satire

I cut my teeth as a literature reading junior on William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was, among other things, a great writer of satire. His satire always creeped up in these oblique quasi-parable/allegories. In any case, my writing notebook has been laying on my floor for the last few weeks by my chair. I was reading Society of the Spectacle last night when I picked the notebook up and wrote down what amounted to "Homeless people are so ethical today." The gag of what I wrote was that the story had nothing to do with homeless people in the conventional sense at all. Rather it was a satire about a family who would rather be homeless than live in the house built for them by "illegial aliens." I really wanted to write something about this email forward my wife received from her friend who sends (from our perspective, well maybe from any perspective) questionable email forwards. I've also been turning over the beer story in my mind. But more on that some other time. I may put the story up here since it is not that long. By the end of writing it, however, I felt very ambivalent about it. You see (always beware a sentence beginning with "you see") the point would seem to be that this family's act of "resistance" was harmful, even ridiculous. I tried to show how these people so clearly misperceived their situation. But what situation? I found this hard to define. This reading would represent the kind of entropic movement that most satire (I think) exhibits. But in another way what the story (which of course you can't read right now) laments is how far fetched it is that anyone would actually go to such lengths to resist something. Well, these are just things that are on my mind when I should be doing things like, oh, studying for oral exams and so on...