Babylon Bee to Cease Publication?
No, of course not. It looks likely to continue its steady stream of satire for a long time. After all, everyday life provides plenty of fodder for its cannon.
But that’s in fact what made me ask the headlined question. Everyday life provides so much grist for the BB’s satirical mill that I suspect it’s getting hard to keep up with developments, much less stay ahead of them. As the simple facts of woke life become more and more bizarre, satirizing same must get harder and harder. It’s as if the unintended self-satire of the woke always threatens to overwhelm the Bee’s intended variety.
Consider the recent excitement on Martha’s Vineyard. MV is one of the whitest and richest of all American enclaves, it votes almost exclusively Democratic and its residents are unctuously woke. They place a high value on diversity, place signs around the place advertising the fact and of course haven’t a racist bone in their inviolate bodies. Hey, just ask them; they’ll tell you.
But then two small planes from Florida landed and discharged 50 people from Venezuela, all of whom were conspicuously brown and suspiciously unrich. Now, 50 people added to a permanent population of about 15,000 aren’t many, particularly when those residents are wealthy and have roughly 100% leisure time. A bit of ingenuity, some organizing and a little, you know, work, could have taken care of those people pretty well, at least for a time. But to MV residents it was too much. Their generosity toward the poor and downtrodden turned out to be more theoretical than actual. It was exhausted in under 48 hours, at which point the governor of the state sent in the National Guard to whisk the unwanted pests away to a military base on the mainland. Another wokester actually likened the Venezuelans to “trash” on his lawn (really!).
Truly, no one made this up, not even the Bee.
Nor this:
In Brooklyn, as in most of New York City, crime is going up. And homeless people, much like those impertinent Venezuelans, are proliferating and making life difficult. So, one doughty resident took the bull by the horns and proposed, via text and email, that locals should create a neighborhood watch organization, sort of like the Guardian Angels, to help prevent crime. It’s an interesting concept in part because that’s exactly the recommendation we were given by the defund-the-police crowd following George Floyd’s murder. You remember. We could take police off the streets and replace them with members of the community, social workers and the like.
And places like Seattle gave that a try. Police vacated one area that was then taken over by segments of the woke citizenry and given the quaint name CHOP, later CHAZ. To everyone’s shock, violent crime, including murder and rape, increased and the place was disbanded three weeks later. For some strange reason, a police-less society didn’t work all that well, even for a few days.
But whatever one thinks of the CHAZ, at least it happened. People got together, stole some barricades, blocked off the streets, established their own armed security force (don’t call them police!) who duly threatened all unauthorized persons with bodily harm if they violated whatever rules they said were in place. Exactly what CHAZ denizens thought that accomplished remains a mystery, but, as I said, at least they did something.
The outlook for the Brooklyn group looks less sanguine. As journalist Suzy Weiss informs us, a small group got together, named themselves the Park Slope Panthers, was told that name disrespected the Black Panthers and found that it’s hard to stop crime, or the homeless and mentally ill from harassing people, if taking any form of action whatsoever offends your woke principles.
Consider:
This made the whole crime-fighting thing a bit awkward: “It’s about finding a way that’s non-biased to report these things and have people feel like it’s safe here,” said Emily, one of the Panthers. “You don’t want to fall into that stereotype of privilege.”
Soon a few 20-somethings showed up to inform the group that they “weren’t super into” the whole idea of the group or “super into” making any form of change. They brought some sort of amplifier with which to blast music loudly enough (“super” loudly?) to drown out the meeting, but seem not to have succeeded.
As to the homeless man who’d killed a woman’s dog with a stick while she was walking him and tried to do the same to another dog, the sentiment seemed to be,
“So, it sounds like this person has been pushed out of an unimaginable amount of systems.” He added that the assailant was probably “neurodivergent.”
More generally,
“The construct of crime has been so socially constructed to target black and poor people.”
That of course sounds like the very reason homeless encampments have proliferated throughout California and woke DA’s refuse to prosecute a wide array of crimes. After all, if the very concept of crime is racist, it’s hard to get behind enforcing criminal law.
Perhaps most woke of all was Cece.
A woman in a blue jumpsuit approached the group, pulling her gray hood over her blue cap that read “ACAB” (as in, “All Cops Are Bastards”) in big white block letters. Her name was Cece.
She suggested we could build a community where we all took care of each other and no one ever had to call the police.
Yes, in order to change the slightest thing, we need to entirely remake the “community” or perhaps the entire society, all the members of which presumably share woke assumptions and goals. Until then, there’s not much hope of accomplishing anything in this most woke of all possible worlds. And, as one participant pointed out, a precondition for actually functioning would be the creation of a “philosophy of safety” that so far has eluded the Panthers.
Stay tuned to learn what that even means. Me? I can hardly wait. But the Babylon Bee? They’re having a hard time out-satirizing woke self-satire. You have to admit, it’s a tough old world out there.