Assignment 13 - Ella Franklin

Satire is what bothers me the most in this world.

Making a mockery of serious issues is not the way to solve them. Look at Saturday Night Live, the leading satiric outlet in America. For over 40 years SNL has run cold opens satirizing the political system. SNL inflates our respectable leaders to a caricature. One skit featuring Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford shows "Ford" sneezing into his tie, followed by picking up a glass of water instead of a phone when a phone rings, and pouring that glass of water on himself. Played by Will Ferrell, George W. Bush prepares for a debate by pouring himself a glass of beer out of a keg and ruminating about how "cool" it's gonna be to be president. And we can't forget the bimbo-ization of Hillary Clinton during the 2008 race. SNL makes a successful woman and a respectable conservative, Sarah Palin, look like a ditz, struggling over regurgitating the canned speech we assume to have been taught to her by the campaign about the $700 billion bailout. When asked by Katie Couric (Amy Poehler) about how to promote democracy in the Middle East, Palin asks to use her phone-a-friend.

SNL reduces our leaders to idiots who, behind the scenes, don't know how to run a country. They view the presidency just as an eight year old boy might - "Man it's cool I'm gonna be president that's wicked" (Will Ferrell as George Bush in aforementioned skit). Modern satire influences us to think that American politics are all a joke, and look where we are! SNL mocked politics so much that politics became comedy and now we have elected a reality star as president.

Saturday Night Live is the reason Donald Trump is our president-elect. Not in how they covered him, or how the "crooked liberal media" covered Trump, but in how they made us view politics. We all watch SNL, our parents have, and we do. It's been on for 40 years! But overtime, it does damage. Every politician is juvenile. So we think our politicians actually are juvenile. So then we see a juvenile running for president, and we think, "Yeah, seems about right." And then we get comfortable with the idea of a juvenile running our country. So, when there is a real blatant juvenile on the ballot, we vote for him! It's no different than how politics has been for years, it's just more obvious!

So what's the solution? Well, Trump hates SNL, so maybe SNL will be gone in four years. Or, assuming it isn't, and we continue the portrayal of our politicians as such, he'll be elected for a second term, and SNL has at most 8 years left! Trump can get rid of it for a nasty mockery of him and then maybe we can try to take politics seriously again. Or, SNL can ditch the satire and we can all be serious about who are president is and build up respect for the office, much like, say, a wall protecting our US-Mexican borders, and then maybe our next election won't end in tears.