Satire Fire
It is much harder to create satire when the world, itself, is naturally satirical. — Paul Krassner, in an interview with Mr. Fish
Praising the great American man of letters and celebrated satirical genius Mark Twain in his classic memoir The Age of Folly, the late Lewis Lapham lamented that “Our contemporary brigade of satirists doesn’t play with fire. The heavy calibers of Twain’s humor have gone missing from our news and entertainment media because the audiences made for television don’t look with favor upon the kind of jokes that cast doubt on the guarantee of happiness and the promise of redemption. Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly, and safe…they prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”
Fortunately, there are still a few “adult” satirists in our midst that share Lapham’s assessment of Twain, grown up, street-wise, heavy caliber creators of sardonic commentary and graphic art with the capacity to have a scalding and lasting impact on the targeted recipients of their scathing impertinence. One of these rare individuals is the author of the illustration below and dozens of others posted in articles on my Substack site over the years, a genius named Dwayne Booth, who publishes his wares under the famous nom de plume, Mr. Fish. Unlike the media players missing in action listed by Lapham, Mr. Fish not only “plays with fire” — he also swims in the “deep end” of the pool. Blessed with an “adult” view of reality valued by Twain that enables him to adroitly adapt to the unpredictable vicissitudes of modern life in TV Land, and inspired by his reverence for truth and justice, Mr. Fish creates satire that consistently burns through the gaslit flames of toxic bullshit with acerbic certainty. “Good art never shuts up,” he said in an interview with the great Paul Krassner, “just as the best political cartooning is about people, not politics, and both truth and beauty are circumstantial and never absolute.”
The satirical masterpiece above featuring the symbols of the two corrupt political parties now ruining America, is a case in point. The occasion for displaying the picture here is also an opportunity to pay homage to the great stand-up comedian Mort Sahl, who died, age 94, in 2021. Mr. Fish’s tribute to Sahl Every Other Tuesday With Mort Sahl, is available on scheerpost.com. It was Mr. Fish’s enlightening piece that sharpened my understanding of the overarching question the two men so brilliantly asked and answered in their frequent conversations, “What’s wrong with America?” Fish’s description of the “joyful confidence with which Sahl juggled his absurdist buoyancy into the existential dread surrounding him,” serves as an elixir of sanity, driving home the significance of Sahl’s quip that “The Democrats have to start doing something other than just to repeat over and over that they’re not Republicans.”
As Fish points out in his tribute, Sahl was “right about so many things so much of the time and usually decades before anyone else.” In addition to noting Sahl’s warning in 1960 that “Israel was becoming something of a nationalistic bully in the Middle East,” Fish cited Sahl’s comment in an interview with Paul Krassner that it was “suddenly possible to be a Democrat and Republican at the same time,” identifying the reality that set the stage for the Swamp of today and enhancing the relevance of Fish’s great cartoon. As Mr. Fish’s book Nobody Left makes clear, humor is the root of all satire, an ingredient which enlivened my reading of Every Other Tuesday with a salubrious dose of belly laughter mixed with tears, an experience that greatly enhanced my appreciation of Sahl’s humor regarding the “disease of modern politics” that the two joyously diagnosed back in 2007/2008 in a Bel Air, California restaurant where they often hung out and exchanged ideas.
Watching the DVD Cartooning from the Deep End again recently, the great documentary about Mr. Fish produced by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Pablo Bryant, dramatically boosted my awareness of the radical evil that has tightened its grip on American society as the ruling oligarchs in league with the military/industrial/congressional establishment intensify their insane quest for Empire. Bryant’s film is a first-rate portrait of Mr. Fish as he rails against the crooked politicians, societal institutions of blatant kleptocracy, corrupt systems of injustice, and the myriad abuses of democracy extant in America’s neoliberal nightmare. I can think of no finer tribute to Fish than to say he is a lot like Mark Twain in his regard for liberty and justice for all, and especially in how, as Lapham described Twain’s modus operandi in The Age of Folly, Fish also “Comes down on the side of the liberties of the people as opposed to the ambitions of the state, pitting the force of his intellect against the ‘peacock shams’ of the world’s ‘colossal humbug,’ believing that it is the freedoms of thought that rescue a democracy from its stupidities and crimes, the courage of its dissenting citizens that protects it against the despotism of wealth and power backed up with platitudes and billy clubs and subprime loans.”
When I ordered Cartooning From the Deep End directly from Pablo Bryant, he asked for some feedback and I gladly complied, explaining that I heard about the production via Mr. Fish’s On Contact interview with Chris Hedges, and like one of the artist’s paper airplanes featured in the DVD, it flew all the way from L.A. right into our hearts. I also told Bryant that I thought his documentary reflected his deep respect and admiration for the subject and his amiable family. Bryant wrote back that the project was indeed a labor of love, “one that feels like it is now withering on the vine,” but as my ebullient email reminded him, “comes alive with every viewing.” In an interview with Filmotomy, Bryant confessed he was “blindsided” by Mr. Fish’s art when he discovered it, “the sophistaication, the humor, the brutality and uncompromising nature of the work,” as he put it. “It all represented a world I struggle with to meet head-on, because it is often so complicated and dark.”
Mr. Fish’s art can be dark indeed, and for good reason. The “armed circus” as Lapham called the American empire, is an oppressive, coercive diaspora that fears artists of Mr. Fish’s caliber, because according to psychologist Rollo May, “They are bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent…Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. Thus are they creators of the ‘uncreated conscience of the race.’” They can also become beacons of sanity and guides for survival in situations where traditional leaders have lost their way, as is the case today in the Washington, D.C. Swamp, which, as Mr. Fish’s imagines, would make an excellent site for a national landfill!
The American Empire currently spends over 50% of taxpayer dollars on weapons and defense in its relentless pursuit of perpetual war, global tyranny and genocide, but only a relative pittance on domestic necessities such as rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and launching green energy initiatives for the preservation of precious soil, water and other natural resources in the face of what scientists believe is a major species extinction event, which also threatens the end of us arrogant, anthropocentric Homo sapiens. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned that mankind now lives in a “triple crisis: a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis and a pollution crisis. And if we don’t act immediately, we are on the verge of the abyss.” While Mr. Fish’s cartoons inject a lot of welcome humor into this dark precipice, beyond the mirth the corrosive evil at the heart of the Beast looms ominously in the background. Accessing the scope of the predatory ethos driving the dissolution of American society, Mr. Fish’s friend and colleague, Scheerpost columnist Chris Hedges, writes, “Imperial ineptitude is matched by domestic ineptitude. The collapse of good government at home, with legislative, executive and judicial systems all seized by corporate power, ensures that the incompetent and the corrupt, those dedicated not to the the national interest but to swelling the profits of the oligarchic elite, will lead the country into a cul-de-sac.”
The news from the front lines of capitalism’s war on the earth and the living beings that inhabit it, is grim to be sure. As we approach another rigged election, staged to empower the “one-party system with two right wings,” as the late Gore Vidal once described the matrix of political power, and a congress made up of mostly “schmucks and rouges,” to borrow James Howard Kunstler’s colorful line, their constituents in the lower reaches of the electorate shoulder the burden and endure the pain. Meanwhile, the equestrian class at the top of the economic pyramid wallows in what William Morris characterized as “the swinish luxury of the rich.” When it comes to economics, it seems the more things change, the more they remain the same, and sometimes the future can look mighty bleak. “At no moment in its history has America declared lasting peace between the haves and have-nots,” writes Lewis Lapham in The Age of Folly. “Temporary cessations of hostility, but no permanent closing of the moral and social divide between debtor and creditor, and no giving up on the thought that some lives matter more than others.”
In the midst of this tragic failure of democracy, enter stage left, Mr. Fish, whose work has a way of brightening things up considerably. His brilliant cartoons and sardonic humor demonstrate time and time again that making arrangements for the Apocalypse doesn’t have to be a grim, bloody affair with barricades in the streets, attacks on Capitol Hill, guillotines in public squares, and mass shootings in schools and workplaces. His work reflects the enduring hope that violence will be entirely unnecessary, and dismantling capitalist consumer culture can be more about changing perceptions through education, empathy and humor rather than inciting riots and trying to force the issue at the point of a gun. Some righteous rebellion on the part of the people is surely in order, of course, as Mr. Fish’s cartoon of the two wishbones below points out. The power of that metaphor was evident during the antiwar protests of the late 60s, a power we need to reactivate now by “carrying out mass, sustained acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in an attempt to smash the MegaMachine,” as his friend the great journalist Chris Hedges succinctly states the case.
As I mentioned earlier, Mr. Fish is also the author of a fantastic book titled Nobody Left, a rich collection of essays, cartoons and interviews with some distinuished cultural icons and artists from the past who share a rare characteristic with Mr. Fish that he calls “emotional mutuality.” These luminaries include the already referenced and often quoted, Lewis Lapham, plus, Graham Nash, Lily Tomlin, Lenny Bruce, Joan Baez, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Tarig Ali, Robert Scheer, Paul Krassner, and many other like-minded individuals featured in this treasure tome of cartoons and texts “packed with nutrients for the progressive brain,” as Pat Thomas describes the book. The point here is, after you see the movie, get the book, which can be ordered from Mr. Fish’s website, clowncrack.com. As Robert Scheer urged listeners in a memorable Scheerpost podcast with the artist, “Give it to your nephew or your own child or grandchild, and that’ll give them a reason to hold on to integrity.”
In his Nobody Left interview with Lily Tomlin, Mr. Fish explains that “People keep telling me that I should be a millionaire and I tell them that corporations and private investors are the only ones capable of making anybody a millionaire and that most everything I do is some variation of the same message: FUCK CORPORATIONS AND PRIVATE WEALTH.” Although not one to sell his soul to the Neoliberal Devil for filthy lucre, Mr. Fish is still a wealthy man in terms of what really matters in life: integrity, talent and empathy for others and an uncompromising commitment to the common good, virtues that don’t amount to much in a society that reduces human interaction with reality to environmentally destructive capitalists feasts of perpetual war and conspicuous consumption. The love of truth and justice rather than a dedication to the cash nexus comprises the staff of life in Mr. Fish’s world, which is a good thing in view of his incendiary mission statement that defines his work as a “threat to the dominant culture,” a stance that certainly limits his sales options in a predatory capitalist society. With each cartoon Mr. Fish challenges the insanity of the dominant culture and slams Neoliberalism’s limp dick in the bank vault door while simultaneously opening a perceptual window of freedom in the corporate state’s prison of perpetual war, ecocide and economic domination that now shackles the human spirit in the vortex of late-stage capitalism’s death spiral. What Mr. Fish said in praise of The Realist editor Paul Krassner’s work in a Nobody Left interview applies to the artist’s own work as well. “As the No. 1 progenitor of all the alternative an underground publications that followed it, said Mr. Fish, “The Realist taught us that the best way to rescue a panicked society from drowning is not to throw it a life preserver, but to teach it how to swim.”
There’s a lot to learn from Mr. Fish as he unveils his own swimming lesson’s curriculum which also includes some fishing instruction. Casting his line about in the delusional waters at the deep end of the conspiratorial stream of American political consciousness, he lampoons lie after egregious social lie with his satirical graphic lures, reeling in the hooked whoppers for the edification of the truth-starved brains of those willing to take a look. A case in point is the image below of Jeff Bezos making a personal Amazon Prime delivery to his favorite codependent uncle.
The method to Mr. Fish’s madness is satire, a mode of expression that according to the dictionary, involves “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize peoples’ stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” More precisely, as Mr. Fish defines the term, satire is “about revealing a truth that, for one reason or another, has been camouflaged by either power or polite society and {doing so} in a creative way instead of a journalistic way, or a lawyerly way.” Although he says he does not wish to make art or entertainment per se, Mr. Fish nevertheless succeeds in delivering a great deal of savage humor in the bargain, defying the view of the Ancient Greek philosophers that humor is “mostly corrosive and anti-intellectual to sound reasoning.”
“Nearly 2,500 years later and with several hundred decades of evidence to support an opposing point of view,” Mr. Fish retorts, “it is now undeniable that Plato and Aristotle were wrong. There is no greater exemplar of sound reasoning —no greater filter of politics, religion and mammonism — than humor.”
In the end, amidst all the drollery and wit, Mr. Fish proves his point and accomplishes his mission as a satirist to “surprise and delight” with the additional virtue of uncompromising integrity.”