Beyond Satire
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

I think it was the novelist Philip Roth who first noticed that real life in the U.S. is now beyond parody. It is, to coin a clumsy but necessary word, unsatirizable.
Every time a writer tries to poke fun at current events by exaggeration or irony, reality overtakes him and then, just for kicks, turns around and mows him down like roadkill.
Reading the paper or watching the news, he is left only with the feeble, deflated observation: “You can’t make this stuff up.”
This is the odd point at which official Washington finds itself this week as the Jack Abramoff scandal quickens pulses and dampens palms from one end of the capital to the other. From the time of Henry Adams a century ago, comic novelists have tried to capture in narrative form the city’s stew of greed, self-aggrandizement and moralizing one-upmanship.
Abramoff has shamed them all.
Start with his appearance at U.S. district court last week in Washington, where the Republican activist-turned-super- lobbyist pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials.
Imagine a novelist trying to describe such a character meeting the world’s TV cameras in a “perp walk” outside the courthouse. Would the novelist dare dress his bad guy in a black fedora with the brim snapped low, a belted black trench coat pulled tight across a well-fed tummy – an ensemble that might have been swiped from the wardrobe of Boris Badenov?
Of course not. Only real life can be this absurd.
Or leaf through the vast pile of e-mails Abramoff traded with his subordinates as they tried to milk ever-grander fees from casino owning Indian tribes.
A good novelist would labor to get the words just right, hoping to make the arrant greed more believable by mixing it with some subtlety of expression.
Not Abramoff. E-mailing his friend Ralph Reed, the apple-cheeked political consultant, Abramoff wrote: “I’d love us to get our mitts on that moolah!!”
A few days earlier, his associate Michael Scanlon wrote Abramoff about the same client: “I want all their MONEY!!!”
Reading such words, the aspiring novelist must feel suddenly powerless. And then it gets worse. He learns of Scanlon’s “think tank.”
The novelist knows Washington think tanks. Some are more reputable than others; some indeed are legitimate research organizations.
But the skilled satirist would stress their pseudo-academic airs, their pretensions to objectivity as the hired scholars nudge and tweak their “data” and “studies” to confirm the self-interested views of the entity – some corporation or labor union or environmental group – that pays the bills.
Scanlon would prove such a satirist a chump. An operative of the “Republican Revolution,” Scanlon knows think tanks too. His was a parody of a parody.
Scanlon used his think tank to disguise and disburse client fees, but he understood that the main credential of many think tanks is their pomposity. So he named his the American International Center and publicized its scholarly intent like so: “to expand the parameters of international discourse in an effort to leverage the combined power of world intellect.”
To expand those parameters, Scanlon established the Center’s world headquarters in a large beach house in a Delaware resort town. He hired a friend named David Grosh to over see its scholarly work. Grosh lacked graduate degrees, but he had been named the resort community’s “lifeguard of the year” in 1995.
At this point, the satirical novelist reels backward from the sheer effrontery, the ham-handedness, of reality. And then he considers Abramoff’s clients.
One of these is particularly indignant at Abramoff’s extravagant fees. The Coushatta Indian tribe of Louisiana owns a casino that brings in an estimated $300 million a year. When another tribe tried to open a competing casino, the Coushatta hired Abramoff to use his government contacts to shut it down – which he did.
A textbook lobbying maneuver? Of course – a crass payout of cash from a client, resulting in a brute exercise of government power to crush a competitor for the client’s sole benefit so the client can continue to profit from the stupidity and weakness of gamblers.
Yet nothing in the Abramoff affair is merely crass. The client has to go and do something beyond the imagination of even the most daring satirist – such as claim victim status through the language of identity politics.
“Abramoff and his partner,” one member of the tribal council told the Washington Post, “are the contemporary faces of the exploitation of native peoples.”
Every successful satire is built on the exaggeration of essential truths. And so it is with the Abramoff affair. Indeed you can tell how revealing this scandal is of the way Washington works by the intensity with which Abramoff’s fellow lobbyists insist that the scandal reveals nothing of the way Washington works.
“The Abramoff style is so far afield from the normal course of business as to be irrelevant to me and probably most people in my line of work,” one Democratic lobbyist, Joel Johnson, told the Post.
A Republican lobbyist, Ed Rogers, was equally indignant. “The whole Abramoff affair,” he said, “is not a lesson of how business is done in Washington.”
Finally, in the face of comments like these, the satirist must declare defeat. You can’t make this stuff up. It is unsatirizable.
Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.