on sympathetic satire

Ari and I were talking about Jane Austen this afternoon (she recently reread Mansfield Park), and I came to the conclusion that I'm not really wired for sympathetic satire (as a creator or a consumer) -- AFAIC, if you're going to bitingly satirize someone, it's because you don't like them; if you do like them, you tell them that they are wrong so they can fix it. (Ari said: "Well Jane Austen was telling people -- she just thought they'd enjoy it more as a novel than as a diatribe." I said, "But if it's a novel, people can say, 'Oh, I'm not like that.' You need to write them a letter directly.")

I, um, sometimes tend toward strongly dichotomous paradigms...