Beards, Satire, and Change?

A month ago, April Fools provided me an opportunity to try my hand at satire.

Part of the reason that I wrote “Clipping Convergence: The Army Overlooks the Beard Domain at Its Peril” was for a new writing experience. Satire poses a challenge, because as an author, you must keep your purpose opaque to take advantage of humor, ridicule, and exaggeration, and not make the argument too earnest. However, you cannot make the article so hard to interpret that your audience actually thinks that you are proposing beards to win wars.

Satire assumes an intelligent audience that can see through that opacity to the deeper argument that the piece is making. Although, since Johnathan Swift wrote a proposal to alleviate hunger in Ireland by eating babies, some of the humor of satire comes from the satisfaction of recognizing the joke and making fun of those that believe a satirical piece is recommending eating babies or defeating our enemies through glorious beards.

Another reasons I attempted satire was to reach a larger audience. I was proud of my previous article, “Returning Context to Our Doctrine,” but that dry title would only attract the true doctrine nerd. On the other hand, an article on how beards produce victory would attract a wider audience out of pure curiosity to hear the ridiculousness of the proposal. The people that read it will hopefully share it for its humor, which is why South Park’s “Margaritaville” explained the Great Recession to a larger audience (2.77 million on its first broadcast) than any economics book on it.

Good satire is more than humor though: it seeks change. W. H. Auden said “comedy is good tempered and pessimistic” because it believes that things cannot be improved, while “satire is angry and optimistic” because it believes the things being ridiculed can be improved. Since the satirists of the 1700s like Swift, Alexander Pope, and Voltaire, authors have turned to satire to speak truth to power and show that even the most sanctified ideas are not off limits. Good satire points to a way out of the absurd situation that it ridicules, moving us beyond the cynicism found in many of today’s online memes.

I hope that my article exposed the limits of Multidomain Operation’s over-emphasis on capabilities and showed that the Army must factor in the non-easily measured elements of war: the will to fight, initiative, and theories of victory.

Although…maybe those elements can be measured by taking a ruler to your beard.