Eleven years ago, when I rather infamously flamed out on the Internet, one of the main reasons I lost it was that I lacked the ability to laugh at myself.  To be sure I’ve always played up my geekiness and nerdiness and how silly I can be, but at the time I wasn’t able to apply that attitude towards the work I was doing online.  As that work became more difficult and I realized that I really didn’t even like the work, I didn’t handle the criticism my work was getting in a healthy way.  In the end I did smarten up enough to just quit, but not before leaving in my wake a long trail of posts to the effect of “I am in so much pain, you have no idea how this feels” that made me look incredibly foolish and self-centred.

I was reminded of why it’s so important to be able to laugh at yourself earlier this week when Fox removed a skit from the Emmys featuring Alec Baldwin that poked fun at the phone-hacking scandal that continues to engulf Fox’s parent company, News Corporation.  Fox said that they pulled the skit because they were worried that airing it would be seen as them making light of the scandal.  I can’t recall a single instance where a television network pulled programming for this reason, and can’t help but suspect that Fox cut the skit because they didn’t want to be made fun of.

This incident recalls a similar kerfuffle several years ago, when Simpsons creator Matt Groening claimed that Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons for an episode that included a spoof of the so-called news network, including a crawl at the bottom of the screen similar to the network’s that included such items as “Do Democrats Cause Cancer?”  One of the excuses I remember hearing for Fox News’ actions was that they worried that the crawl would trick viewers into thinking they were actually watching Fox News.  Granted, plastic surgery is a fact of life for most on-screen talent at any channel, but I haven’t seen anyone on Fox News who’s been so drastically reconstructed to be able to pass for one of Matt Groening’s animations.

The most telling tale of conservatives’ inability to laugh at themselves, to me, comes from Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.  Back when Barbara Bush’s public image was still bulletproof, Franken wrote of sitting next to her on a plane and getting the ice queen treatment from her simply for suggesting that the way George W. Bush shook his shoulders when he laughed was kind of funny.  Then again, given Dubya’s disastrous “I can’t find the WMDs” skit at the 2004 White House Correspondents Dinner, perhaps humour is simply not in the Bush DNA.

In and of themselves, these examples are kind of a funny look at the stodginess of conservatives.  However, last week when some conservatives loudly cheered the idea of allowing an uninsured thirty-year-old man to die after falling into a coma, it made all too clear the abhorrent inhumanity that is at the heart of a good portion of the modern conservative movement.  I couldn’t help remembering Rush Limbaugh’s audience laughing and cheering when he came out on his television show mere hours after Kurt Cobain’s dead body had been discovered and called Cobain “a worthless piece of human garbage,” the moment that forever turned me off of American conservatism.

One of the things I’ve been doing this summer has been to read the Bible all the way through.  I’d read bits and pieces over the years, but never the whole book from cover to cover.  When I got to Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:44 — “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;” (KJV) — I had to wonder if the verse is simply not printed in some Bibles, as well as its repetitions later in Chapter 6 of Luke and Chapter 12 of Romans.  I’ve frequently said that for all that the far right claims the mantle of Christianity as their own, they espouse and act in ways quite unlike what Christ taught, but reading the Bible all the way through has made me realize just how true that statement is.

As problematic as the marriage of the Republican Party to the religious right has been, its most insidious aspect has been to infuse American conservative thought with religious righteousness and certainty.  It is one thing to believe that your opinions are correct, but it is quite another to behave as if anyone who disagrees with you is not only wrong but evil or un-American or what have you.  Where the figurehead of the religion these people claim to follow tells them to turn the other cheek, they are all too quick to cast the first stone.  Dubya’s infamous post-09.11 declaration that “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” was only the tip of the iceberg of that attitude in his administration.

Speaking of 09.11, as its ten-year anniversary passed earlier this month, I was reminded of how some conservatives sought to rally public sentiment by pointing out how some people cheered in the streets at the deaths of innocent Americans.  Perhaps things would have been different if those Americans didn’t have health insurance, or weren’t heterosexual, or voted for Al Gore in 2000.  Maybe the conservatives would have led the cheering instead.

This is why the inability of conservatives to laugh at themselves is so troubling.  It’s a symptom of a much deeper problem with American conservatism, a prevailing attitude that their ideas are not only correct but beyond criticism, even the relatively mild criticism of comedy.  Conservative figures like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are placed on pedestals and elevated to near-biblical heights, and any criticism or joke, no matter how small, is taken as an affront to not only the figure but God and country as well.  Either you’re with them or you’re against them, and if you’re against them then they will unleash their full fury and vengeance on you.

To be fair, not all conservatives act this way, or at least not all the time; for all his faults, Bill O’Reilly seems to be occasionally aware of what a blowhard he is, referring to himself as a “pompous bastard” in one of his earlier books.  For too many conservative figures and their followers, though, their inability to handle criticism, or to be poked fun at in even the mildest way, not only renders intelligent political discussion and debate even more difficult, but also discourages people from even trying to join the political process.  That, above all, is no laughing matter.