Satire vs. Realism

Satire is great. It's the weapon of the powerless, as many people have said in a quotable manner. It's funny too.

The problem is that you can't satirize the powerless. You can't blame anyone but the powerful. If you do, you're being elitist. I completely agree with this point of view.

Reaching beyond satire, however, we must be realistic. For instance, it is easy to exempt victims from blame; they're victims, after all. Members of the Lunatic Fringe Religious Wackos (call them whatever you want; I will be using as abusive a term as I can because if you're going to do something, you might as well go for the gusto, and people will assume I'm being abusive anyway) are simply victims; they shouldn't be blamed for their upbringing making them into soulless androids incapable of doing anything other than what they are told by their wacko leaders. Television audiences aren't to blame just because television is mindless schlock pandering to the lowest common denominator. You can't blame the victims, can you?

I can, actually. This entire article is in response to http://http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2007/02/lb_casting_the_.html , because as I said I'm not simply planning on linking to other blogs and then commenting on them. That's not what I'm interested in. So I'm going to do it now.

People who watch TV are to blame for the poor quality of the programming. They're not the only ones to blame, of course, but they have to get their share. Religious nut-jobs are to blame for reading crap like Left Behind because they do have brains. Simply blaming some higher power for your own failings is ridiculous; there are many cases where the victims are stupid people who should not have done what they did. We feel sorry for them, we might even want to help them, but that shouldn't stop us from admitting that these people are stupid.

Unless you believe that everyone who is a victim has no control over their own actions, you have to parcel out blame. In some cases, the victim is blameless. In most cases, the victim is and must be held responsible for their choices. This does not mitigate others' actions, but if someone acts irresponsibly and suffers because of it, even if the suffering is grossly disproportionate to the action, then that person should own up to their part.

I guess I just feel that there's a big difference between blaming someone and making them solely responsible. I could go on making up hypothetical examples, but the bottom line is that no one is entirely blameless, and that is meaningless. Blame is a pointless concept; find a problem and solve it, don't find someone to blame for the problem's existence. If the solution to a problem is to punish someone for the problem, then I'm hard-pressed to find that a suitable solution to most problems.