Sacha Baron Cohen’s new series, Who Is America? was at times hard to watch but also howlingly funny. Philip Nolan’s verdict
WE live in a post-satire world. As The Onion, the best-known spoof website in the United States, recently announced with tongue only slightly in cheek, it is in danger of going out of business because it can’t make up anything quite as bizarre as that country’s current realities. That said, Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind Ali G and Borat, made a savage and fearless stab at it after a 10-year absence from our screens, in Who Is America? on Channel 4. In four different disguises – Make America Great Again Trump voter Bill Wayne Ruddick Jr; liberal arts professor Dr Nim Cain-N’Degocello; ex-convict British artist Rick Sherman, whose speciality is painting using bodily fluids; and Colonel Erran Morad, formerly of the Israeli Defence Forces – he skewered Republicans and Democrats alike in a series of interviews that, while often hard to watch, were howlingly funny too.
In the guise of Morad, he convinced gun lobbyists and politicians to support an initiative he claimed already was popular in Israel, a scheme to train children as young as three to use assault weapons against terrorists. I nearly spat my coffee when he said: ‘My son was one of the first on the programme – God rest his soul. He died doing something I love.’
It really should have come as no surprise that the people he targeted were so enthusiastic about training these ‘Kinderguardians’. One, Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens’ Defence League, went so far as to take part in a promo video featuring guns disguised as toys – the Puppy Pistol, Gunny Rabbit and the Uzicorn.
Larry Pratt, of the Gun Owners Of America organisation, was convinced not only that children respond in crisis situations 80% faster than adults, but also to blindly read out a scientific explanation for why this is the case: ‘It’s because of the Blink 182 hormone produced in the Rita Ora before moving down the Cardi B to the Wiz Khalifa.’ In case you don’t know – and Larry, living up to his surname, clearly hadn’t a clue – all four are music acts.
Meanwhile, Joe Walsh, the former Republican Congressman for Illinois, was persuaded to say directly to camera: ‘A first-grader can become a first-grenader’. Tellingly, he was first out the traps on Monday to condemn Trump’s capitulation at the Helsinki Summit, just hours after Who Is America? aired in the United States, in what seemed very like a damage-limitation deflection exercise.
Equally disturbing was that all these people are so desperate for a public profile, they didn’t even perform a basic level of due diligence in checking out the backgrounds of their interviewers. If they had done so, they perhaps would have noticed that ‘Colonel Erran Morad’ joined Twitter only in April of this year. That certainly would have set alarm bells ringing with me.
It was mind-boggling and terrifying at the same time, but it still paled compared with Channel 4’s
Dispatches, which sent an undercover reporter into CPL, the Irish recruitment company that employs first-tier content moderators for Facebook in Dublin.
Their job seemed very simple. If there was a photo on the site showing even a hint of female nipple, it had to be taken down immediately. If there was a video showing two girls kicking the living daylights out of each other, or of a man beating his infant stepson, or the hate speech of Tommy Robinson and his English Nazi supporters, they could stay, because they generated traffic to Facebook, and without traffic, it can’t make money.
The abject lack of any humanity, of anything resembling morality, was deeply depressing. Even though children under 13 are supposedly banned from creating Facebook profiles, no action is taken against them, even when their profile photo clearly indicates they are under age. ‘If they are lying, we don’t care,’ one moderator explained. ‘We pretend that we’re blind.’
If someone posted something bad about Muslims, that was hate speech and had to be removed. If, however, they added the word ‘immigrant’ after Muslim, that could stay. As a user of Facebook, I find it useful for keeping touch with family and friends all over the world, but its pernicious role in the dissemination of racial hate and the undermining of traditional democratic norms, allied to its massive ‘population’, rapidly is turning it into a rogue state. Honestly, it’s vile.
The saddest programme of the week was RTÉ’s My Broken Brain, which told us that 700,000 people in Ireland suffer with neurological conditions. We met a few of them – Frank Smyth, coping with the early onset of Alzheimer’s, which also killed his father, theatre impresario Brendan; Billy Reilly, who suffers with motor neurone disease; and Gerry Boyle, who has Parkinson’s.
Their stories were heartbreaking, for two reasons. The first, obviously, was the simple human cost. The second, though, was that there are people out there – US lawmakers, gun lobbyists, Facebook bosses terrified of a female breast but oblivious to violence and hatred – with fully functioning brains who seem utterly incapable of using them. Our modern tragedy is not just living in a post-satire world, but in a post-empathy world too. On so many levels, it was a bad week.