Tags: history | news | parody

Nobody familiar with the Onion should be surprised that its first book length effort is a brilliant, milk-spurting-out-of-your-nose tour de force of sharply honed, dangerously informed wrecking ball humor...

Our Dumb Century is the last one hundred years through the crystal lens of America's finest news source, which systematically sears the folly and wickedness of the American Century with pitch perfect evocations of the various myths that have sustained and fueled it, from Industrial Progress ("Nation's Skies Filled With Beautiful, Black Smoke") to the Space Race ("Outer Space Falls to Communists") to the Domino Theory ("U. S. Loses Vietnam War; Ford Urges All Americans to Salute Our Vietcong Rulers").

90% of the material is new, and it retains all of the bite, multi-dimensionality and con sistency that one expects from the weekly edition.

It is clear that an impressive amount of research went into the first half-as well as a reading or two of Howard Zinn's People's History - and there was almost certainly some academic input along the way. The tone of the first three sections is spot-on convincing and demonstrates at least an advanced graduate student's sense of the nation's past.

Which is not surprising for a crew based in Madison, Wisconsin, a town famous for leftist politics, great historians and great leftist historians. The Onion staff, which combines the comedic intuition of Woody Allen circa 1970 and the politics of Noam Chomsky with an unmatched, zeitgeist shaping sense of their own moment in time, can be seen as part of a long tradition of Madison-based dissent starting most famously with the Progressivism of Robert La Follette.

But unlike their predecessors, The Onion can't take this protest shit too seriously. When the situation on spaceship Earth is This Bad, and being earnest and thorough doesn't even guarantee the illusion of change anymore, it becomes attractive to beat the bastards with a painful, momentary black blooded belly laugh so hard you almost forget for a moment.

Which is not to say that the Onion fails to offer a running, sustained and coherent critique, but rather that it realizes the limits of straight-faced and overly earnest intellectualism.

One is reminded of Stanley Kubrick and his early attempts to research Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which he originally intended to be a drama along the lines of Fail-safe, a nuclear themed film released the same year.

The more Kubrick learned about the Air Force, the arms race, and the insane logic behind it all, the more he knew his film could only be satire. The spirit of that film, which makes us laugh at what normally freezes our tears while still in their ducts, is the spirit behind the Onion, which is to say the healthy, humane side of intelligence made manifest in these dark times.