Let me be completely candid: I have developed nervous habits.

My smoking is definitely one, as is my drinking, both of which I find myself doing more and more as I follow the news – Bush’s speeches on his “little bitty” tax cut in the face of overwhelming opposition of financial experts, White House press conferences about intelligence failures in Iraqi, Wolfowitz’s open declaration that “weapons of mass destruction” was a banner manufactured to solidify bureaucratic opinion on invading Iraq.

Like many of my peers, I find there are times when I cannot take the news sober.

Critics of American culture have called it a Prozac nation, but in a horrific political climate like this, a mild anti-depressant will most likely not be enough for the future, since – as many today and many before me have known – it becomes increasingly difficult to live with a clear head in a country with a dirty conscience.

In many ways, I have known that this administration is pushing this country to the right, and that many print and televised news sources were following quickly, but I guess I hadn’t realized just how far right popular news media had gotten until last Wednesday night, when my mailbox was flooded with e-mails about the latest column I had written.

Last week, I wrote a satire about how liberal viewpoints are seen through an increasingly warped conservative lens. I also mocked the ways in which abstract concepts like universal freedom are lazily thrown over tough issues of foreign policy. In the adopted voice of a conservative extremist, I satirically railed against activists who were trying to tell others about workers’ rights and the consequences of American imperialism, jokingly implying that consumer goods were more important than the plight of mothers and children chained to machines in sweat shops.

The piece was, as they say, over the top. Indeed, it was so over the top that I actually joked that no one in Indonesian sweat shops were really working that hard if Americans couldn’t get their hands on Kobe Bryant high tops at their local Foot Locker.

Few got the joke.

Which is partly my fault, since it was an underestimation. Not of the audience, though everyone – myself included – should read more satire. No, I underestimated just how unpatriotic dissenting opinions are seen by both the right and a depressingly large part of the conservative middle and, more importantly, how far to the right this country has actually gone.

I had heard that the Fox News and MSNBC espoused some brutally imperialistic epithets. I have heard Rush Limbaugh and other syndicated radio commentators label liberals evil and unpatriotic. But I guess that I wasn’t aware just how far they had gone and – unfortunately – just how warmly they are being accepted, even taken seriously, taken to heart.

There were some that thought Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was serious, that he actually wanted the Irish to sell their babies to the British, who would then eat them. Which is emblematic of two things. First, satire takes critical readership, something many in Swift’s audience did not possess. Second, it spoke of how terrible the British ruled over the Irish, since people believed that they would – if given the chance – buy and eat Irish babies.

The same things, then, are at stake for those who did not get the real message last week. First, satire is both an under-used and (sometimes) misunderstood form of argument. Second, arguments that are desperately obvious parodies are being taken seriously – showing that others, who are not joking about their radically conservative stances, have the lee-way to transmit them to an all too eager public with the grace and encouragement of this administration.

I have learned, then, a lesson: Satire does not function in a political climate that is quickly becoming an evil, one-sided parody of itself.

In such a climate, too many people don’t get the joke.

John Ross is a senior in comparative studies. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].