Not all humor comes from a light heart. Some of the most troubled souls are our most talented comedians. It has been said that humor is the best medicine, and sometimes it is; but often enough it can also be a cynical response to the cancer that is killing us, not a medicine at all, just a comical shaking of the fist at a cruel and absurd universe.
Remember when it was said that President Obama was immune to the humorous jabs from the late night comedians because he just didn’t do anything that was that funny? After the treasure trove of material that George Bush delivered in his eight years, with his southern drawl, comical expressions, and misspoken words; it seemed that eight years of Obama with his serious demeanor, sympathetic political leanings, and the fears of accusations of racism, would all lead to a famine of Presidential comedy. Up until recently that has generally been the case.
Ridicule is perhaps the lowest form of comedy. That doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. It just isn’t nice. How many of us have found ourselves hiding a smirk or suppressing a chuckle at a cruel but humorous insult? And herein lies the elusive source of what is funny about Barack Obama. As presidents go, he is really bad at his job. As with any poor administrator, Obama’s ineptitude has metastasized throughout his administration. One need look no further than the remarkable loss of leadership in the military where we are bleeding generals and admirals as the best of the best find themselves unwelcome in an administration more concerned with political statements than national defense. Organizations die when their best people make an exit leaving only dead wood behind. The resulting performance can be an epic tragedy, but it can also be a comedy of errors. The ineptitude exhibited in the Obamacare rollout does not just invite ridicule, it demands it. It was laughable even before the comedians worked it over. The presence of a paranoid schizophrenic who was hallucinating and hearing voices while signing gibberish at the Mandela service, inches from the President of the United States, would be merely an oddity were it not for the arrest record and violent tendencies in the gentleman’s past. The man’s demeanor and the interpretation of his gibberish reminds us that despite the tragedy of his illness and the potential danger, crazy people can be kind of funny sometimes… forgive me. Some of the statements and actions coming out of our government in recent days begs the question of whether they are hallucinating and hearing voices, the gibberish is almost just as unintelligible.
IMHO: The failure of the South African government to appropriately vet the signing interpreter shows us that ineptitude is not a characteristic restricted to our own government. Indeed, it is an anomaly to find a government that actually seems to exhibit excellence, and when you do, it’s usually the government of a very small nation. The fallacy of the progressive mindset is the belief that it is a given that huge bureaucracies can accomplish some things that can be done in no other way. Only the government can provide infrastructure, only the government could create the internet, only the government could fly a man to the moon. Throw enough money around and even the totally inept might occasionally look like they know what they’re doing, but give even a fraction of that money to a more focused and talented group and the results could be staggering. Because government generally follows public opinion, its imprimatur often looks like the agent of change when it is simply the acknowledgment of it. Government is the god that we have created, and not the God who created us. As such, it is a woefully inadequate savior, and its attempts at deity will be sadly comical. We may be on our way to hell in a hand basket… but at least we’ll be entertained along the way.
