Nation's Snowmen March Against Global Warming

With the current heated discussion regarding the difference between "symbolic politics" and "conventional politics" proper, I was reminded of the following fake news item from the Onion.  The Onion is very good at mimicking the sound and feel of how "real news" is presented for our consumption. What seems relevant for our purposes is how the notion of "protesting" is presented as absolutely ridiculous.  The suggestion seems to be that people march and complain for just about anything, with the obligatory appearance by Jesse Jackson added for good measure.  While I generally enjoy the humor (and do not take the Onion too seriously), it does seem to reflect a certain general attitude about politics, particularly of what now may be described as largely "symbolic" expressions of resistance.

For example, in this story of the beleaguered winter figures,"millions of scarfless snowmen and snowwomen gathered in cities across the world Tuesday to raise public awareness about the heavy toll global warming is taking on their health and well-being."  It goes on to quote "Joe Centigrade," president of the Advocates For Beings Of Frozen Precipitation"

"The unseasonably warm winters of the recent past are a clear indication of a real environmental threat to humans and their frozen simulacra," said Centigrade, his coals arranged in a frowning pattern. "As snowmen and snowwomen, we accept the inevitability of melting, but the actions of man are causing us to evaporate well before our time."

Speakers at the Washington rally included a Chicago snowwoman who had lost three snowchildren to warm temperatures, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Larry Chilly, formerly a 6-foot-tall, triple-segmented Muncie, IN snowman, who had been reduced to a slushy head.

What I find particularly amusing, but also a bit disturbing, is the parody of rhetorical victimization (that is also the source of so much PC backlash humor):

Bearing signs with such slogans as "You Can't Build A Snowman With Rain" and "Winter = Life," the crystalline-ice protesters, many of whom had chartered refrigerated tractor-trailers and ice-cream trucks to travel to the mass protest, complained that popular stereotypes about snowmen obscure and trivialize the crisis.

"Humans sneer at us, 'If you want to stay intact, go to the North Pole and live with Santa,'" said Susie Flakeman, a Thunder Bay, Ontario snowwoman waiting in line with hundreds of others to use a Porta-Freezer. "But less than one-half of 1 percent of us ever receive that honor. Most of us end up victims of the scourge that almost killed Frosty: man-made climate change."

The protest was largely peaceful, disrupted only by a disturbing incident in which one distraught snowman hurled himself into the reflecting pool of the National Mall. He suffered third-degree slush on over 90 percent of his body before rescuers could recover him. He was rushed to a local meat locker where he was pronounced melted on arrival.

My intention in quoting from this fake news story is not that it is wrong to make fun of protests and activism - nothing is really off limits when it comes to humor.  But I do think this piece reflects a larger condition - one that I might call a "Post-Political Cynicism."  From this vantage point, all symbolic politics takes place in the theater of the absurd.  And issues like global warming, something that most scientists take very seriously, is relegated to comical news stories and the concern of granola eating tree huggers.  To get beyond this Post-Political Cynicism will require a vision and an effort that has so far been lacking - one that offers both a practical sensibility of the possible and the inspiration to provide hope in the midst of hopelessness.