@Jaxonpool

Make Jacksonville Greater Again!

email: chris.gabbard904@gmail.com

Jaxonpool — pronunciation /dʒæk/sʌn/pul/; a neologistic proper noun combining “Jaxon” + “pool”
→Jaxon: noun, “A sweet, amazing person, very smart and funny.” – Urban Dictionary
→pool: noun 1.c†, “A whirlpool. Obs.” Last used in this sense in 1767. – Oxford English Dictionary
Definition — A whirlpool of sweet, amazing people.
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Beginning: Jaxonpool published its first issue on 27 November, 2011.

Creator and author is Chris Gabbard, who says about this site: “I was inspired to create Jaxonpool by the Scriblerus Club, an informal early 18th-century association of British satirists including Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Henry St. John, and Jonathan Swift. I was particularly inspired by Swift and his Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.

“In terms of genre, all of the pieces I wound up writing for the site were Minippean (indirect) satires taking the form of faux letters to the Times-Union editor or contrived news reports (“The Jaxonpool News with Violent Crawley”). With regard to tone, most were Horatian satires (“Fifty Shades of M&Ms,” “Alcohol Enemas for the Holidays,” “Socialist Roundabouts,” etc.), and a small number were Juvenalian satires (“Rifling Montessori,” “Clay Yarborough’s Final Solution,” “Angela Corey Charges Fetus with Murder,” etc.).

“I’ve given up writing pieces for Jaxonpool for a number of reasons. For one thing, people no longer know what satire is (and perhaps never did), so they don’t know it when they see it and so mistake the satiric for the real (“You really got me going with that last one!”). For another, satire is dead, for the time being at least. It’s just not possible to write this kind of thing anymore. It’s dead for two reasons: First, from politics to Disney our culture has become overly laden with irony and snark, and why would I want to add to that. And second, news and social media today contain so much outrageous material that the sad ridiculousness of it all exceeds what even the best satirist’s imagination could produce, so trying to compete with current reality is simply not possible.

“And for another thing–this is the last–writing satire is not something that a mature adult should spend their time doing.I had this kind of late-breaking but important epiphany while writing Jaxonpool pieces and studying the work of Jonathan Swift that Swift was a guy who never really grew up. He was stuck in his adolescence, carping like a teenager from his remote location in Dublin. Some people may think that it’s a good thing not to grow up, but I’m definitely not one of them. At some point you have to face the fact that reality is not going to change, no matter how cleverly you’ve worded your satire. The motto of my fake newscaster, Savage Crawley, was ‘The world is what it has become.’ At a certain point the truth of this tautology sank in with depressing intensity, and it suddenly didn’t seem funny anymore. So, no more writing satire for me.”

Chris Gabbard is the author of A Life Beyond Reason: A Disabled Boy and His Father’s Enlightenment, Beacon Press, 2020, and the co-editor (with Talia Schaffer) of Care and Disability: Relational Representations, Routledge, 2025. He is also the co-editor (with Susannah B. Mintz) of The Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century, Bloomsbury Press, 2020.