Satire can make us laugh, but it can also direct our gaze to the gap of what is said and what is true. It’s in that reflection that satire becomes more teacher than entertainer.
Stratford, consider this the ringing bell – class is in session.
Those on social media lately may have noticed a new entrant into the city’s reporting scene, one that might’ve sounded familiar at first but upon further examination it wasn’t quite what you thought. The Bacon Harold has been appearing before your eyes since February 18, taking shots at targets near and far on its single-page stage. It’s an idea that creator Andrew Watson got from the preponderance of memes he just couldn’t escape.
“I was flooded with memes for years, like everyone else,” he said. “You think that the far right is much bigger than it is, like it's blaring at us. And the far left is not innocent, but there’s nowhere near what the far right has been doing. So it was a reaction to all of that. I asked, how do I get to the people that are being inundated with a lot of this shit? Then it crossed my mind – how about a meme newspaper?”
Watson said that you can get a message out effectively with a really good meme; people might not be seeing the right words, but they get the understanding of it. But with so many bad memes out there that have flooded everybody, Watson said he’s not surprised that people are overwhelmed by it all.
“I’m not even going to call it propaganda, but rather disinformation,” he said. “There are people who aren’t going to regular news outlets to do their own due diligence – they’re basing their votes and decisions on these repetitive memes.”
The trucker’s convoy that proverbially rolled over this country is a prime example of what Watson is talking about, pointing to the fact that lots of seemingly normal people took up the trucker’s cause without ever actually going beyond the echo chamber of what they were consuming on social media. Having our neighbours to the south cranking out their fair share of meme ‘news’ also had an effect on Canadians as well. A lot went into the creation of the Bacon Harold, and Watson said he’s approaching this with no agenda in mind.
“It just sort of happens, and with my skills as a graphic artist and coming from a newspaper background years ago, it was something I could put together quickly,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll have to photoshop a picture and then the story evolves from there, and it really ties into what’s going on so you’re able to read between the lines. I look at the big picture stuff, what’s going on here in Canada and in the US, and there’s a lot of material to work with. And if you look at old newspapers, they wouldn’t just have headlines about what’s happening around town; it was a mix of national, international, provincial and municipal stories, so that’s how I’ve approached it.”
Being a professed lover of travel, Watson draws on his experiences elsewhere to help inform him how to create issues of the Harold. It’s already been happening in the early days, he said.
“People are different from the leaders of their country, and I do expect Americans that come to Stratford a lot will identify with what I’ve been doing,” he said. “There’s a man from Michigan that has been in contact with me and he’s just loving the concept. For him, it’s like a breath of fresh air.”
And an important distinction – one that, at times, is lost in the jungles of social media’s eat-or-be-eaten world – is that context is now and will always be king. That’s the platform good satire is built on, and Watson makes sure he remembers that.
“Stratford is a centre for creativity, and it can really surprise us who lives in this town at times,” he said. “We can have fun with and tie them into the local thing, and a good example if one of the people who posts on Facebook a lot about his property taxes being too high. He was a little standoffish in the beginning about it all, but he took that page and understands it now and what I’m trying to do … the message of the property tax being too high, it’s resonating a little bit more than what he was trying to do. I’m not slagging or personally attacking anyone, just putting what is being done into context.”
Watson said that he understands he needs to tread a fine line very carefully when it comes to poking the bear on municipal issues. He’ll never attack someone personally, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be included in one of the Harold’s reports.
“I think that in the world of politics, the mayor is fair game, and I have identified one of the councillors … with a new name,” he said. “I called him Kobe Sutton, and at the end of the day he’s the one asking the hard questions and going, ‘whoa, no, you shouldn’t be doing that’. It’s done funny.”
