Is irony dead? I have to wonder.
On Friday, I put up a Mad Magazine parody movie poster of “Gulf Wars: Episode II, Clone of the Attack” on my office door. If features George Dubya Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powel, Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, and George Herbert Walker Bush in various dramatic movie poses, with a large rocket (possibly carrying a nuclear payload?) taking off in the background. It’s modeled after the Star Wars: Episode II, Attack of the Clones movie poster, and the moment I saw it I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s one of the most brilliant, ironic criticisms I’ve seen of the Bush administration -- it’s really quite funny.
It’s not flattering -- it’s clearly opposed to the war. If you read the fine print you see statements like “And reprising their roles from Episode I ...” and “A Production of the Second Bush Administration in association with the First Bush Administration,” and my favorite line of all: “And featuring Osama bin Ladin as the Phantom Menace.”
But no one in my office gets it. The conservatives call it “cute” and “cool,” and the leftists think it’s beating the war drum. A friend of mine who placed it in his cubicle at work is also getting similar reactions.
Am I insane? Is this poster with unflattering photographs and a green-tinted Dick Cheney Yoda really pro-War? It doesn’t look like it to me. And what is it with people, anyway? What happened to a sense of humor?
This is what happens when you work with professional journalists, I suspect. Inverted pyramid bleeds it out of them.