Satire as Civic Duty
I wrote a book about an imaginary island where everything works perfectly, and I named it “Nowhere.” Five centuries later, people are still arguing about whether I was serious. I consider this a success.
Satire operates in the space between what is said and what is meant, and that space is the most politically productive territory in all of literature. Because satire says the thing that cannot be said directly. It wraps the indictment in a joke, and the joke provides just enough cover to get the truth past the defenses of the powerful and into the consciousness of the public.