"Support Payments",
http://www.short-humour.org.uk/10writersshowcase/supportpayments.htm
"A Long Marriage", pifMagazine, No. 268, September 2019 https://www.pifmagazine.com/2019/09/a-long-marriage/
"Suicide Post", Island Writer, 17(1) 2019
"Tunnelling Down", Wandering Words: Anthology of West Coast Writing, 2018
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The
Satirocene Age (a.k.a. Today)
Our era may have invented the term
“fake news” but we didn't invent fakery. Rather, the Romans
started it all when the Latin tongue produced the verb “facere”(to do or
make), from which we get “manufactured”, “made”, and things
made-up: fakes. We got this then, from classical forebears. It used
to be called propaganda, which properly speaking is about propagation
(more Latin) of a doctrine by a committee (originally a
committee of Church cardinals).
“Satire” means medley and comes from “sature” (more Latin ...), and as a literary form it mixes fact and folly for the exposure of the latter (usually in a humorous way). The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English points out that satire is most popular in eras of rampant thought control – meaning eras with language police who enforce ideological correctness as expressed in popular socio-political slogans. That sounds a lot like our own times, and for that reason we could call ours the “Satirocene Age”. Satire is becoming the dominant literary species. It lets us demonstrate our resistance to the thought police by tossing as many individualistic fire-cracker ideas into the mix as we can – ensuring that nobody gets burnt, of course (although if their bluster gets heated that can be entertaining).
