08/03/2022
Come on folks. Do we REALLY need to be an easy target for socialist libs?
Absurd trucker convoy jamming up the Capital Beltway has me rooting for higher gas prices.
OK, let me get this straight: A truckload of U.S. truckers has assembled outside Washington, D.C., to protest something, but nobody quite knows what. Is it the mask and vaccine mandates that most cities and states have already dropped? Who knows.
On Sunday, they formed a convoy and did two loops around the Capital Beltway. What did they accomplish? Who knows.
They’re threatening to repeat the driving-around-in-a-big-circle thing Monday, but to show they really mean business, they’re adding a third Beltway lap, and organizers say they’ll add an extra lap each day until their demands are met. What are their demands? Again, who knows.
Plan is to be a 'huge pain'
According to The Washington Post: “Organizers said their goal is to be a ‘huge pain.’ ”
Congratulations, brave members of the “People’s Convoy.” You and your 6-mile-pergallon diesel 18-wheelers have managed to make me root for higher fuel prices.
If you’re wondering why I’m so annoyed with this assemblage of people who have too much time on their hands, it’s simple: I write satire for a living, and they’re making my job really difficult.
How exactly am I supposed to satirize something that’s already zanier than any absurd hypothetical I could cook up?
Imagine my column pitch to an editor.
Me: “OK, I want to parody the lengths some are going to in protesting basic public health measures during the pandemic. So I’m going to come up with this wildly over-exaggerated scenario where a bunch of truckers drive to Washington, D.C., in protest and then just start driving in circles around the city in inefficient vehicles during a time when fuel prices are nearing record highs!”
Editor: “I know you need to make it zany so readers know you’re kidding around, but that seems like a bit much.”
Me: “Did I mention that Russia has invaded Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are bravely defending their homeland, making the truck protesters look even more tone deaf and whiny?”
Editor: “Stop it.”
Me: “Oh, no, I’m just getting started. In the weeks before the truck protest, most of the mask and vaccine mandates get dropped because COVID-19 numbers are trending down, so the very thing they’re protesting is no longer really a thing!”
Editor: “Well that’s just ridiculous. Try dialing it back a little.”
Real life more absurd than fiction
Nobody in their right mind would buy that, even as parody. But it’s EXACTLY what’s happening in real life.
I desperately want to – and professionally need to – make fun of the People’s Convoy, but people in the convoy are making it impossible by being astonishingly ridiculous.
It’s like they’ve made themselves immune to satire by achieving self-satirization. And that immunity, in and of itself, is satirizing vaccines.
It’s brilliant, and I wish I had come up with it. But these folks? They just … did it. HOW CAN I COMPETE WITH THAT?!?
Consider this actual quote from an actual human member of the convoy who says his name is Stan. This was on a podcast run by Steve Bannon, who, speaking of self-satirization, is a former White House strategist. The podcast is called “War Room,” because of course it is, and on a recent episode Stan is asked what people in the convoy really want:
“We want to go back to the way it was before the COVID stuff. Personally, me, I’d like to go back before 9/11, the Patriot Act. Things like that. It’s just very tyrannical type stuff. It’s government overreach. And that’s what we’re all about. Sure, the mask things and the shots and all this, they’re the … easy thing to talk about, but it’s all the other things behind the scenes. … We have freedom. They’re trying to take it away, and we’re gonna stop ’em. We’re gonna take our freedom back to where it was before.”
If someone said, “Rex, please write a made-up quote that perfectly encapsulates the babbling, aggrieved nonsense modern-day conservatives go on about, but make it really over the top,” I couldn’t have dreamed of crafting something as good as what my friend Stan actually said. Out loud.
And after he said it – and again, the question was basically, “What are you protesting?” – people around him began randomly shouting, “FREEDOM!!!”
The satire business is getting impossible.
QAnon has entered the chat
Making matters worse, some in the convoy, likely in an effort to better tailor their protest to the news of the day, have glommed on to a QAnon-linked conspiracy that says Russia, with the help of former President Donald Trump, invaded Ukraine to stop secret bioweapon laboratories set up by President Joe Biden's top medical adviser, Anthony Fauci.
Sara Aniano, an extremism researcher, told NBC News: “In their fantasy, Trump comes back and the military tribunals commence over COVID tests. But I don’t think they know what they want. They are just mad, and they want a reason to express that.”
Look, if you trucker convoy people are mad and want to vent your anger, I get it. Just the other day I stopped to get a vanilla cone at McDonald’s and the soft-serve machine wasn’t working. I was furious. But I didn’t respond by making it damn near impossible for America’s hardworking satirists to write silly things that expose other people’s silliness.
So to defend my profession, I hope rising fuel prices make it fiscally impossible for you all to keep trucking the 64-mile loop around Washington, trying to persuade who-knows-who to stop doing lord-knows-what.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/03/07/trucker-convoy-capital-beltway-freedom/9407428002/
The truckers who make up the People's Convoy driving in circles around Washington, D.C., are making it hard for people who write satire.
