In case you missed it, parody died this week. It had been ailing for some time, steadily enfeebled by the growing hegemony of an ideological mindset that made its mocking rendering of extreme ideas no longer pointed or even funny. When the lampoon becomes less absurd than the real thing, parody’s fate is sealed.
But it was finally put out of its misery when it was bludgeoned to death by the latest elevation of a caricature-defying radical to one of the high peaks of American cultural life.
Katherine Maher was appointed last month as chief executive of National Public Radio. Unless you have an obsessive interest in the more rarefied corners of American media, you won’t have heard of Maher. You probably haven’t heard of NPR either, a fact you should quickly add to the list of items in your gratitude journal.
It’s the US public broadcaster, funded in large part not by a mandatory universal levy like the BBC but by direct subventions of taxpayer money appropriated by Congress. Its output manages uncannily to recreate both the fervour and the earnestness of a Puritan meeting house of the 17th century.
The programming consists largely of news and current affairs shows featuring lengthy disquisitions on the persecution of Sioux laundry workers in the Midwest or the plight of transgender potters in the Deep South, punctuated by occasional “comedy” game shows that seem to have been lifted from the file of ideas rejected by BBC Light Entertainment in the 1960s. If you can sit through an episode of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! (Yes Yes… It Really Is Called That!) without satisfying the urge to blow your brains out, you need help.
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Of course, as all this suggests, NPR has long been absolutely right-on, PC, woke, gently exhaling to a vanishing audience in the tone of a tranquillised therapist all the established verities of the progressive left. But in the past week it has unexpectedly become a topic of national conversation.
A seasoned NPR journalist named Uri Berliner went public with an exposé of just how demented the organisation’s values have become. In an essay in The Free Press, Berliner described himself as a perfect fit for the NPR mould: a Subaru-driving, liberal arts college graduate, with listening tastes right off the campus of Berkeley who had been “raised by a lesbian peace activist mother”.
But even this avatar of modern progressivism felt compelled to express alarm at how far NPR had gone, and recounted numerous examples — the literal absence of a single Republican voter in the entire newsroom, an editorial prohibition on stories that might be deemed helpful even inadvertently to Donald Trump, and many more.
This was no surprise to anyone who has listened to NPR for more than the 15 seconds it takes to discover you’ve tuned in to the wrong station while driving. But the main effect was to cause an angry backlash within NPR itself. Apparently intent on validating the allegation that they were a bunch of intolerant cultural Maoists, a large group of employees wrote to their bosses demanding that their colleague be disciplined.
Enter Maher, bludgeon in hand, failing parody in her sights. Before her appointment, Maher had clocked up mileage in many of the institutions that most aggressively promote the ideological advancement of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” fraud that has taken over so much of our lives: Unicef, the World Bank, Wikipedia. As she climbed this ladder into the cultural clouds, she kept up a running commentary on all the evils of western society and capitalism through a series of tweets, blog posts and speeches. There are literally thousands of these meditations, but a few will give you a flavour.
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On the wickedness of festive seasonal family gatherings: “Made it through dinner. Zero turkeys sacrificed to the racist uncles.” On the transphobia of Hillary Clinton: “I do wish Hillary wouldn’t use the language of ‘boy and girl’. It’s erasing language for non-binary people.”
On the inherent sexism and racism of business travel: “Airline business class demographics are such a pet peeve of mine. In the lounge and on the plane, usually >80% male, usually white.” On the lethal nature of the combustion engine: “Driving will be the new smoking.”
Best, though, was a recent speech unearthed online in which this soon-to-be top executive of an American news organisation said this about reporting principles: “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
No parodist could write a comedy sketch in which an American editor demanded her employees stop being distracted by the truth, because it would be too absurd. Now the reality is too absurd for the parody.
Of course, Maher immediately sided with her angry staffers and suspended the hapless Berliner for his treachery. On Wednesday he pre-empted the inevitable by resigning from the organisation.
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The lunatic thoughts and illiberal practices of the chief of a media institution of diminishing importance aren’t the issue here. The issue is what Maher represents: the ascendant class of expensively educated but seemingly not very bright, manically motivated but not very capable exponents of the modern bigotry and intolerance that passes for progressive ideology — on issues of race and gender identity, on climate, migration and western historical revisionism.
Despite the widespread discrediting of their extremism such people continue to ascend to powerful positions not just in the media but in academia, the public bureaucracy, the major technology companies that control information flow and even mainstream companies.
Killing parody of course is the smallest of their crimes. But perhaps, as we pause to mourn its passing, the rest of us will finally be roused to rebel against the joyless rigidity, the artless dogmatism, the endlessly corrosive moral relativism this weird episode of postmodern ascendancy has imposed on us.
