Saturday Night Live has been brave enough to broadcast a parody of another ABC show, Shark Tank, in which prospective entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to self-made billionaires in the hope of gaining their financial backing. Host Chris Rock, the man who says he loves being famous because it’s almost like being white, dressed up to make a pitch on behalf of a business which is “growing too fast” – ISIS (or ISIL as it said on its brochure), asking for an investment of $400 million in exchange for a 1% share in the business of “doing away with Western pigs and vile Jews”. He justified this valuation by stating that ISIS is making $5 million a day from selling stolen oil.
The amount ISIS is actually making may be less, but if it were not offering cut-price deals to certain end users in Turkey and Syria it could be making even more. It is this particular point which has sparked official condemnation of the skit, using the sort of language usually reserved for terrorists themselves, even those the U.S. invented. Anyone who has followed the pages of NEO will quickly understand why.
A well-travelled road
At one time free speech was considered an absolute value. It was in that atmosphere that the inside front cover of the November 1983 issue of Hustler Magazine featured a “parody” of an advertisement for Campari Liqueur entitled “Jerry Falwell talks about his first time.”
This was a parody of actual Campari ads which included interviews with various celebrities about their “first times.” Although it was apparent by the end of each interview that this meant the first time they had sampled Campari, the ads clearly played on the sexual double entendre implied by the phrase “first time.” Copying the form and layout of these Campari ads, Hustler’s editors drafted an alleged “interview” with Falwell, who was a celebrity due to his leadership of the Moral Majority organisation.
In this fake interview, accompanied by a photograph, Falwell stated that his “first time” had been during a drunken incestuous rendezvous with his mother in an outhouse. Obviously, this would be an extremely unlikely thing for the head of the Moral Majority to have done, and even if true he would never have said it in public. Clearly, therefore, as Hustler said in small print at the bottom of the page, this parody was not intended to be taken seriously.
The magazine’s table of contents also listed the ad as “Fiction; Ad and Personality Parody.” However Falwell was not amused, believing that it presented him to the public as a “hypocrite who preaches only when he is drunk,” and sued the magazine. The court rejected his claims that he had been libeled as no one would believe the ads related actual events, but initially awarded him damages for “emotional distress”. Ultimately the Supreme Court overturned this ruling too, establishing the principle that public figures cannot stifle free speech because it might upset them, as such an action was held to be contrary to the principles of the Founding Fathers who wrote the U.S. Constitution.
The significant part of Falwell’s suit was that he also claimed for “invasion of privacy”. If he did not perform the acts in question, what privacy was there to invade? By objecting to the parody he gave unnecessary publicity to it, thereby himself encouraging people to think that there was no smoke without fire. We still do not know what actual private act Falwell thought was being referred to, but his own actions suggest there was one.
One man’s meat
Humour is always a subjective business. Peter Sellers, at the height of his radio career on The Goon Show, was happy to see jokes in his friend Spike Milligan’s scripts about his characters buying new cars, as Sellers himself frequently did. However he strongly objected to jokes which suggested his characters were wealthy enough to buy and not sell a succession of new cars, although without the second he wouldn’t have been able to do the first.
Similarly, there are national characteristics to humour. When there was a split in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in the early 1990s the spectacle of priests coming to blows outside cathedrals reduced the standing of the Church in the eyes of many believers. This public attitude was famously expressed in a cartoon which depicted a priest, wearing nothing under his robes but a cross, exposing himself to a woman who averts her gaze and crosses herself.
Such humour would be too serious for people in the West, not a laughing matter at all. But it wins awards in the East of Europe, not least at the annual world humour festival, which is held in Gabrovo, Bulgaria.
But when humour is accompanied by blatant hypocrisy alarm bells start ringing everywhere. Russians will remember the Soviet magazine Krokodil, which was happy to satirise certain actions of the government but never attacked the Communist system itself. The West made much of this censorship, even though it was often self-imposed.
Yet in 1948 The Western Brothers, a popular singing comedy duo, made an offhand joke on the radio that the UK’s Minister for Fuel and Power had given a job to his cousin over better-qualified candidates. This was a satirical comment on the government slogan of the time, “Jobs for the Boys”. They were forced to apologise, in a direct act of government censorship, and there was talk of banning them.
Unbeknowns to these comedians, or anyone else until a few months later, another of the minister’s relatives had in fact been given a better paid government job than his qualifications suggested he would be considered for. In the words of another Western Brothers song, “It was all hushed up”. But it is rather difficult to hush up ISIS’s campaign of slaughter, and the West knows it.
Disgusted of Washington, D.C.
When Fox News reports that “people are outraged” by a comedy sketch about ISIS and its deeds featuring people known to be comedians and not ISIS members, we can be sure of one thing. The “people” outraged are not random citizens but those who are newsworthy – the types Fox News listens so to get stories.
For “people” read “White House.” If you aren’t going to quote the number of “people” who complained about the skit, the number cannot be significant, but the identity of the complainant(s), studiously masked, is significant enough for Fox to take notice.
The White House knows a few things about ISIS which it knows other people also know. It knows that these Islamic militants, presented as radicals beyond the pale of civilized society, were armed and trained by the US itself and inserted in order to further various U.S. business projects, which are described as “foreign policy objectives”. The former description is more accurate, because foreign policy involves working with others to achieve agreed goals, while business involves destroying the competition to achieve your own.
The White House also knows that ISIS or ISIL really is funding itself by selling oil on world markets, and that the US has the power to stop this if it wants. Iraq destroyed Kuwait’s oilfields during the Gulf War, while the allies were strangely reluctant to do the same in Iraq – though given the sources of George W. Bush’s funding in oil-rich Texas, perhaps that wasn’t so strange. Furthermore the US can impose sanctions on the same countries which buy ISIS oil, but is pleading impotence, despite its generations-long blockade of the former USSR, and that is just one example.
Above all, The White House also knows that ISIS is indeed growing too fast. Any U.S. project needs to proceed at a pace the U.S. can control. The present situation is similar to 1979, when the Afghan communist regime collapsed too quickly. The US, through the UN, organised the usual “free elections” to create a new government. It was then shocked to discover that the Mujahideen it had armed had no reason to take any notice of these elections, one group seizing power despite them simply by taking control of the area of Kabul where the government buildings were.
ISIS is now in the same position in Iraq, and this was not in the script. It no longer needs U.S. backing to take control of anywhere. It is forcing the U.S. to do exactly what it does not want to do: either carry on surreptitiously backing it, or take genuine steps to remove it. It is asking this of a second-term president who has no need to do anything he might be held responsible for after his term necessarily ends. Next time Americans vote, they might consider who is actually playing their system in front of their faces.
Conclusion
The White House knows these things about ISIS and knows that many other people know them. By presenting ISIS as a U.S. business project out of control, Chris Rock and his friends have hit the nail on the head instead of being loyal Americans according to Fox.
If the sketch was merely stupid it would be easy for other comedians, taking a different line, to satirise the Saturday Night Live crew. In fact this is common practice. Michael Moore’s documentaries, such a “Bowling for Columbine”, are also too true for many. Other filmmakers have therefore hit back with counter-documentaries such as “Michael Moore Hates America”, whose funding is rather opaque. There are also plenty of TV channels whose ratings would be boosted by effectively attacking Saturday Night Live, as their executives know.
So let us see if The White House can fight fire with fire. All it is doing at the moment is surrendering to its own smoking gun – the criminality at the heart of U.S. global practice which created not only ISIS, but those who are prepared to comment on it. If it wants us to think that the Saturday Night Live sketch was not truer than it intended to be, it will have to do better than this.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
