The death of a satirical force
Satirisit Paul Krassner exposed ‘scuzziness’ of people in power
I want to honour the recent death of America’s finest political satirist of the 20th century, Paul Krassner. The 19th belonged to Mark Twain, whose satirical subject was race (Pudd’nhead Wilson, Huckleberry Finn).
This century, so far, is Jon Stewart’s, whose subject was largely the media and propaganda apparatus — he did a popularized version of Noam Chomsky’s endless work on “manufacturing consent.” Stewart retired just in time to avoid the poleaxing of satire by Donald Trump, who’s so infuriating that he’s transformed deft skewer-ers into feckless denouncers and haranguers, without much wit.
Krassner (born in 1932) took as his topic, I’d say, the scuzziness of respectable people in power. It was mid-20th century, when the “elites” really got away with everything but murder and, if you broaden the definition to death by unjustifiable war or poverty, that, too.
So, after Walt Disney — America’s fusty uncle — died in 1966, Krassner published a memorial poster showing Disney characters engaged in raunchy sex acts, like five of the seven dwarfs having group sex with Snow White (the other two have sex with each other). It was about disrespect for the overlords and their icons — a democratic impulse that’s always applicable, akin to populism today.
Krassner started in the 1950s with Mad magazine, which also passed recently. Then, he created his own mag, the Realist — a great satirical title. He painted his masterpiece with a 1967 article, “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” It was like an instructional manual on satire. It claimed to reveal a censored section from a bestseller on the Kennedy assassination — four years earlier — called The Death of a President, authorized by JFK’s family (Jackie, Bobby, etc.) who decided they disapproved of the result and demanded changes. The author eventually agreed, so when Krassner produced an ostensible uncensored version, it already had credibility.
It wasn’t really about Kennedy, it was about his successor, former veep Lyndon Johnson (LBJ). He’d been a uniquely powerful senator who lost the nomination to Kennedy and ran beside him. After the election, the Kennedys treated him with contempt.
A satirical LP (!) at the time had a little boy arrive at the White House asking if JFK’s daughter, Caroline, could come out and play. When JFK said she was busy, the kid asked if Lyndon could come instead. Someone with Johnson’s ego surely had been seething. He once bragged, typically for the era, that he’d “had more women by accident than Kennedy ever had on purpose.” His vulgarity was notorious.
Krassner approached the key moment, which happened on the plane flying JFK’s corpse back from Dallas, slowly. The article began on page 1, then continued on page 18, where he introduces the incident, supposedly told by Jackie’s pal Gore Vidal, who says she “inadvertently walked in on [LBJ] as he was standing over the casket and chuckling … there is only one way to say this — he was literally f--ing my husband in the throat. In the bullet wound in the front of his throat.”
As I write this, I still find it shocking and surprising, although in the half century since, everything imaginable about anything has been written somewhere. “He reached a climax … the next thing I knew he was being sworn in as president.” Everyone had seen those photos of LBJ being sworn on the plane, with Jackie in the background.
The genius of it was: you believed it, if only for a moment. Krassner admitted years later that the illusion was brief. It was for me: it rang with truth, but you quickly realized it wasn’t literally so. That only added to its artfulness.
What was the point? Not just disrespect. Johnson could’ve been a great president. He passed civil rights laws, using his skills, where JFK would probably have failed. He began a serious “war” on poverty. But he also committed to the war in Vietnam, though he knew it was unwinnable; he felt U.S. presidents simply couldn’t abandon wars. By ’68, he’d withdrawn from running for president. So the piece had, at least in retrospect, a tragicomic, or just tragic, element.
Why has disrespect for authority now lost its bite? Obviously, because the U.S.’s mightiest figure appropriated it. Trump is constantly animating a Disney memorial poster about the U.S. that not only smears Snow White and the dwarves, but Martin Luther King and John McCain. Satirists are probably tempted to look for ways to show respect. He swiped their best weapon — or their entire arsenal.
Why has disrespect for authority now lost its bite? Obviously, because the U.S.’s mightiest figure appropriated it.