That’s Right Nate

There is a real danger out there my friends.  You see it on shows like the Colbert Report.   When I first started watching the show I found it extremely refreshing.  On a lefty dominated station like Comedy Central, there was Steve Colbert with a solidly conservative voice.  He even called Bill O’Reilly Papa Bear.  Well three years into watching the show religiously, I found out that it was all a put on.  Colbert was a liberal portraying himself as a satirical conservative.  I was sickened.

There was something similar that happened today and many conservatives believed that we were going to be placed under martial law because of a 3 year old story from The Onion.   I’d read the newspaper a few times and didn’t care for it, but now I found it The Onion is also satire.  Here’s the clip:

When ordinarily rational conservatives saw this, they reacted all over Facebook like this.  Is it their fault no?   That’s the insidious nature of satire.  It pretends to be real news and people believe it.   Look at what happened yesterday when Democrats took the bait from brilliant satirist Andrew Breitbart who first came to prominence by editing a video tape to make it look like ACORN was supporting prostitution.  This time Breitbart took a speech by a USDA employee talking about how she learned to overcome her own racist upbringing to learn to help everybody and made it sound like she was refusing to help people based on race.  In fairness to this employee she probably became an employee when her father was murdered by the KKK, but it’s still no excuse for being predisposed not to like white people—we’re very lovable.

Well, the liberals bought this hook line and sinker even though they felt for Breitbart’s pranks before.  Before they even validated the statement, Shirley Sherrod was thrown out of the department and hoping that unemployment benefits would be extended.  Today the liberals have egg on their face after hearing the unedited speech she gave.  Oops!!  You fell for it liberals.

That is why I don’t like satire.  It can hit Democrats and Republicans equally and what makes it so dangerous is you never know when what you read is satire and when it is real.  New Zealand managed to ban political satire.  I am hoping that I can use my influence in the Kimble campaign to get him to pass a similar law here.  One thing’s for sure, at Thatsrightnate.com you’ll be able to continue to count on the same sold Conservative values you’ve always expected and still 100% satire free.

“I am a reasonable conservative who likes to write about politics and culture. Since the media is biased I get all my news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues,” Jon Swift

I enjoy the occasional video game.  One of my favorites from the early 1990s was a game called Civilization.   You started out with a settler and you built one of the great civilizations of the world.  There were several paths to victory in that game.   You could defeat your neighbors militarily or you could have a research based economic power.   One of the first times I ever played that game I was the Mongols and I dominated Europe and most of Asia with my chariots and knights.  Nobody could touch me.  Then Around game year 1800, I saw an Aztec airplane pass by my city.  All my conquests seemed so utterly meaningless.

About two years ago, I encountered Zenyenta on this blog and we struck up an email conversation.  She mentioned to me a blogger named Jon Swift who she originally suspected that I might have been.  I checked him out and when I saw his blog, I immediately had one of those Aztec airplane moments.  Somebody was doing what I was trying to do.  He was doing it before me and he was doing it better than me.  In fact, he had bar none the greatest satirical website on the internet.

I immediately started an email conversation with Jon and was shocked to discover in a world full of bloggers who make up for what they lack in social skills with loud opinions, that Jon was a wonderfully supportive person.  He didn’t tell me, “Give it up.  You’re taking my shtick” and instead put a link to my blog immediately on the blog roll.   Over the last few days the internet has been awash with people praising Jon not only for his wit, but for his support.  I benefited from both.   Blogroll amnesty day–that was his.

OK, now that that’s been said, I can finally move on to the humor that made Jon’s blog such a must read.  The man was the master of Amazon book reviews.  If a conservative wrote a book, Jon usually had a review–often starting with a disclaimer that he had not read the book.   Here’s a little gem he offered in review of Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism by Sean Hannity, “I have not actually read this book but I agree with Mr. Hannity that evil is bad. I am against all evil whatsoever, whether it is in an axis or solo. Liberals are always making complicated distinctions between things that are a little bit evil and things that are moderately evil and things that are very evil. Not Mr. Hannity. Everything to him is either good or evil, period. I think that’s a much easier way to view the world and it saves a lot of time.”

What made Swift so good is that he wasn’t just going for laughs.  He always had a message in the material.   Definitely take a moment to visit the best of section on his blog.  There’s too much genius there for me to be able to distill it for this blog.  In October 2008, he had this to say of the beginnings of the tea bag movement, “This country wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an angry mob that decided it wanted a tax cut and threw English tea into Boston Harbor. Angry mobs once enforced local justice without interference from the meddlesome federal government in the Old West and in the south after Reconstruction, just as our Founding Fathers had envisioned in The Federalist Papers. And we would probably all be Muslims now if an angry mob hadn’t chosen Barabbas over Jesus 2,000 years ago.”

Jon Swift was obviously not his real name.  His real name was Al Weisel and he was a professional writer, but Jon Swift just seems natural.  When Dr. Seuss passed away, I didn’t mourn him as Theodor Geisel.  As I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned by President Obama’s misguided education policy, I’ve been putting more of my focus into my serious education blog and less into thatsrightnate.com, but Swift’s passing reminded me of what great satire does.  He poked the rich and powerful in the eye and he always backed the underdog.   I am sure that he is with the great writers in a much better place and if for some reason he missed the cut, I have no doubt he’ll be there next Blogroll Amnesty Day.

I think it was Zenyenta who remarked about me that I never broke character.  I thought that after 13 months of blogging the time was right to do so.  This blog is a fraud and a sham.  You see, I am not the conservative I claim to be and I not even named Nate.   My name is Joe and I am actually 40 and a teacher in Chicago.  I teach in a city school that is 95% Mexican students and definitely somewhere between impoverished and working class.  For most of my life I have been in the Republican camp, but a moderate Thomas Dewey type Republican.

In 20003, something changed.  I remember the war in Iraq was going miserably and the economy wasn’t doing so hot either.  George Bush gave a rare Press Conference that night and the topic was on the threat of gay marriage.  Now, I’m not gay myself and while I do have several gay friends this was not an issue that was terribly important to me, but it was an epiphany for me.  I saw the speech as an attempt to distract the Republican base from real problems and even though it was a gradual transformation, I believe that is the moment I left the Republican party.

It is said that nobody is more anti-smoking than an ex-smoker.  Well, I had that kind of attitude towards the right wing excesses of my former party and I attacked it with all the gusto of a jilted lover discussing his ex.  When I see Republican hypocrisy I will use this blog to point it out.  However, I also occassionally bash the Democrats.  In Chicago our mayor is completely focused on the Olympics to the detriment of everything else.  He is selling off every bit of revenue creation the city has which is going to really bite us in a couple of years and I have seen first hand his push to privatize education.   Obama is likewise mistaken on education in so many ways.  When Obama does something I don’t agree with, I will be going after him as well.

I have a little bit of a comedy background.  I was in the Second City Training Center at the same time as Tina Fey and a few other successful actors, but I never really had the hunger to pursue it with the zest that was necessary to make a fulltime career of it.  I also worked in television for awhile and for a decade I did my own public access television show.  This blog fills that comedy niche nicely for me.   Though I had Steve Colbert as one of my teachers at Second City, I have always tried to do something different than what he does.  In the beginning of this blog I was determined never to break character while Colbert frequently lets his audience in on the joke.  As I have done this for awhile, I have done some more preposterous things like the panic attack when Obama was elected that should make it obvious that I’m running a parody site.  Still, I probably take more joy from the person who takes this blog seriously than I do from somebody posting how funny they find it.

My original plan was to end the blog after the 2008 election, but I have enjoyed getting to know people like Wrecks, Lola, BeccyJo, Pat, Gina, and the blog regulars so I have decided to continue things indefinitely.

Aw who am I kidding?

APRIL FOOLS!!

I’ve never been a big fan of satire.  I find that it is the lowest form of humor.  However, I was really disappointed to see how many people overreacted to the New Yorker’s hysterical satire on their newest cover.  The cover which portrays Barack Obama dressed like a Muslim giving a terrorist fist bump to his wife who is dressed as a black panther.  There is a fireplace with a picture of Osama bin Laden and a US flag in the fireplace.

What people have failed to realize is that this is a satire of Obama showing how we perceive him and was in no way racist.  The New Yorker shouldn’t have been surprised that people couldn’t figure it out.  There is a long history of satire involving African Americans being misinterpreted as hatred.   Minstrel shows were a type of satire that were really popular in the 19th century.  They featured white actors in black face lampooning black culture.

In this century Amos and Andy came into America’s living room over the radio for 30 years.  The two main characters were actually played by white actors satirizing the lives of Southern blacks living in the Norths.  Like the minstrel shows, Amos and Andy was mistaken for racism as well.

Its not just black people who don’t seem to get satire.  A satirical book in Russia called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have had Jews up in arms for centuries. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail and African-Americans will stop taking themselves so seriously.   Lighten up, its satire.  I don’t get uptight about WASP jokes.