Allan, I love good satire, but you’ve got to be careful about “stepping over the edge” to the point where a significant majority of your audience starts to believe they’re reading something serious. I think if you read the comments here you may find that more than half have taken the story seriously — and that “more than half” are selected from those who read the story carefully enough and cared about it enough that they then decided to write a comment on it.
Ginburg’s “What a moron!” comment *should* be a dead giveaway, but your writing is talented enough that by the time a reader reaches it I think a lot of them have already bought into the full theme to such an extent that they’ll simply accept it as an accurate quote!
Yes, “Truth In Satire” is sitting right there above the headline, but maybe you need a prominent tagline at the end as well? (Although that would certainly take away from the fun of the comments… )
I wrote a piece back in the ’90s titled “AATTAACK!” which detailed the goals of a group called “Americans Against The Tobacco, Alcohol, And Car Killers!” I played upon people’s soft spot for attacking smoking at that time in history and wove in the threads for the same sort of fanaticism to be used against alcohol and automobiles. I’ve always been quite proud of the piece because although about half the folks realized it was satire, I also had a quarter attacking my “group’s” aims and another quarter wanting to join up!
So I understand your quandary, particularly when presented with such a soft target!
- MJM, who actually WAS quite involved with a fairly radical-oriented pro-bicyclist / anti-car group in the ’70s and ’80s … and still has some sympathies in that regard.
