Turns out God-fearing, gun-toting “Middle Americans” aren’t the only ones “not sophisticated enough to appreciate satire.”
How embarrassing (do read the whole thing…)
That incident came rushing back to me a while back as I read the Vox Popoli blog, which seems to have been one of the first to have posted this hilariously subversive “Dick to the Dawk” video spoofing the arrogance of Richard Dawkins and his New Atheist devotees.
Now it frankly never occurred to me that anybody—wherever you come down on the “Intelligent Design vs. The New Atheists” quarrel (I think they both have big problems)—could watch that video and not know that it was a satire of Dawkins and the New Atheists (it is, in fact, transparently the work of viral advertisers for [the Ben Stein movie] Expelled).
However, I discovered that, thanks to the same sort of bizarre lack of elementary social aptitude that Leakey displayed in the film I saw decades ago, the humor and satire are indeed lost on… Richard Dawkins.
I don’t mean that Dawkins got angry about being spoofed. I mean that Dawkins was too thick to figure out if he was being spoofed or not. On his blog, after discovering the video, he pleads for enlightenment from his fellow Brights:
If anyone can understand a single word of this, don’t bother to translate, just tell me whose side it’s on.
That would be funny enough, given that Dawkins is our natural moral and intellectual superior, according to his own press releases. But the hilarious part is the response of the Brights who chorus into his combox to assure him and each other that the video is, in fact, on “their side”…
