Life Imitates Satire: Sometimes Reality Has the Last Laugh
by Dale McFarland | A classic episode of the original Twilight Zone featured Burgess Meredith as a sinister figure who rescues a struggling newspaper by reporting events before they actually happen. He would clatter away on the old Linotype machine with a maniacal grin on his face, composing horrific stories he knew would come true the next day.
My long-buried memory of Mr. Meredith's character resurfaced recently, sparked by an article about the deaths of fourteen World Trade Center search and rescue dogs. Because, back in 2002, I wrote a news satire piece with the headline "Last Anthrax-Sniffing Dog Succumbs to Inhalation Anthrax." It seemed funny at the time.
Parody journalism isn't a new concept. Long before The Onion and The Daily Show there was National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Preceding generations had Mad Magazine and That Was The Week That Was. Our great-grandparents might have noted the birth of Punch or The Harvard Lampoon. And perhaps somewhere there survives a petroglyph that some early homosapien thought was pure comic genius.
Now, for better or worse, the internet provides an unfettered outlet for twisted imaginations everywhere. The proliferation of satire news websites is accelerating. The well of outrageous concepts seems bottomless.
And occasionally we hit the nail right on the thumb.
Happily, the examples aren't always of such a tragic nature. Five months after The Watley Review lampooned Canada, in an article about beer power solving energy shortages, came the revelation that technology was indeed being developed which might allow cellphones and laptop computers to run on alcohol.
Random Perspective did a send-up of man vs. machine when it reported "Brazil Beats Team of Super Computers at Football." Within a year, Carnegie Mellon University researchers were playing soccer with customized Segways. In 2003, RP conceived of "Download-a-Lover" and offered to fabricate photographs, email and telephone conversations for lonely guys. Now, at least one "virtual girlfriend" service is actually up and running.
And Studio 8 could hardly have imagined that a spoof about the Digital Actors' Virtual Awards Ceremony honoring nonexistent individual achievement would foretell MTV's "virtual performance" awards to Yoda and Gollum a few months later.
Some stories are practically inevitable. My cynical take on the debate over digital piracy insisted "CD Sales Down Because New Music Sucks." I wasn't too surprised when a subsequent legitimate study indicated the impact of file sharing is exaggerated. Nor was I shocked recently when female members of the Raelian cult (aka Clonaid) posed nude for Playboy, which I "reported" almost two years ago.
Politics is a volatile arena where it's always dangerous to tempt fate. The Daily Farce's farce about President Bush's "1972" military payroll records being produced on a 2004 version of Quicken was whimsical when it ran. But 60 Minutes wasn't laughing when an almost identical controversy overshadowed its exposé of Bush's national guard service a few months later.
SlashNot ran a article last year arguing that Google's algorithms caused it to skew search results (although they wrongly assumed it was a liberal bias). A recent USC Annenberg study suggests Google News is indeed skewed, but to the right.
Dan Kurtzman concocted a story almost two years ago warning "2004 Presidential Election Canceled" due to the possible threat of terrorism. This might very well have come to pass, but for the uproar against exactly such a plan which was leaked this past summer.
Ironic Times published this eerily accurate forecast back in 2001: "Schwarzenegger May Run for California Statehouse; Believes He Can Beat 'Girly Man' Gov. Gray Davis."
And then, of course, there was the quintessential prediction by The Onion shortly before George W. Bush was sworn in as President: "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over."
We live in a world of shoe bombs and frozen baseball legends, where porn actresses regularly seek elected office, where eBay auctions virginity and bald head ad-space, where talentless buffoons morph into superstars overnight.
So let this serve as a warning to the infinite number of monkeys with typewriters out there: Be careful what preposterous headline you invent today. It just might end up being tomorrow's front page news.
