PERHAPS YOU'VE HEARD THE EXPRESSION THAT CLOWNS CAN GET AWAY WITH TRUTH, especially so in regimes where an overzealous brand of censorship or State control of the media prevails in the presumed name of "protecting the State from her sworn enemies, both within and without."

The fact of which can be traced back to Shakespeare's time, when it was not uncommon for the court fool to be entrusted with secrets of state and other sensitive political information.

And back in the salad days of the Evil Empire otherwise known as the Soviet Union, about the closest one could get to the truth in such a tightly-controlled society was in the official satiric magazine Krokodil ("Crocodile"), as found plenty of targets to lampoon within the confines of official restraints and censorship; after all, as the proverb went, there was no truth in Pravda nor news in Izvetsiya, come to think of it.

=============

GROWING UP MYSELF WITH LEARNING AND UNDERSTANDING DISORDERS WHICH, IN THE MINDS OF SOME, were breeding-grounds for schizophrenic tendencies (and led to several diagnoses of the paranoid type against Your Correspondent in the 1980's especially), has led me to develop a cynical sort of take on the conservative status quo holding high carnival--and, in the minds of some Zealots and True Believers, the need to maintain a "stay-the-course" complacency from everlasting to everlasting, and invoke G-d, Country and Family when pressed to explain.

Not to mention having Mein Innkeeper Friend provide some inspiration, particularly so from encouraging me to develop a healthy sort of cynicism and skepticism @ what conservatives depict as truth, and which should be accepted without question or reservation, "silence=acceptance" notwithstanding.

The which explains how I have developed this satiric take on the world such as is reflected here by Your Correspondent @ The Exaggerator from time to time--as a safety valve, so to speak, on frustrations and aggravations on what goes on in the world.

No wonder comedy can sometimes be close to the truth, without being so obvious in its desire of provoking moral outrage. Jonathan Swift was perhaps the best example of using satire to make a literary point, as witness the likes of "A Modest Proposal" and "A Tale of a Tub."