Monday 1 April 2019

Happy April Fool's Day

SHARE
Readers interested in Brexit would do well to subscribe to Jack Blanchard's invaluable free newsletter. Today's begins:


Good Monday morning. Brexit Day is 11 days away.
HAPPY APRIL FOOL’S DAY: This is the day you’re meant to spot the absurd, fictional, no-way-can-this-actually-be-happening stories hidden away among the real news in each newspaper. Good luck with that this year.
ANNUAL REMINDER: April Fool’s Day is also Chris Grayling’s birthday. Because of course it is.

April Fools spoofs used occasionally to be funny, though I don't like them. I don't think newspapers should intentionally print fiction as truth. Now they do all the time. 

On the other hand, satire really has died by now - satire requires a sense of a fundamentally orderly universe which is being disrupted by foolish behaviour. I am not sure in a post-modern world, whatever that means, that this sense still exists.

I am not sure what fixed points there are any more - even in the Catholic Church, which until the present papacy was the one unchanging fixed point.

No comments:

Post a Comment