SATIRE

We have written a book and are told that in order to get it published we need to build an audience. Therefore we want to be friended and liked and followed and linked! On Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and Flickr and LinkedIn. On all the social media we can possibly find!

We need to be “liked”, but we’re afraid we’ll be hated, instead. And this is why. Our book is satire.

The atrocities in France have people from all over the world — from Grambling, Louisiana to Ypsilanti, Michigan to Nairobi, Kenya Googling the word “satire.” This is because Charlie Hebdo — a previously little-known weekly magazine which features cartoons, articles and jokes, and that uses satire as its main theme, became a target of hate.

According the Merriam Webster on-line dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire), satire is:

“Artistic form in which human or individual vices, folly, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement . . . Though present in Greek literature, notably in the works of Aristophanes, satire generally follows the example of either of two Romans, Horace or Juvenal. To Horace the satirist is an urbane man of the world who sees folly everywhere but is moved to gentle laughter rather than to rage. Juvenal’s satirist is an upright man who is horrified and angered by corruption. Their different perspectives produced the subgenres of satire identified by John Dryden as comic satire and tragic satire.”

PLEASE PARDON OUR FRENCH (A Peek at a week of not-so-private, Private School Emails) is about students, parents, teachers and administrators who are both comic and tragic. The characters and stories are culled from our being four out of four of the above, for a combined experience of 120+ years.

To tell the truth, our book is more on the tragic side of satire, because we have been horrified and angered by the hypocrisy we’ve witnessed. There were only a few souls with whom we ever shared “gentle laughter” about the absurdity of our situations and we realized quickly the futility of trying to improve the circumstances for ourselves or others.

Our book ridicules people’s stupidity and vices by using humor, irony and exaggeration. Some of these people are loathsome, vicious, spiteful, repulsive, despicable, mean, obnoxious, and vile.

We are apprehensive. It’s scary to be hated. Sometimes dangerous. Wish us luck.

Better yet, like us!