President Paternoster Wins the Wrong Award!

Brothers and Sisters it has come to my attention this morning that my blog was nominated for certain Brodie awards and in fact won the title of “Best Humor/Satire Site or Blog” for 2011. 

http://latterdaymainstreet.com/2012/02/01/2011-brodies-vote-here/

Words cannot even begin to express how disappointed I am right now.  When a Stake President decides to come online to show how the gospel helps individuals come unto Christ and when he defends the Church against the attacks of the enemy there is absolutely nothing humorous in this.  We are in a battle for the souls of men and Satan is winning.  I am disgusted at the very suggestion that my blog may contain humour or satire.  I am also outraged that the creators of the award couldn’t even spell humour correctly.  Don’t they have schools in America?

Rest assured I am working with the people in charge to change the name of my award from “Best Humor/Satire Site or Blog” to “As Faith Promoting as General Conference Blog.”

I went so far as to research the meaning of satire to try and understand where this gross misconception might be coming from.  The below is my understanding of the purpose of satire and why my blog absolutely does not fit into this category:

“In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming the institution itself, into improvement.  (My blog is about the one true Church even the Lord’s kingdom upon the earth which certainly does not need to be shamed into improvement.  Improvements, if any even need to be made, will come through the revelatory channel that the Lord has put in place for the salvation of mankind). 

Although satire is usually meant to be funny, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit as a weapon. This "militant" irony or sarcasm often professes to approve or at least accept as natural the very things the satirist wishes to attack. (My blog does not meet this requirement, although Sister Murphy did once mention I was rather witty).

The best satire does not seek to do harm or damage by its ridicule, unless we speak of damage to the structure of vice, but rather it seeks to create a shock of recognition and to make vice repulsive so that the vice will be expunged from the society under attack; (to the truly faithful my blog posts do not create a shock of recognition.  If it did they would be working against me trying to bring my blog down and reporting me to blogger or whomever they could – trust me).  Whenever possible this shock of recognition is to be conveyed through wit: the formula for satire is one of honey and medicine. Far from being simply destructive, satire is implicitly constructive, and the satirists themselves, often depict themselves as such constructive critics.

The reason the satirist doesn't merely write moral tracts encouraging people or organizations to virtue, and the reason he feels justified in displaying anger and indignation at the institution under attack is that the satirist's world (in the church) is not one of basic good accidentally gone astray, in which every man would seek good if he knew how or were shown the way, but rather it is one of unseeing fools and unsightly knaves who either claim to possess virtue already, or who have already rejected it, claiming that vice is (or is as good as) virtue. It is a world of hypocrisy, in which social standing, church membership, titles and positions, peer praise, lip service to morals, and wealth are all used to hide evils of the first order. In such a world of hypocrites and pretenders, simple moral encouragement would be totally inefficacious. The satirist, therefore, will display his critical attitude and implicit morality through irony, often by creating a narrator (naturally this does not describe the good President Paternoster) who appears to be as much a hypocrite as the target of the work, but who exposes himself and the target by his lack of true perception or inability to hide his hypocrisy.

Church members pay little attention to moralizers or blogs that attempt to expose the Church. Since the hypocrisy demands this particular approach, it is not surprising that the satirist takes hypocrisy for granted in his works. The theory is, then, that for the satiric mode to be corrective, certain values must exist which people do not follow, but which values they claim to follow (this of course does not describe the church, at all).

Exaggeration is one of the most commonly used techniques in satire, since the depiction of an extreme or blatantly vicious case is one of the best ways to get the target to recognize or admit that a vice exists at all. Recognition must precede correction. The satirist brings his description of a wrong to its logical extreme, or at least exaggerates by overemphasis in order to make the unseeing see, and the seeing-but-complacent oppose and expunge corruption." 

To him that hath ears let him hear.