Set-up: Draw a map.

Label it with funny things about botched handling of American

Ebola outbreak. Keep the reader distracted with all the stupid, funny things that
could possibly happen. Mark the locations of future incineration pits, happy hazmatsuit manufacturers, and roving post-epidemic tribes to prod our sensationalized
tendencies toward apocalypse. Bring it home with the statement: almost tenthousand people in West Africa have a disease with a 70% mortality rate (not
pictured on this map). As usual there is an actual apocalypse going on but it is
elsewhere and so hardly gets a mention compared to anything closer to home.
This is a scathing commentary on U.S. media and culture. Good job. You nailed it.
Everyones aware of how self-centered and oblivious our country is now. It doesnt
change that looking Ebola up the first two pages of google news dont carry a single
article about the real epidemic so long as theres even a couple quarantined
Americans, but we cant change that anyway. People are idiots but since were
laughing about it and know better we must be less idiots? File this away for further
consideration next time theres nothing good on television and you get bored.
New set-up: So youre in an English class that wants you to learn the true value of
an education. Its about learning to think critically and actually becoming able to
interact with the world around you responsibly, it says. About learning to take care
of yourself since no one else is going to bother to do it for you and caring about
learning because its a tool that can help you avoid being hopelessly nave and
maybe help you become less short-sighted and solipsistic than you, by default, are.
To do this the all-powerful Voice in the room has dictated that, having read a few,
you are now to write a satire in which you attack something that pisses you off and
should be changed. Your job is to explode hypocrisy by poking fun at the basic
human follies that so often override any sort of logic. You are not required to
understand anyone elses perspective, merely to exaggerate elements of things you
find distasteful to a point where they seem hopelessly absurd. You dont have to
know anything but youre required to strike a pose that makes it seems like you do
and points out the stupidity of positions other than your own.
There are a lot of stupid, hypocritical things in the world that you are by this point
well acquainted with. Americans dont pay attention to important news, only to
whats entertaining. Theyre fat and selfish and when they try to intervene they just
cause more damage. PETA kills animals, Invisible Children is incompetent, and our
militarys involvement in foreign affairs is so wound up in economic interests as to
render any sort of trust insane. Europes supposedly less thoughtlessly right-wing
and extremely bipartisan but it doesnt really matter since theyre primary concerns
are still their own interests anyway and they have as much in the way of nationalist
hate-groups and unconsidered opinions as anywhere else.
Substitute the Americans mentioned earlier with people in general. Stupidity
appears to be a worldwide epidemic and to believe in a cure is to feed the disease.
So decide you dont believe in any cure. Play the game in the only way it can be
played and make light of the ways our attention and involvement reach out to all
the wrong things. Write sassy reviews of the Hobbit and how it totally needed to
last for 3 whole movies of next-to-no plot but plenty of gorgeous scenery and high-

budget violence. Crucify various fandoms for the way the franchises people worship
are really nothing more than fan-service and smart marketing decisions. Take solace
in the harsh reality of scathing humor that spares the audience nothing, that
bases its whole appeal off the assumption that theres no way we can ever stop
procrastinating and paying attention to dumb internet jokes and frivolous uses of
social media. Once you actually get into the work force and have the absurdity of
the office to deal with in addition to the dumb entertainments you feel guilty about
wasting time on, start to laugh along with Onion articles like Health Experts
Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back or videos on
the benefits of new Fetal-position Desks that make getting through the day more
tolerable. Its not that you think any of this will actually help you are after all an
rational, thinking person who wont be suckered into thinking anything they do
could really create a lasting change but at least this is an entertaining way to
distract yourself from that fact. Maybe you still somehow believe theres some
moral good in what you do, but largely by this point youre aware of your own
hypocrisy even if you dont want to look at it and by laughing at it maybe you can
remove some of its sting.
The lie here is that living in blissful ignorance of your irresponsibility and being able
to make fun of yourself are incompatible. You can scream WAKE UP at everyone
else till youre blue in the face but what makes you think youre any more awake
than anyone else? Do you really even know what you want people to wake up to?
People are dying in Ukraine, Syria, Nigeria Hell, people are dying everywhere and
aside from maybe voting for less stupid candidates to attempt to make something
out of this screwy system we call a country what can even a fully awake person
really do about any of it? Nearly all of the ways to act are as liable to cause harm as
good; to devote yourself to a cause requires sleep, not wakefulness. If you want to
accomplish anything you have to temporarily get off the high-horse of perceived
omniscience and contribute to whatever you can, ignoring that to do so is probably
insane.
So maybe you reject the higher path of rational awareness in favor of dumb oldfashioned action. Maybe you join with PETA and start distributing graphic Your
Mommy Kills Animals comics to children. Or at least slap a Friends dont let
friends eat meat sticker on your car. You have the moral high-ground after all,
anyone who cant see that their treatment of animals is hypocrisy on the most basic
of levels needs to be enlightened, and if what you say and do hurts a few
consciences than so much the better. Start a kids for Christ club that intentionally
indoctrinates children for the kids own good, join the ranks of the Earth Liberation
Front or listen in on far-right talk shows and take up their call to spread the word
that global warming is a hoax, take your pick. Whatever belief set youre inclined
to, subscribe fully to its purpose and revel in the necessity and freedom from
choice it gives your life. If somebody gets hurt thats unfortunate, but you cannot
be held responsible because you acted out of duty to an unequivocally true idea.
Youll change the world this way but maybe the willful blindness as to what youre
changing isnt your cup of tea. Maybe you realize no value can be universal except
the preservation of peoples freedom at all costs and go back to the easy targets of

cultural commentary, back to the enslaving forces of your work, the market,
entertainment, and tell the part of your brain that tells you that engaging with these
subjects through their own medium will only enforce the same cycles to shush for a
bit. If you put aside radicalism and advance genuine, one-step-at-a-time ideas, no
one will read them. Try to report on multiple sides of an issue and youll attract the
abject hate of all sides youre trying to mediate between, and without attention or
mainstream support any message you might have will go precisely nowhere.
So after all this you realize theres no other tenable options but to invert radicalism
and reject everything, and so long as youre funny about it people will pay attention.
You wont attain much depth of thought this way and are maybe just enforcing the
norms already there, but at least here theres a possibility someone might take this
particular clarion call for change (even though its pretty much guaranteed to be
one theyve heard a thousand times before and are essentially dead to) and actually
change something real about their life from it. Maybe a couple will be so shattered
by the mirror of their own hypocrisy in your work as to realize that the values you
leave implied are actually something they agree with, see that theyve been
irresponsible and make some minor change like starting recycling or lobbying for
reform or whatever. Knowing that your Ebola critique has made a real difference in
how people look at things you can rest easy. The few people youve gotten through
to (that totally werent doing this already before you pushed them into Truth) will
now read the real international news constantly and see that their personal
problems are petty and that what with how stupid everyone is no ones noticed the
really simple solutions thatd be available if they can just send in a letter to the
president or find some other way to knock some sense into the world. Actually
maybe one in a hundred will actually go through with the first part, most will just
assume they have enough information to have an informed and worthwhile opinion
without putting much effort into it, and since ridicule seldom requires any real
sacrifice on the part of the one putting it out its likely theyll never notice theyre
every bit as fallible as the people in power they so readily dismiss.
Through your successful and worthwhile work you will have in essence created
another satirist, and perhaps together you can tackle the bigger issues of the
human folly that is belief in particular causes. Now with the thinking western world
at your back you turn to the dumb, uneducated people who have not yet seen the
light, and when theyre unresponsive to your message begin a campaign to force
them to abandon their ways. Hardly anyone seriously buys into notions like ecoterrorism or Marxist economics anymore, so you mostly leave that alone in favor of
religion, what you figure probably has to be the most obvious and easy of
hypocrisies to shed.
When they show no signs of changing, start printing cartoons of Muhammad where
his face looks like a dick, or draw God, The Father, and The Holy Spirit sodomizing
each other. Theres no way the people who actually hold the beliefs youre critiquing
will be anything but disgusted and maybe even spurred on by your antics, but thats
because they need to be woken up and offending is the only way to get them to
think and maybe upgrade their values to something closer to the new civilized
views of first-world liberal society. If they cant take a joke its their own problem

and after the way extremists reacted to Salman Rushdies novel that cast doubt as
an inextricable part of Islams origins, exercising the fundamental right to offend
people is actually a moral duty, whether you believe it will help or not. The deaths
that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses only go to further show the
moral necessity of the cause you have chosen, and even when a publication aims
only to offend and carries next to no redemptive value with it, the cause of
bludgeoning people over the head with our own superior and unabashedly hostile
belief sets cannot be abandoned. What is inarguable is that when you have a group
that believes they have the truth and that other people need to wake up and that
it is necessary for them to force people to come into the light whether theyre want
to or not their beliefs must be challenged.
And the only way to challenge their beliefs that theyre likely to listen to is to shove
the same treatment right back in their faces. Have sex with another man in front of
a Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, display a Christ-figure in a jar of piss,
take whatever means legally available (under the laws your own sectarian culture
made) to desecrate what they hold sacred. This will foster understanding. This will
help people to realize the sacred value of the rights theyre violating when they try
to force their views on others.
As for the disconnected, white-collar people who dont believe in much of anything
except their own hypocritical preferences, let them sleep. Dont challenge them with
anything that forces them to think about how they might go about changing their
lives, anything that might treat them with plainly undeserved respect and
potentially spark some sort of real discussion, just poke fun at what they already
know is the opposite of sacred. You cant force them to change and anyway
answering questions of how we should live as opposed to going on about how we
shouldnt is complicated and uncomfortable. Just let them laugh at their own
absurdity and keep on living essentially unfazed. Theres not much they could do
about any of it anyway.