I’ve been digging through my incunabula (old writings in my files) and thank goodness found a long-lost item that should help me weather the depression invoked as I browse through the morning paper to read about the poverty us lower class people are likely to suffer in the coming months.

I’m worried about the collapse of our educational system, IRS malfunctions, the loss of public television and the recurrence of the Covid epidemic, as well as a host of other catastrophes. Including a more recent proposal, that the government re-write the national highway signs to better educate us that the white man has been much kinder to our founding fathers—i. e. Native Americans—than current propaganda has made us believe.

Has there ever been a worse time? Probably. Back when my un-woke and silent generation of the 1960s were reading The Realist Magazine, now long gone, but very much alive during the Kennedy years, when we silently laid around and laughed at the satirical jabs thrust into the complacent bellies of the silent majority by a magazine that is no longer with us. I found my copies of a collection from the 60s. Ever hear of it? Just think Mad magazine, only WAY WAY crazier, edited by Paul Krasner and written by satirists like Lenny Bruce, whom the Chicago Police Department threw into the slammer for using the C-word in his night club routine at a club called The Gate of Horn.

There the old anthology lay, next to a pile of well-thumbed Mads. 

I tentatively wiped off its dust and realized it contained material first published in 1974 when we weren’t, to my surprise, as silent back then as is claimed by our critics, like Dick Gregory, Mort Sahl, and Terry Southern.

One huge article claimed that we’d all be so financially strapped that the next World’s Fair would feature a “Poverty Pavilion” offering an arcade featuring HIT THE BEGGAR, “a fun[!] ride in which derelicts are loosed in simulated traffic. As they attempt to wipe your windshield, you attempt to run them down.” 

A DUST BOWL RIDE “will provide free face masks. See Oakies with hopeless expressions attempt to farm in six feet of silicon dust.”

SLEEP UNDER A BRIDGE. “Only 25 cents a night. Vermin blankets 5 cents extra. Prices in this exhibit in no way reflect actual costs, which have been underwritten by various philanthropical organizations which set them arbitrarily to show the poor men an accurate idea of money.”

APPALACHIAN FUNLAND. “Roar at the tobacco-chewing antics of a 5-year-old boy. See the funny legs of the kids with rickets. Kick a hole in the wall of the splintering shacks.”

But wait! There’s more! There’s the miniature model of the Mississippi Debtor’s prison, the Unplanned Parenthood Booth and the Hobo’s Jungle Luncheonette, meals served in rusty tin cans.

So what did I learn in my adventure to examine the example of the violent tropes of vicious Juvenalian satire exemplified in the Realist as opposed to the gentler warnings of Horatian satire displayed in Mad? Neither are much fun, nor are the early morning daily news stories in the Star Tribune. Time to grin and bear it, I guess.