When I was a kid, I thought Mad Magazine sucked. The humor was too obvious—like it was hitting you over the head. There was no subtlety. It was like a bad joke teller who nudges you, “Get it?! He thought she was making fun of his eye, but she was really just surprised, ‘Would I?’ Get it?!” That was the magazine.

But then yesterday, they came out with, If Norman Rockwell Depicted Today’s America: the Militarization of Officer Joe. And I was blown away! They nailed it. This is good satire. It isn’t even about what’s happened to our policing, because in a fundamental sense, that hasn’t changed so much. What has changed is the way that the mainstream of America sees the police.

When Rockwell created the original in 1958, if he had painted a black boy, the officer would have been saying, “What are you doing on that seat, boy?! Don’t you know this is the white’s section!” So for a great many people in 1958, the parody was accurate at the time—at least in the general sense.

Of course, it isn’t only about the representation of the police. There have been far too many Ferguson-type shootings and many of them have gotten a lot of attention. What’s more, nice white middle class people have found that increasingly their local police forces do more harm than good. Now instead of just fixing problems, police seem focused on getting arrests. As though it makes any sense to arrest a 16-year-old boy for a Facebook posting that he shot his neighbor’s pet dinosaur.

So what I’m thinking is that maybe Mad Magazine is just as stupid as it ever was. It is just that America—and especially American policing—has gotten so stupid that Mad looks good by comparison. In its defense, Mad has never claimed to be anything but stupid. On its website, it offers for readers to, “Get more stupidity delivered right to your mailbox!” But when Mad Magazine is clearly more serious and insightful than the Very Serious Chorus of the likes of David Brooks (much less the right wing loonies), I fear we have past the point from which we can return.

H/T: Democratic National Christian Choice

A couple of years ago, I wrote, Inequality: the Monopoly Analogy. It involved a social psychologist’s experiment where he had people play Monopoly. But instead of the usual rules, some players were “rich” and so got twice as much money as the players who were “poor.” And what he noticed was that the “poor” players got discouraged and the rich players exhibited feelings of entitlement and felt happy about the the poor players bad “luck.”

I was over at Digby’s Blog today, where I found a fabulous article by Batocchio, Lucky Duckies and Fortunate Sons. I recommend reading the whole thing, because it is rather wide ranging. But it introduced me to the game StarPower. It was invented in 1969 to study exactly these kinds of class issues. Based upon how they start, people are placed into one of three groups: Square, Circle, or Triangle. These correspond to rich, middle, and poor.

The structure of the game is such that if you are a Triangle, you’re going to stay a Triangle. If you are Circle and you get lucky, you might make it into the Square group. Similarly, someone in the Square group with bad luck might fall into the Circle group. At least, that’s the case for the first half of the game. But then, the game allows the rules to be changed by the Square group. It should come as no surprise that the people playing the game don’t choose to make the game more fair; they change the rules to give themselves even more advantage.

Donella Meadows described her experiences playing the game all over the world, Why Would Anyone Want to Play StarPower. And she described one incident that actually did shock me, but I don’t know why:

I think the reason I found this shocking is that you would think that in a game, a rational appeal like this would work. But if it doesn’t work there, how can it possibly work in the real world with actual money. I hate to think that it requires revolution, but it is true that in the real world, there are a whole lot more Triangles. Meadows deals with the real world consequences:

She wrote that in 1986. In the 28 years since then, it has gotten so much worse. And along with that, we have gotten a class of Squares who have convinced themselves, not that the game is fair, but that it is unfair—to them. It’s frightening to think about. But it ought to be even more frightening to them. They are living in delusion. And I hate to think what the Triangles might do if all the rhetoric about “job creators” starts to sound as hollow as it actually is.

We are all doomed.

The other day, Andrea called to read from an article by John Hodgman in The New Yorker, Ask Ayn. In it, he created excerpts from a column she had supposedly written for Parade Magazine shortly before her death. Of course, the article isn’t presented that way. It starts, “After a couple of appearances on the interview program Donahue, in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on Match Game and a guest appearance on Fantasy Island as the Spirit of Capitalism.” I did not get the joke.

I knew she had been on Donahue, so it wasn’t a stretch that she was on a second time. And the truth is that Rand had a love a pop culture. Corey Robin’s essay on her is titled, Garbage and Gravitas. And the fact that I have read a couple of biographies of her made the joke much more opaque. She was a supremely strange person. In addition to this, I knew that she had written a column for a popular audience. It turns out it was for The Los Angeles Times, but that isn’t too far off.

Anyway, Andrea started reading to me the fake columns. Here’s the first one she read:

Again, I was confused. I remembered that she did claim to like the show Charlie’s Angels. And she was totally hung up on beauty. Whatever else you can say about her, Ayn Rand was not a beautiful woman and she was painfully aware of it. She idolized Marilyn Monroe, writing at least one entire essay about her. So I was kind of confused because all of the fake columns started off with things Rand believed, written in ways that Rand wrote. Hodgman recreates her style very well. But then the columns slid off sideways but rarely into total absurdity—rather typical of Hodgman.

The whole experience was yet another example of how it is not healthy to know a lot about Ayn Rand. But luckily, John Hodgman performed the piece live and it is on YouTube. And it is hilarious. But at the start of it, he mentions that all of the bits start off with “pretty much verbatim quotes from Ayn Rand.” That would have helped a lot—context is everything in comedy. But you can’t miss the comedy with his performance. Even after having heard most of it, I still really enjoyed this:

For the record, Ayn Rand hated Reagan. She also hated the libertarian movement. She hated pretty much everyone. Even among her circle of Objectivists, people were constantly being excommunicated over trivial matters. There are very good reasons why people call Objectivism a cult. I don’t know if I would go that far. But it was typical of small revolutionary groups so brilliantly parodied in Life of Brian:

I have a soft spot for losers and comically idiotic people. That’s especially true when they are blissfully unaware of what they are doing and when what they are doing is in no way mean. And so, I do not present Representative Curt Clawson to laugh at but rather with. But laugh you should, because this is like something straight out of Monty Python.

Clawson just got into the House, having replaced Trey Radel who was forced to resign because he was arrested for cocaine possession. Now he’s a Tea Party guy, and a businessman who I’m sure will tell you, “I did build that!” And I’m sure in the future I will have many bad things to say about him because he probably does hold the vilest of opinions. But yesterday, there he was, the newest person on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And testifying before him were Nisha Biswal from the State Department and Arun Kumar from the Commerce Department. But Clawson was confused; he thought they were representatives from India.

Now, it is true that they are both Indian-Americans. Indeed Kumar clearly was not born in this country. But Biswal just as clearly was, based upon her casual American accent. But Clawson was actually very sweet. He waxed about how much he loved India. According to John Hudson of Foreign Policy, “During the hearing, he repeatedly touted his deep knowledge of the Indian subcontinent and his favorite Bollywood movies.” I just want to hug him!

The interesting thing though, is that no one contradicted him. But when the ranking Democrat, Eliot Engel, got to speak, he pointedly said to the two administration officials, “Thank you both for your service to our country, it’s very much appreciated.” But the best part is when Clawson asked Biswal if India would be as open to capital flows as the US is to capital from from them. She responded, “I think your question is to the Indian government. We certainly share your sentiment, and we certainly will advocate that on behalf of the US.” Clawson was not at all moved from his delusion. He smiled and said, “Okay, we’ll see some progress!”

There is, of course, the possibility that he’s drunk. He certainly looks it. I don’t mean really drunk, but just far enough gone that the world seems like a damned fine place. And if he was drunk, I don’t think it takes away from the beauty of the moment. (If you don’t know what I mean, watch this skit from That Mitchel and Webb Look, The Inebriati.)

More seriously, however, it does show just how clueless rich people are. They so cut themselves off from the rest of the nation, they don’t know that it isn’t 1820 anymore. It reminds me of an episode of the television show MASH where some tribunal is taking place and the judge says to the prosecuting officer who is African American, “But first: a song!” The judge is so out of it that he thinks the officer is a minstrel.

Today, Clawson released a statement apologizing, “I made a mistake in speaking before being fully briefed and I apologize. I’m a quick study, but in this case I shot an air ball.” Clawson played basketball at Purdue University from 1981 to 1984. Go Boilermakers!

H/T: Ed Kilgore