Last night a colleague recalled the scene from “The Simpsons – The Movie” where Homer questions “Aawww, why do I have to go to church on Sundays. Why can’t I just pray like hell in the final minutes of my life, like everbody else does.” – being scarily close to the truth for some significant proportion of the populace down here in the bible belt.
Unlike Sam, I wouldn’t like to bet against too high odds that these people are from a real church community, who see this as valid comment, albeit in some level of humorous parody (or god forbid, maybe not).
Things are rarely what they seem, which after several cycles of paradoxical irony, may be not, not … not what they appear to be. Now that is the sign of our times … (too) many a true word.
In the good old days the jester wore the silly outfit, so you could tell spoof from reality even if, in fact precisely because, many a true word could be spoken. The loss of innocence arrived “while the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown”. The difference between irony / humour and hypocrisy / lies is in the intent, not in the words or ideas expressed. The memes have us mere mortals over a barrel.