I wrote the first installment of the Fake News series in October of 2020. Both the name and timing of the series attest to my inspiration: being three surreal years deep into the presidency of Donald Trump, in which he spurned the “fake news” that criticized him while welcoming “alternative facts” that improved his image. As has been done for millennia, I used Fake News to put a satirical spin on the real-world phenomena that I found the most ridiculous and least rational. The kind of which I felt massively multiplied during the Trump administration.
Where the Material Comes From
The first installment, “Tyler Singleton,” was meant to satirize the way that American conservatives and gun rights advocates fail to hold white murderers accountable for their actions in the same way they do those of color. This was far from the only time I’d go after the racist, self-contradictory, and generally nonsensical nature of Trumpian and Tea Party politics through Fake News. Yet I soon found that the steady flow of material they provided me with was just as much of a curse as it was a blessing.
In a country where politicians and lobbyists turn a blind eye to mass shootings and to legislation designed to prevent them, where Martin Luther King Jr. is quoted to challenge the study of Black history and the celebration of diversity, and where self-proclaimed misogynists are able to sustain millions of demented disciples, it can sometimes seem like all the best bits have been done already. In an ironic twist of events, reality got to them first. I spend hours racking my brain ahead of each Fake News piece. My never-ending challenge is in finding a way to comment on America’s absurdity without simply mimicking it. Naturally, this has become more difficult the more absurd the nation has gotten. Things may even reach so satirical a point that there’s no longer anything to satirize. Then what?
The Age of Consistent Satire
I read the news for two reasons: to be informed and to be inspired. For Fake News and my opinion pieces, staying on top of current events is an essential part of my creative process. Imagine my dismay as I scroll down my favorite news aggregator to find that everything I want to comment on is something that, in my opinion, I’ve already done to death. Trumpian politics, for example, get more surrealistically convoluted by the day. Of course I have something to say about the latest sophistic melodrama cooked up by Ron DeSantis or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it’s rarely something I haven’t already said in myriad ways.
In fact, now that we’re on the topic of “MTG,” we can use her as a shining example of how difficult it can be to create satire in an
age as consistently satirical as our own. Greene is a bona fide Trumper and democratically elected Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia. She has supported the Twilight Zone-grade QAnon conspiracy theory, suggested the execution of Democratic politicians, pushed the theory of 9/11 being a hoax and that several mass shootings are too. She’s also pushed multiple theories that, in conjunction, characterize the Clintons as murderous, filicidal child predators that sometimes drink the blood of their adolescent victims as a ritual offering to Satan. As the saying goes, you can’t make this up, which is an issue for the creative writers who have tasked themselves with making things up. I’d have loved to have come up with the character that is Marjorie Taylor Greene. Unfortunately, divinity beat me to it.
Outlandish, Not Ridiculous
The Fake News style of satire, as its readers know, is designed to be outlandish to a certain degree. Not so ridiculous that what it attempts to satirize is undecipherable, but not so realistic that it can be read as simple journalism instead of satire. As the ridiculous and the realistic continue to intertwine with dizzying frequency, the process of writing Fake News sometimes just feels like writing, well, news. I fear the hypothetical day when the only option left will be to write the most outlandish thing I can possibly think of in hopes that it hasn’t already occurred somewhere in nature. Even then, there would probably be a decent chance of it having appeared on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account.
Still, the show must go on. The task of a writer is to bend and twist in accordance with whatever path humanity takes, no matter how tortuous. “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times,” famously said Nina Simone. I believe this holds true regardless of what the times consist of. There will always be something to write, say, draw, sing, paint, and play. At its core, the challenge of artists today is no different from the challenge of artists last year, last decade, or even last century. One must find what to do and find how to do it.