There’s a judo method of humor column writing. Let’s suppose we have to write a humor column. You and I. We sit down at the ’puter. We enter the words, “Insert column here,” so that we may have started without actually having started. But we are still stymied.
That’s a fine word, isn’t it? We are sty-the-heck-out-of-mied. Why is that?
Why indeed? We are prevented from writing for some reason, most likely because there is precisely not one single awfully bearably amusing thought available to us now or in the conceivable future, as the world and all that it offers is hideous. Life is cheerless and humanity disappoints so far as to take all breath away, as if lovingly bitten through the septum by a vigorous 9-month-old kitty.
So what should we do? There’s the judo method. The method is simple. You identify the thing that is keeping you from proceeding. You then write ahead, writing about that very thing. You use the power of the block against its own stupid self.
This is not in the slightest amusing: Some 21-year-old waste of chromosomes sat in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, for an hour, then announced he was there to kill black people and did so.
I wanted to write a frivolous column about, I don’t know, maybe the NAACP lady who was more white than advertised. So much comedic potential. But, no. A racist shoots up a church. Humor is eclipsed. There is no happy fun time. The inbox of my mind is jammed with this garbage.
What can I possibly say about this situation? That racism is still alive? I knew that and so did you, too. We have brains that are connected to space and time, right?
I can’t even be sad about the situation. Sad doesn’t work for me.
I’m past sadness into anger. I’m thinking about all the people I know who have been evicted from apartments because landlords jacked the rent up past what they could afford, cast aside because they were too poor, and meanwhile there is no mechanism for casting aside the Dylann Roofs of the world.
If our society can make poor people sleep under bridges just for being poor, can we make the Dylann Roofs experiment with segregation, living by themselves on a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
The obstacle I face is clear. Ordinarily exaggeration is fine comedic form, but in this case, it doesn’t work, because the entire thing is exaggeration. We are living in a country that is an exaggerated joke, and it can’t be funny to exaggerate it more.
Disparate incarceration is an indecent, despicable, exaggeration of justice that makes America look like the most insane clown of the world, white-faced and red-nosed, unable to cram black people into prison fast enough. And that exaggeration makes the Dylann Roofs, seeing it go on, believe their racism is justified. The criminal system convinces them they are right.
This system needs to be torn down and torn up. It is not going to be torn down as it needs to be by people who are sad at it. I’m sorry about that. I’d like sadness to break prisons, but it isn’t happening.
Consider the pervasiveness of the madness of our society. Just one example: There are people in this city — normal, respectable, ordinary people who are thought of as fair-minded and just — who think that the problem of secondhand smoke in public spaces ought to be met with the threat of incarceration.
Compare those two harms. The harm you suffer because someone is smoking upwind of you in a city park. Versus the harm a person suffers being jailed. How proportionate is the punishment?
Our society says, in every way and every day, it’s perfectly proportionate. Jails and prisons are the answer to everything.
You probably think I want all racists to be jailed. I don’t. I just want the institutions that carry out their agendas to be smashed.