Satire forever soils your perception. Every age has its up-and-comings, its overnight geniuses and afternoon-long obsessions. The satirist has always tried to provide the antidote to such novelties—throwing random jeremiads from the street corner at those with their noses pointed toward heaven. The satirist wants to be the little boy in the fable who points out that the emperor is parading through town stark naked, while everyone else believes (or wants to believe) that the royal finery is too chic for commoners to understand. For all these reasons, satire has historically been ceded to the conservatives. At least by our modern political definitions, it is the liberal who finds novelty attractive; the conservative feels most at home with the status quo.

This is just as true for the ancient world as for ours. P.J. O’Rourke is only recasting Aristophanes’ mold. Evelyn Waugh can’t hope to be more of a curmudgeon than Juvenal or Marcus Varro. All share the same blood-line. And each satirist, modern or ancient, seems to share the same tragic fate; pop culture doesn’t mind the jeremiads. If it’s wrong to be tragically hip, it’s far worse to fall behind the times.