Autumn Clematis
Postmodern thinking would suggest that controlling the language used to interpret reality controls the narrative that supports this or that idea of reality. The Goebbels's quote "We shall go down in history as either the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals," is unsourced, and because of that it's suspect. The quote suggests Goebbels was aware of how the narratives the Nazi Party propagated would be judged. But is this unsourced quote something Goebbels actually said? Is it something he actually believed. Or is it a something the author of the quote, when all the information and motivations supporting the author's understanding had found their way into this interpretation of the Goebbels meta-narrative chose to promote as something Goebbels's might have said? Inevitably it's accurate to question the extent to which Goebbels deserves the word meta-narrative all to himself, instead of a more straightforward "The Goebbels Story." It's also probably accurate to suggest that in our current climate the environment is rich with attempts to modify the meta-narrative, there are so many fine examples of attempts to rewrite or re-inform us people. To this end the word democrat is being used as a synonym for the words bad, evil, insane, libtard and dangerous snowflake. But don't hold back, Roget's has some interesting and equally dehumanizing additions for the word republican conjoined with the word patriot. To my mind, the most entertaining of these synonyms is Švejk-like, after Hašek's character, that congenital idiot, The Good Soldier Švejk. Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech, in 1923 he died at the age of 39 of heart disease. His unfinished book on the cretinous nature of authority figures, has been translated into at least 60 languages. Hašek has been called a Satirical Realist, and he's been described as having a passion for writing. He was someone who may well have approved of the Poet Charles Bukowski's epitaph "Don't Try." Bukowski's point was that authenticity before the muddle of pretension was the honorable way to express story and emotion rather than reduce emotion and story to a product. So what is satire? Merriam Webster suggests: trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly. Oxford English suggests: The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics. Easy to suggest in this day and age of us against him that whoever said "We shall go down in history as either the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals," already begins to sound like a satirist.
