or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
April 29, 2008
How Did We Ridicule Powerful People Before The Internet?
Apparently we had to write books, which is far less effective and fun. This is from Sound and Fury by Eric Alterman:
In early November 1987, Edward Luttwak spied a photo on page one of The New York Times posing Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega beside Erich Honecker of East Germany and Poland's Wojciech Jarulzelski at the opening of the 19th Party Congress in Moscow. The photo, wrote Luttwak in The Washington Post, proved that the Sandinistas had been admitted to the "very exclusive club of governments the Soviet Union regard as permanent, organic allies," and thus "settled conclusively" the argument over "the nature of the Sandinista regime and its intent in regard to the peace plan." One of the many problems with Luttwak's analysis was that the photo did not exist, and neither, so far an anyone else knew, did the club. The Times had simply published two photos adjacently with only a tiny border between them.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at April 29, 2008 03:49 PMTHE OLD MOUNTAIN MAN, Sylvan Hart, (Florence, Idaho) once said, back in 66, "The New York Times is wonerful for cooking eggs over. The fishoil in the ink lends a certain flavor to the eggs."
Posted by: Mike Meyer at April 29, 2008 03:58 PMLuttwak puts himself out there, and in this instance certainly made himself look foolish. But he's an erudute man in terms of military history scholarship and has earned respect at least as often as earning ridicule. (In the latter category, check out his pre-Gulf War I pronouncements and more recent statements re. counterinsurgency strategy.)
Of course the Sandinistas were, as I recall, at least "wannabe" Marxist-Leninists, falling tragicomically short by virtue of allowing a free election. Isn't Ortega something of a democratic socialist these days?
Posted by: Ralph Hitchens at April 29, 2008 04:37 PMNot necessarily less effective...I mean anyone remember Abbe Sieyes and his talk about the Fourth Estate...I mean wow heads sure rolled after that...which is more than the internet has done...
Posted by: En Ming Hee at April 29, 2008 11:39 PMWhoops sorry...THIRD estate.
Posted by: En Ming Hee at April 29, 2008 11:41 PMOnce I found a photo of Big Brother with three later discredited early Party leaders. But then later I found out the photo never existed.
Posted by: Seth at April 30, 2008 03:06 PM
