“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” says the fifth rule of
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic
Radicals, Saul Alinsky’s classic 1971 activist handbook.
That’s because, “It is almost impossible to counterattack
ridicule,” as Michael “tank moment” Dukakis so painfully
knows.
Since the publication of Alinsky’s Rules, activists across the
political spectrum have tried to adapt those rules to their own
purposes, with varying degrees of success. Now a recent paper from
the Institute of World
Politics argues for ridicule as a weapon to fight terrorists.
The author, J. Michael Waller, makes a compelling argument for the
effectiveness of ridicule, citing historical examples, including
from America’s Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and World
War II.
Waller argues that, just as in these conflicts the side that
emerged victorious used ridicule effectively, America today can use
it against terrorists. In Iraq, since the publication of Waller’s
paper, the American military took advantage of a great opportunity
to do just that, releasing video footage showing Abu Musab
Al-Zarqawi fumbling with a rifle. (Zarqawi is now, to the world’s
benefit, dead — it’s doubtful the rifle fumbling video helped
much, but it certainly didn’t hurt, either.)
Waller cites Team America: World Police, an
all-marionette-cast war-on-terror movie comedy by South
Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, as a good example of
effective contemporary anti-anti-American ridicule:
Team America is a brilliant work that plays on
the obvious faults of an insecure and lonely Kim, the absurdity of
United Nations diplomacy in the person of weapons inspector Hans
Blix, and on popular stereotypes about Islamist terrorists and
Hollywood anti-war personalities… Team America limits
its effectiveness, as well as the size of its audience, with
extremely crude adolescent (some might call it “adult”) humor.
Nevertheless, it is a masterpiece of over-the-top ridicule that
could be to the current young generation what the irreverent
Monty Python and the Holy Grail was to young people thirty
years ago. Team America puts the bad guys in their place
and shows that, as clumsy and arrogant as Americans might be to
many people, they are still the good guys.
It is that obnoxious — and at times offensive — up-yours
irreverence that makes
Team America so effective. Yet that
raises an issue Waller doesn’t address: That presumption of
irreverence limits the professional war fighters’ ability to seize
on more Zarqawi-with-rifle moments.
Waller argues that, “The United States must take advantage of
[ridicule] against terrorists, proliferators, and other threats.”
Yet as his example of Team America shows, the United
States is already doing that the way America does things best —
privately.
Parker and Stone, in addition to (literally) skewering Kim
Jong-Il in Team America, have ridiculed Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden on
South Park in a manner worthy of Der
Fuehrer’s Face.
MOREOVER, as Waller notes, “Popular culture also mocked the Axis
powers — not after a decent interval following a given incident or
atrocity, but from the start.” The same could be said of the
Onion’s special
9/11 issue published shortly after the terrorist attacks. What
American couldn’t take cathartic relief in articles like “Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell”? And what
Islamist fanatic could respond to that?
As Alinksy notes, ridicule “infuriates the opposition, who then
react to your advantage.” Terrorism aside, ridicule is also a
powerful weapon against those who want to tell us what we can
drink, eat, and watch, whom we can hire, where we can work — in
short, against those want to stick their noses where they don’t
belong.
As Waller rightly notes, tyrants “require a controlled political
environment, reinforced by sycophants and toadies, to preserve an
impenetrable image. Some are more tolerant of reasoned or
principled opposition but few of satire or ridicule.” Yet even
democratic governments require a certain level of control in their
management of all their affairs, especially in diplomacy. What
government could, even in jest, vow “to
defeat whoever we’re at war with”?
State actors are ill-suited to exploit ridicule. And that’s just
as well. As Waller notes, ridicule is a dictator’s worst nightmare,
but it is more than that: It is freedom’s friend, and as such, an
unreliable tool of governments, no matter how democratic.
Rulers simply don’t do humor well. If “a picture is worth a
thousand words,” notes the introduction to Clods’ Letters to
Mad, a 1970s compendium of the most unintentionally funny
letters submitted to Mad magazine, then “a funny picture
is worth a thousand Chinese proverbs” — especially if it’s of the
emperor.
