Mad!

Interesting that The New Yorker, a magazine long associated with parody, particularly in its Shouts & Murmurs section, has itself become the subject of a parody. The Times reported that the Church of Scientology has published a parody of the magazine which they have passed out in front of New Yorker headquarters (“Scientology Strikes Back at The New Yorker,” NYT, 8/31/11). What incited the parody is a 25,000-word exposé of Scientology written by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright back in February. However, what distinguishes the Church of Scientology parody from your typical Shouts & Murmurs piece is the amount of time, effort and money that has obviously gone into it. The New Yorker may parody the Times, as it has done  on numerous occasions, but it doesn’t go to the trouble of having its parody printed up on Times newsprint, using  typeface close to that used by the Times along with other symbols (the Scientologists expropriated Eustace Tilley for their purposes). Nor does it hire people to hand out its parodies in front of the Times offices. Nor does it attempt to go after particular Times staff members, such as the church does when it “singles out editors, fact-checkers and other New Yorker staff members who worked on the article by name and prints their photos.” Parody and satire are fun—there have been satiric versions of both the Times and The New Yorker that have been printed up as gags over the years—and also function as means of social criticism. To this extent, the church has every right to parody whatever it likes to. However, parody becomes a form of intimidation when the parodist creates a garish mask of the subject he or she is parodying and shows up at that subject’s front door.

The Human Scale

Lawrence Wright is a writer for The New Yorker who recently performed his piece, The Human Scale, at Joe’s Pub. Based on Wright’s November 9 New Yorker article “Captives,” The Human Scale deals with the aftermath of the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. (Wright is also the author of a book about Al Queda called The Looming Tower.) Bertholt Brecht, whose plays have been a signature of the Public Theater over the years (Meryl Streep starred in Mother Courage back in 2006), epitomized the conjunction of politics and theater. What is unusual about Wright’s approach is that it’s the conjunction of journalism and theater, replete with a video backdrop and Wright’s attempts to capture the accents of Palestinian and Israeli subjects. Magazine articles sometimes become the subjects of movies, but they are rarely developed as monologues. What is also unusual about Wright’s screed is that it’s an impassioned plea for equanimity. Passion usually tends to be one-sided. Twenty years ago, Gazans were living and working in Israel; there were tensions, but there was also a de facto reciprocity between the two societies. Now, in the aftermath of the Shalit hostage-taking, the firing of missiles into Israel by Hamas, and the Israeli army’s response, Gaza has been reduced to rubble, its citizens taken hostage by an act of hostage-taking. There could have been other solutions, Wright maintains, but the kidnapping served a perverse purpose, in that it facilitated the kind of polarization that nourishes extremism.