A little trifle

Ian Frazier has written in the New Yorker a little trifle based on a bit of Jerry Falwell’s autobiography. He quotes Scripture out of context, talks of toting his shotguns and acting vaguely southern and homophobic, being cruel to animals because God gave him “dominion” over the earth, and getting filled with the Spirit to establish the Kingdom of Us. Frazier meant the piece as parody, which disappoints, as the humor is insipid and the joke overplayed. Reading it as parody is better than the alternative, of course—namely as gross mockery of a community of people and the intentional misrepresentation of people’s worst traits as their defining ones. One might suspect a special animus or hostility. One might call it hate speech. Much better to call it parody.