Is Satire Dead? Not so much in Benjamin's Mess, a collection of essays by David Benjamin

Benjamin's Mess, a collection of essays by David Benjamin

Publisher: Last Kid Books

ISBN & Price: 9798991716949, $20.00

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Benjamin's Mess by David Benjamin

Satire is dead. Or so they say.

In this hodgepodge collection of short 1000-word opinion pieces and essays, aptly named Benjamin’s Mess, David Benjamin proves otherwise.

Part memoir or slice-of-life essays and part satirical essays, Benjamin’s collection offers astute and hilarious critiques of political, cultural, social, and religious news and events in the good ol’ USA from his own particular vantage point as both a boomer and an OWL, or “old white liberal.”

From essays that depict Benjamin’s memories of childhood (such as trying to warm up his mom’s car before she had to drive it during the blistering cold of our northern midwestern states) or adolescence (such as his successful attempt to convince the Vietnam draft board that he was a pacifist and couldn’t serve in the military) to his modern travels in France with his Japanese wife nicknamed Hotlips, Benjamin offers snippets of experience that grounds readers in a solid foundation of the middle USA cultural reality from the 1950s onward.

With Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, we’ve come to understand that the tendency for journalists based on the two coasts is to ignore the middle of the country—as if Americans don’t live there. But these short personal essays give lie to that bias and point us towards a deeper understanding of the lived experience of Americans who aren’t bifurcated by East and West Coast assumptions about what’s important or good for the country as a whole. As somebody who grew up in the much disparaged and frequently ignored U.S.-Mexico border region, all I can do is cheer, “Hear hear!” Veering occasionally into a delightful and deserved nostalgia, Benjamin’s personal essays reflect the visage of another possibility, one where all Americans are honored through thoughtful stories in our news media, and one where the diverse social realities of the country are presented for a collective understanding of what we truly need and want as a nation.

Nothing is sacred in Benjamin’s world, even those core political and social beliefs that he values. In his score of political and social commentary essays, he tackles an enormous variety of problems.

For example, in “I’m Hip,” he examines the maligned word “woke” in light of the changing vernacular of slang. Delighted, he riffs off earlier “hip” words in sentences that practically need a decoder for anybody born after 1970. Language changes, as do meanings, and getting hung up on any singular word deserves the scorn he offers.

In “The Hunt for Red Antifa,” Benjamin presents an imagined dialogue between Donald Trump and his campaign manager, making fun of the conservative fear of far left groups like Antifa, arguing that these fears are both irrational and offer undeserved credit to tiny groups like Antifa, believing in an undue influence on the left that doesn’t exist in reality.

Forgivably (and justifiably) cranky in such essays as “Ding dong, ‘in which’ is dead,” Benjamin dissects common modern grammar use (or abuse) and Americans’ penchant for “syllable creep”—to orient has become orientate, while preventive has become preventative. (I admit, to my chagrin, that a colleague recently mocked me for using preventative…)  He chides sloppy editing, but though he’s afraid of coming off as a “curmudgeon,” he can’t help concluding with one more example—a doozy of an example. I won’t spoil it—go and read it yourself. (Side note: He follows this first essay up with a second, examining the problems of homonym use in “Homing in on the Haphazard Homonym.”) (Second side note: I’ve been guilty of having to look up honing vs. homing many a time, to make sure I’m using this pair of similar words correctly.)

Tackling gender in “The Little girl on the scooter and the feminine aesthetic,” Benjamin confronts the inherent tension between competing values of equality and difference, concluding with an appreciation for the feminine aesthetic that he suggests can’t and shouldn’t be erased.

One of the most moving essays in the collection is “My atomic mother-in-law.” In this essay, Benjamin recounts his Japanese mother-in-law’s experience of narrowly avoiding death in Hiroshima when it was bombed during World War II. Kiyoko Yoshida hops on a train with a friend. Only moments later, that section of Hiroshima was obliterated by the atomic bomb. Though she rarely spoke about her experiences that day, it had lingering effects on how she lived and how she raised her daughter, Benjamin’s wife, “Hotlips.” Near-death experiences always leave a mark. He concludes,

“When she was not exactly ‘sweet’ sixteen, Ma Yoshida—pretty little Kiyoko—had encountered, smack-dab in the center of his atomic inferno, the Grim Reaper. But after a moment, after trembling at the slaughter he had wreaked, she kicked him in the shin and walked away—a bounce in her step and a twinkle in her eye. Of course, eventually, he got her. But it took him another seventy-seven years and a few more whacks on the shin.”

While my favorite essays are those in which Benjamin memorializes his experiences growing up in America (including the meaning of shoes and why we remember random things about random items), providing humorous commentary on the implications of those memories for modern-day life here, all of the essays collected in Benjamin’s Mess examine the messy reality of America today using both humor and incisive observations. Though showcasing his own voice and style, I recommend Benjamin’s Mess for having a clear lineage in the tradition of collections of essays by comedians and political commentators like George Carlin and Dave Barry.