Redress = get dressed again what?!

One ongoing theme at Satire?blog is the difficulty distinguishing between stupidity and mockery. If someone fails sufficiently enough it can be impossible to tell if that person did so deliberately to make you laugh or make a point. Depending on the (1)source and your own (2)personal level of skepticism, you will make an informed guess as to the person's (3)intentions, and thusly decide (4)is it satire?

If I were to look at the democratic body of the US, I would see an astounding demonstration of confidence in lieu of actual expertise. Occupy Wall Street protesters provide a particularly wounding example: "It's unfair how investment banks can print money and use it for what they want." But a failure to understand how the government manages the national economy is not unique to park dwellers. These groups, literally demonstrating they can articulate neither the problem nor the solution, provide fertile grounds for asking are you fucking kidding me?

If I were responsible for solving the nation's problems and this was the feedback I got I might be inclined to react negatively. So it is understandable that on September 22nd the White House rolled out this petition mechanism on whitehouse.gov, no doubt as a means to more effectively discard with the risible sentiments of the hoi polloi. It allows you to petition the government for redress of grievances, which sounds a little-old fashioned.

It's also weird to think about. How is the government, the perpetual faceless bureaucracy, supposed to respond to millions of citizens? It's not God. Smaller, more local components of government lack the authority needed to address many grievances, and the institutions at the top certainly don't have time to address any which are not backed by a PAC. The idea of individuals talking to government is sweet, but indistinguishable from prayer.

Of course, that vague, dreamlike feeling you get from reading "petition the government for redress" is the fading memory of the first amendment. Oh high school civics! The way you made the structure and purpose of government so sensible. Much is lost by the time people become actual voters and start agitating for the 1% to pay their school loans or for the 47% to sink into the income gap with their bootstraps pulled up to their grimace.

Petitioning the government via the internet seems like a real solution which does not involve shitting in a park or posting photos of handwriting on the internet. Finally. But it's so plainly not a solution due to the much larger influence of campaign contributions, lobbying efforts, and grassroots movements funded by billionaires (the influence of physical protests belongs here in this parenthetical afterthought), that we have wonder if it is satire. Make a petition. Email your friends. Then go play in the kiddie pool.

A satire test I like to use for political issues is to ask if it could be featured as a joke on the Onion News Network. A system where 5,000 25,000 people need to electronically sign a petition to get a government essay in response? What good is a response? Is the response essay, written by the intern who "consulted relevant experts" going to a vote in the Congress? And if it did, would it get to go ahead of political bullshit that our legislators are currently involved with?

Many people are frustrated by what they view as a lack of responsive government and paradoxically, its intrinsic devotion to public relations. To those people this petition mechanism is a joke. So they use the joke to make a joke: We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition. Hey yo dawg I heard you like satire so we put some satire in your satire so you can shake a fist and laugh while you humorously criticize a system of fist shaking.

The public's relationship to governance is as fascinating as it is depressing. The public mistrusts the government because the public does not believe it governs in their interests, but the public at all times will criticize the government for being influenced by the public. Through these simple rules we get a rich myriad of interactions which fill our TV boxes and news sheets daily; OWS & Tea etc. It's like a goddamn Mandelbrot sequence: