Advice for Franken: Satire is key to your Senate skill set, so use it

What a difference a year makes. Last summer, Al Franken got a stern lecture on satire from Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who asserted that Franken’s abuse of the genre disqualified him from service in the U.S. Senate. In the New York Times this morning, Victor Navasky advises the Minnesota Democrat to stick with satire.

Gerson in June 2008:

Franken’s defenders explain that his edginess is the result of being a “satirist” — a term he embraces. … Rather than lampooning the emptiness and viciousness of our political discourse — a proper role for satire — Franken has powerfully reinforced those failures. … This is not prudery; it is a practical concern for the cooperation and mutual respect necessary in a functioning democracy. And it is hard to believe those causes would be served by a Sen. Franken.

Today (the fourth day of Sen. Franken’s term, if Gerson’s counting), Navasky advises the new senator:

Satire — which has a long and refreshingly subversive history as a form of truth-telling and effective social commentary — is Mr. Franken’s comparative advantage in his new job and he should exploit this blessing, not deny it.

Navasky, now a professor at Columbia University Journalism School, was a longtime editor and publisher of The Nation magazine, where he now holds the title of Publisher Emeritus. While at Yale Law School in the 1950s, Navasky started ”a leisurely quarterly of political satire” called Monocle (not the current magazine published under the same name).

Monocle was a pioneer in pushing satire into electoral politics, according to a history of the short-lived journal:

With brazen hubris Monocle even ran [humorist Marvin] Kitman for President of the United States in their Spring 1964 issue (the year LBJ ran against Goldwater), the first time in the twentieth century a comedian ran for the high office (pre-dating Al Franken by over forty years).