Satire Runs Out Of Time As Election Day Approaches

November 6th, 2016  |   

In baseball, three strikes and you’re out. In like manner, three days and we are finally out of this seemingly endless election campaign.

Our nation has been transfixed by the frenzied political foreplay leading up to a climactic Election Day. Keeping up with it has been an addictive exercise. We have been afforded at least one surprise a day. Our ongoing curiosity has been driven by a rather simple question: What can possibly happen next?

That question aside, the campaign has been costly, beyond the gross amount of “green” spent by both candidates. The political race to the White House has been a theatrical show long overdue for closure, a horror show that has left people fearful, anxious, disturbed, and even emotionally and physically sick. Hope has battled with despair; despair has been tempered by welcomed moments of comic relief.

Has comic relief finally run out of airtime? Now that this political farce is almost over, and we’re all thoroughly miserable, is there anything funny left to say about this dread-filled election?  The New York Times, in an article about the satirical website, The Onion, says the writers are struggling “to come up with fresh avenues of amusement.  “The nominees, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, already seem like walking parodies of themselves, and the rhetoric has been so hyperbolic and apocalyptic as to be virtually beyond satire.”

Ah, but Saturday Night Live, for weeks now, has found the key that unlocked a chest full of laughter. The show has offered a comical repartee to the tortuously haranguing, take-no-prisoners political messengers. The show has channeled Herman Melville’s words from Moby Dick, “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.”

With but three days left before we know “all that may be coming,” we cannot possibly know the outcome of this election. When it comes to prognostication, polls are political fools gold. Even on Wednesday, the cloud of uncertainty may linger over ballots already cast. In a matter of time, however, we will have a President-elect.

Last night, Saturday Night Live, in its final episode before Election Day, continued to make us laugh at both candidates. And then they ended the spoof with a happy hug and handhold between Hillary and Donald. Then both of them then ran around in Times Square embracing everyone, particularly a host of  “others,” Hillary hugging a working class man, and Donald snuggling up to an apparent Muslim Family. Was the show attempting to move from the genre of satiating satire and into the realm of poetic possibility? Or was it just another satirical parody? Take your pick.

It is said that Jesus rose from the dead after three days in the tomb. Is it possible that in three days we will rise to greet the day, and discover that our nation has risen from the muck it has been buried under during this election cycle? Is the thought of that possibility merely a bucket full of religious pap, or a conceivable pathway to the healing of our nation’s very sick soul? Take your pick.

No matter who goes to the White House, our nation will have to dig its way out from beneath the rubble, the debris from two collapsed political parties.

And remember, be it goofy Donald or a besieged Hillary in the White House, the new Commander in Chief will be the new conductor of a train. Not the Polar Express or the Cat Stevens Peace Train. It’s our very own War Train that’s been running out of control all over the Middle East and Africa. And it will be no laughing matter if it continues to speed on toward an inevitable crash. A wreck with no relief, even from Saturday Night Live . 

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