In a rather bizarre case from my neck of the woods, a 75-year-old man has been found guilty of making a death threat against his city councillor. The twist? The threat was in the form of a poem, which the man claimed was a work of political satire.
But Justice James J. Keaney claims that since Antonio Batista doesn’t have a high level of education, it’s unlikely that he knew what satire was.
Threeliesforone, who drew my attention to the article, is calling classism, and I agree. Plenty of educated folks fail at sarcasm. One friend of mine, a community college teacher (name withheld not to protect his identity, but rather the identities of his students) had his kids read A Modest Proposal; several reacted in horror, wondering why their teacher was advocating cannibalism.
It’s not like you need a formal education to figure out satire, you just need to read a lot and plenty of intelligent but otherwise not so terribly educated people read a plenty.
Maybe he doesn’t have a Ph.D in literature, but I’m sure he’s got a library card. Most people from my grandparent’s generation don’t have anything past a high school diploma. But I wouldn’t call my grandparents poorly educated.
Right. Because nobody’s ever been sarcastically or satirically lambasted by a grandparent. Nobody who doesn’t have a high-school diploma credentialing them has ever read a sarcastic editorial in a newspaper. That’s why newspapers are edited and written to a less-than-high-school reading level. Nobody old has ever been exposed to political satire on TV or in political cartoons. Nuance and irony are the sole intellectual heritage of the university-educated.
Someone tell my Italian great-aunties, please. We’ll also need to posthumously revoke Jane Austen’s snark license, as well as that of William Hogarth.
[...] (Via Sabotabby) [...]