A Genuine Satirist
by tristero
RIP, Paul Krassner. I was listening to WBAI back in the day when (I’m pretty sure) it was Krassner who announced the formation — such as it was — of the Yippies. And my 15-year-old alienated self knew I had finally found a grown-up who got it.
He was a genuine satirist: cruel, unfair, with a truly sick sense of humor, and revelatory:
The Realist’s [Krassner’s underground magazine] most famous article was one Mr. Krassner wrote portraying Lyndon B. Johnson as sexually penetrating a bullet wound in John F. Kennedy’s neck while accompanying the assassinated president’s body back to Washington on Air Force One. The headline of the article was “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” and it claimed — falsely — to be material that had been removed from William Manchester’s book “The Death of a President.”
“People across the country believed — if only for a moment — that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place,” Mr. Krassner told an interviewer in 1995. “The imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.”
Bad taste doesn’t begin to describe Krassner’s article (you can read it here). But Krassner’s obscene fictional images pale in comparison to the very real atrocities that were coming in every day from Vietnam, the sheer extent of them creating a dangerous normalizing of that awful war.
Controlling and channeling Krassner’s level of outrageousness in a good cause is something very few people can pull off (for another doozy from that time, try Philip Roth’s Our Gang). And certainly, in this era of fake news, the last thing we need is more of it.
But at the time, Krassner’s point was very clear: it was to shock readers out of their complacency and, pace Burroughs, look at what really was on the end of every fork — and provoke genuinely unhealthy, morally indefensible laughter.