landover baptist

Satire is one of thos tricky areas, where you have to balance between pointed humor and just plain old-fashioned mean-spiritedness. Landover Baptist Church is a web site where I think the owners take their satire across the line quite a lot. It's especially bad when they get onto the issue of sex.

The church has had a lot of unnecessary histironics on sex, and it deserves to be lampooned for that, but I think the Landover people go too far. It just gets too vituperative to be effective. It's hard to quit, though, because the lowest common denominator is always going to appeal to a large group of people, as they found with their Jar Jar Binks sex toy article, and there is a perverse pleasure in raising the ire of your critics.

Smirkov and I had a debate on this subject with the Brothers Grinn one time. We were doing something with Jesse Helms, and I was going the same route the Landover people do -- take someone who's already a little loud and pushy, and turn him into a real fire-breather. As Smirkov pointed out, that's the easy road, and it's not particularly funny. Everyone does that with Helms, and it just gets mean after a while.

What I did in the end was to make Jesse Helms into a deeply sensitive man who always wanted to be an actors. It's his publicist who is so vicious, and scripts everything for him so that he has earned a reputation as a bit of a bulldog. As luck would have it, the interview with the Brothers Grinn was something he was able to arrange without his publicist's involvement, and our readers were treated to the rarely seen real Helms, including his soft tears over the people he's had to hurt because his publicist made him.

Much funnier, I thought. It'd be nice if the Landover people tried that too.