Donald Trump (and his opponents) may have invented and popularized the term “fake news”, but they didn't invent fakery itself. Rather, the Romans started it all when Latin invented the verb “facere” -- to do or make -- from which we get “manufactured”, “made”, and things-made-up (fakes). We got fake news, then, from a venerable source: classical forebears. It used to be called propaganda.
Properly speaking, propaganda propagates a doctrine by a committee (originally, of Church cardinals).
“Satire” means medley (“sature” -- Latin again), and as a literary form it mixes fact and folly for the exposure of the latter, usually with humour. I'm not telling satirists anything they don't already know here; I'm celebrating a literary form and testifying for the Defence in the ongoing worldwide trial of satirists who seize their right to free speech.
The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English points out that satire is most popular in eras that like thought control – meaning eras which employ language police to enforce ideological correctness expressed in popular semi-literate political slogans. That sounds a lot like our times, and for that reason I call ours the “Satirocene Era”, when satire is a dominant literary species. It has to be, for it lets us demonstrate resistance to the thought police by tossing as many individualistic incendiary ideas into the mix as we can – ensuring that nobody gets burnt, of course (although if their bluster gets heated that can be entertaining).
Satire is not fake-news; it's anti-fake news. It's ironic, not literal. Serious world-saving thought-controllers of course hate irony, recognizing it “correctly”, as their enemy.
FJ
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