right to Blaspheme the thought experiment of a limerick contest that goes beyond drawing Muhammad and may, closer to home for them, a little border upon the blasphemously obscene and obscenely blasphemous.

            There is an old limerick (#265, 266) said to go back to the Victorian period but of only legendary provenance and probably later than the 1880s and the publication of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. The usual form of the limerick begins "Thus spake I-AM-THAT-I-AM," whereas the form I learned — "Thus saith I-AM-THAT-I-AM" — is one syllable closer to the classic British form of three anapests (= nine syllables). Anyway, both the original and lightly corrected version include a mild profanity ("damn"), a vulgar slang infinitive, and an obscene verb phrase.

            I rewrote the limerick to eliminate the "bad words" but to leave it obscene and blasphemous — and more clearly a theological statement: mockery of Trinitarian doctrine (God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).

            There is also, I recently learned on line, a Spanish version.

            So, Thought Experiment for recent converts to The Right to Blaspheme: How would you take to a well-publicized contest for the best limericks — and maybe other forms poetic and graphic, or maybe in Spanish or Québécois — that mocked a crucial element of Christian faith? Or, for more-equal opportunity, Judaism?

            How long do you think this post would stay up if I got a fair number of readers and actually quoted the classic limerick or gave my somewhat more refined version?

            Like many countries, the United States is a confederation of different smaller nations and a patchwork of, among other things, ethnic groups and different religious traditions. One of the bonds that holds us together is belief in some basics like Free Speech As a practical matter, however, we are only occasionally at each others throats because most of us, most of the time use or freedom carefully.

            So, one cheer for Freedom of Speech for all and another for the usefulness of satirists and the right to provoke — and then a moment of quiet respect for respect for others (even for the idiots who disagree with us), and another moment of silent respect for the virtues, usually, of moderation and propriety.

CODA: The Student Affairs Council of Miami University was asked in the 1980s or so to approve a revision in our Statement of Good Teaching Practices that cited as an offense making students uncomfortable. A somewhat older colleague responded that as an undergraduate in Religion he'd been made very uncomfortable in a Bible course in being taught that — contrary to what he had been brought up to believe — Scripture did not pronounce Black people inferior and segregation the law of God. We voted down the provision as written and allowed on the record that making some students uncomfortable might be part of very good teaching.

            On the other hand Jerry Farber decorously used satiric hyperbole and what can awkwardly be called "transgessivity" to note "the master-slave" relationship between teachers and students. So making students uncomfortable, on occasion, is necessary to good teaching, but should be carried out — even in studying so insensitive a mode as Satire — consciously, mindfully, and very, very carefully.