Bill Moyers essay last night on The Journal was the striking similarity between today's news headlines and the satire of The Onion, quite often impossible to tell apart.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
We'll begin this new year with some of our favorite headlines from the old. They're all from "The Onion."
Yes, "The Onion," this newspaper of humor, remains the most reliable over-the-counter relief for the blues. We journalists can sometimes be vultures, plucking morsels from a collapsing civilization; it can be a depressing job.
So take it from me, when you're down in the dumps, "The Onion" offers a mood-altering experience that's completely legal, and guaranteed to lift your spirits at least until the next bulletin from the Middle East, the White House or Congress.
...
Nowadays, it's hard to tell "The Onion" from the straight press. How many times a week do you read or hear a story and think, "This has to be a joke."
Moyers finishes with the classic Marx Brothers comedy of 1933, Duck Soup, one of the great films in motion picture history.
So bring on "The Onion" and Jon Stewart. And Stephen Colbert, and Doonesbury, and all the others who channel Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Will Rogers, reminding us that as we live in the Twilight Zone of politics between reality and parody, we are really living in America's 51st state, the state of Freedonia.
That's right, Freedonia, the make-believe country imagined by the Marx brothers in their classic comedy DUCK SOUP. The parallels with the soup we're in are notable, even if the movie is older than I am.
