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November 17, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Friends don’t let friends commit felony hyperbole

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Ever since I read “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, I have been an admirer of well-crafted satire, sarcasm and irony. Been known to use the persuasive little devils myself on occasion.

The only problem with these three expressive devices is they are like habanera peppers: a tiny bit goes a long way; too much can not only blow out the senses of the intended persuadees, it also can turn people off of your intellectual fare forever.

As someone who has long made her living at persuasive writing, I have picked up a sense over the decades for what works and what does not. Failing at satire, I can personally attest, is one of the great teachers. No matter how funny or clever you think you are, if your send-up goes over the heads of most of your audience, you have failed.

Another failure occurs when you get so carried away with your sarcasm/satire/irony, you commit felony hyperbole.

For example, say you are searching for a sarcastic or ironic comparison to a person you dislike, and the word “Hitler” pops into your brain.

STOP. Do not go there. Ever. A smart-aleck Hitler comparison is almost always felony hyperbole. It will derail your argument and wreck your attempt to persuade anyone of anything.

Case in point: a recent letter to the editor of this newspaper.

The gentleman’s initial complaint was about the difficulty of contacting the office of his congressional representative. For the first few paragraphs of his letter, the writer had a really good, controlled blast going, providing damning detail of his many futile attempts to get through via phone or e-mail.

Then, the gentleman switched to the congressman’s real sin — supporting some of the U.S. President’s policies for reform — and his persuasive case began to unravel.

He called the congressman a puerile name, “pond scum” (a class-B persuasive writing misdemeanor). In the next paragraph, his once-cogent argument came apart at the seams. The gentleman compared his duly elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives to “Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao and Hitler,” and said all four “look benevolent by comparison.”

Note not only the Hitler felony hyperbole, but also Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao felonies, plus an over-the-top ironic reference (class-A misdemeanor) to the compared benevolence of four legendary perpetrators of mass genocide — in a single sentence.

Perhaps a short, historical review will be of help. Shall we begin in reverse order?

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) — Leader and dictator of the National Socialist German Workers Party (nee “Nazis”) and architect of the Third Reich’s 12-year reign of terror, invasions of Europe, Northern Africa and the Soviet Union, and a “final solution” meant to annihilate entire cultures and ethnic groups from the face of the Earth.

Hitler is generally believed to have been responsible for as many as 17 million citizen deaths as part of the Third Reich’s quest for Aryan dominance. This included 6 million Jews deemed deserving of extermination. As the primary causal agent of World War II, Hitler also could be credited with the deaths of at least 22-25 million Allied and Axis troops (5.3 million Germans), and of an estimated 40-52 million civilians.

Mao Zedong (1893—1976) — Chairman and dictator of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 until his death. Through myriad campaigns, revolutionary policies, mass executions and state-induced famine, Mao is estimated to have caused the deaths of at least 50 million people and possibly as many as 70 million.

According to a U.S. State Department report cited by Wikipedia, about 1 million Chinese were killed in a single year as part of Mao’s massive transfer (i.e. state theft) of land.

Josef Stalin (1878-1953) — Dictator and general secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the early going of Stalin’s three-decade rule, his policies helped set off an apocalyptic famine that cost the lives of more than 5 million people.

Then came a variety of political and ethnic purges, during which millions of undesirables (to Stalin) were deported and more than 1.7 million people were arrested. Throughout 1937-38, the execution rate held fairly steady at about 1,000 people per day. Conservative estimates put the two-year death toll somewhere between 950,000 and 1.2 million.

The Soviets would go on to lose about 14 percent of their population during World War II (see previous reference to Hitler’s totals), Stalin would do a 180 on his Allied comrades, invade and occupy much of Eastern Europe, and lay the foundation for the Cold War and another few decades of purges, imprisonment, deportation and executions.

Saloth Sar, a.k.a. Pol Pot (1928-1998) — Leader of the Cambodian Communist regime, the Khmer Rouge. Anti-Soviet and pro-People’s Republic of China, Pol Pot employed the customary genocide tools of political execution, forced labor, torture, ethnic and religious oppression, starvation and mass murder until he was chased to the edge of Cambodia in 1979.

During his hey-day (1974-1979), his policies and actions are believed to have resulted in the deaths of between 1.7 million and 2.5 million Cambodians. They included untold numbers of undesirables (to Pol Pot) who were forced to prepare their own graves in seized agricultural lands and whose discovered skulls later spoke volumes about those “Killing Fields.”

So, there you have them, brief capsulations of four maniacs — and a sarcasm-oozing gentleman letter writer chose them for comparison with a hard-to-reach second-term congressman from Indiana’s 8th District.

From what I’ve been able to glean from the Persuasive Writing Penal Code, there are standard plea bargains for each of the gentleman’s four felony hyperbole, but I’ve yet to find a possible deal for all four felonies, plus the irony misdemeanor and the aggravating circumstance of the pond scum.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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