The Satiric Exaggeration Of Satire

[Dave Monroe]

Reality: The Satiric Exaggeration Of Satire

I've been told by some people who saw Dr. Strangelove
when it came out in 1964 that they didn't find it
funny at all. It didn't seem like satiric exaggeration
to them. It seemed like a straightforward
representation of reality.

I'm not sure they were right. Not because it was an
exaggeration, though—but because the reality was
actually WORSE than the movie.

In Dr. Strangelove, General Buck Turgidson (the George
C. Scott character) was supposedly based on Curtis
LeMay, who headed the Strategic Air Command during the
fifties. LeMay was notoriously insane, known for
musing about nuking the Russians for no reason so
they'd be "condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps
for generations to come." Now, here's the famous
exchange where Turgidson advises the president to
launch a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet
Union:

    GENERAL TURGIDSON: Mr. President, we are rapidly
approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as
human beings and for the life of our nation. Now,
truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is
necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two
admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless
distinguishable, postwar environments: one where you
got twenty million people killed, and the other where
you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

    PRESIDENT: You're talking about mass murder,
General, not war!

    GENERAL TURGIDSON: Mr. President, I'm not saying
we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more
than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending
on the breaks. 

Ha ha ha! No more than ten to twenty million killed,
tops!

But when Dr. Strangelove was released, LeMay was no
longer head of SAC. His successor was Gen. Thomas
Power, who was so crazy he scared EVEN LeMay. Here's
something Power said in 1960 about nuclear war:

    "The whole idea is to kill the bastards...At the
end of the war, if there are two Americans and one
Russian, we win."

That's why I say that to understand reality, you have
to take satire and then wildly exaggerate it.

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com