For the thinking, sensitive people of the world, the pain of the Trump presidency has been almost unbearable almost all of the time.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But, thanks be to Momus (Greek mythology's god of humour and satire) the best of anti-Trump humour and satire has sometimes eased the pain. In much the same way, famously, secretly circulated anti-regime jokes helped keep East Germans a little bit buoyant during the GDR's Honecker tyranny.
I urge the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Pain Relief During the Trump Years to The Onion, the satirical newspaper.
Its daily feeds into my inbox have been psychotherapeutically indispensable. So for example, last week, at the height of the sickening awfulness of the Republican National Convention, The Onion reported with its usual tone of credible authenticity:
"CHARLOTTE, NC - Organisers of the RNC were reportedly forced to pad out the final nights of the event with illegitimate Trump children, sources confirmed Wednesday. 'We're proud to announce over a dozen new surprise speakers will be joining our line-up this evening,' said RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who managed to get the president's many secret offspring to agree to speak at the convention in exchange for an increase in their privately negotiated monthly hush-money payments."
The best of satire always has the straight-faced ring of truth about it. As well as there being nothing in The Onion story that sounds wildly improbable, the more you look at them, the more the faces in the photo-portraits that accompany the news story do seem to have some Trumpian features.
Perhaps it is because ACT politics is relatively painless and unimportant that it never generates any worthwhile satire.
Good satire is triggered, like the response of the immune system to disease, whenever there is a dire need for it to soothe the symptoms of dismay and despair. But even at this election time in the ACT, few strong feelings are stoked in citizens' bosoms. The two 'major' parties are both identically, unimaginatively conservative. If only, for excitement's sake, one was an apple and the other an orange; but, alas, both are pears.
The re-election of Trump would break my sensitive, left-leaning heart. But here in the bland, bubble-wrapped, apolitical ACT even the election of a Canberra Liberal government led by that unremarkable, thankfully unTrumpian young man (whose name escapes me for the moment) will, after the initial pang of disappointment, barely leave an emotional sprain bad enough to require the soothing ice pack of satire.
Meanwhile, the parties contesting the looming ACT election have yet to offer any education policies. And so, suspecting that this indicates a lack of ideas, I refer them to a clever new book, How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.
Top US Shakespeare scholar Professor Scott Newstok's book, analysed and deeply discussed in the latest Los Angeles Review of Books, argues not only that Shakespeare's education in an early modern grammar school must be given credit for creating a fabulous mind like Shakespeare's but also that it is exactly the kind of education (creating nimbleness of mind) urgently needed by all of us today if we are to be the best that we can be.
"Newstok's purpose," the LRAB writer diagnoses, "is not so much to enhance our understanding of Shakespeare's works as to develop our own mental processes with Elizabethan schooling as our guide."
"Looking at how Shakespeare's mind was trained ... will make us better thinkers,'' Newstok argues. The same material quality that has elevated Shakespeare's mind, then, enables our pursuit of it. It is no easy chase - citing Shakespeare's own play King John and Sonnet 44, Newstok writes that "[w]e must be ready to 'fly like thought' to catch it in the act, 'for nimble thought can jump both sea and land' - but it is apparently rendered possible through a return to the Elizabethan classroom."
In the shoes of the ACT's election-toey government and opposition education kingpins, I would be earnestly studying these ideas, this very minute, so as to be able to make the thrilling election promise of Canberra schools that will create Bards of Stratford-on-Avon here on the Molonglo.
