Interesting but maybe not coincidental that this discussion comes on the day Bernie pulls ahead of Hillary in at least one New Hampshire poll (the Franklin Pierce study is a little rare, a little spare, and seems designed to produce a desired Republican result of making Jeb seem stronger than he really is).
But no matter, I think anything that benefits Bernie is probably good news (unless you hold his NRA endorsement against him).
We’ll probably touch on ‘Black Lives Matter’ who’s more gentile and less militant Massachusetts branch just today got booted from a Hillary rally and accepted gratefully in return a “private meeting” where “concerns were heard”.
Bow down Bernie indeed.
Though mostly he has. He gave them the mike and an audience. There’s a new communications director, a fully developed policy, and 40 years of history at the forefront of Civil Rights (not for nothing folks). O’Malley caved after Netroots Nation without the resume and had presided over Baltimore and Freddie Gray. Now he gets a pass?
There are lots of questions (swiftboat) but I’ll put my tin foil aside.
Populist Propaganda
Ferguson
You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.
It’s really hard to know what to say about Ferguson. On the one hand I don’t seem to be finding a firm answer to my question- did the guy the cops shot really have a gun? Do you remember the Molotov cocktail at the 3 am news conference last year, where they displayed a bottle of liquid with a rag in it and clamed this was an actual, factual gasoline bomb they had recovered that night and then proceeded to man handle it as if it had no forensic value at all?
You know, you’d think if they wanted to become cops they would have watched at least one cop show in the last 30 years.
Other than that teeny tiny sliver of good faith on my part (I don’t think most cops are liars, I know it) the news is that things are, if anything, worse. The capper for me is that they’re letting armed vigilantes roam the streets in cammo and body armor because they are…
Wait for it.
White! Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Missouri has always had very flexible rules about open carry and it’s always a great pleasure when I venture South to discover that everyone doesn’t wander in to the Waffle House (Waffle House!) packing a Peacemaker as a cosplay codpiece in their own personal Rio Bravo fantasy of frontier justice.
They have just relaxed their restrictions on concealed carry about which part of me asks- if I’m using a gun as a deterrent, why wouldn’t I want people to know I’m packing heat? That’s right, I like that Buntline Special with the barrel that pokes into your boot tops.
There is another part of me that wonders- so what if I’m Black? How exactly does that interaction go?
“Officer- you need to know I have a permit”?
My instinct is- not well.
You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.
Stewart gradually evolved into the principal media mouthpiece or channel – the two things are not quite the same – for what might be called common-sense liberalism, the self-appointed pathway of Enlightenment reason. He has called himself a moderate and admitted voting for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and while you shouldn’t hold a person’s youthful indiscretions against him, I think that fact is important to the Stewart brand. He is disappointed, disillusioned and sometimes outraged by the evil and idiocy found on the Republican right and the thoroughgoing corruption of the political system. But he is not unreasonable, not an ideologue, not a “leftist.” He believes in comity and compromise, and yearns for the kinder, gentler days when a 25-year-old Jewish standup comedian in New York could vote for Ronald Reagan’s vice president without consciously self-identifying with a party of bigotry, warmongering and paranoia.
Was that a low blow? I’m honestly not sure. I come to bury Jon Stewart, not to praise him – except, wait, maybe it’s the other way around. First of all, let’s note that Stewart isn’t dead, so I’m under no obligation to say nice stuff about him just because he is leaving a television program after 16 years. Furthermore, there’s a reason most people get that Shakespeare quotation backwards: The speaker of that famous monologue, Marc Antony, repeatedly challenges his audience to perceive that what he says is not what he means: “Brutus is an honorable man,” and all that. He is using irony, in its old-fashioned Socratic sense (not the debased modern sense of easy mockery, or just a bad attitude), which is a mode that Jon Stewart has never mastered and largely avoids.
Stephen Colbert’s long-running satirical portrayal of a jingoistic Fox-style commentator, first on Stewart’s show and then on his own, had a random, hit-and-miss quality and often descended to cheap gags. (On balance, Stewart probably provides more laffs per minute.) But in his best moments, Colbert has employed the ironic mode to reality-altering effect, and never more so than in his infamous performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, when he mocked the empty, photo-op presidency of George W. Bush to the president’s face and derided the Washington press corps for its stenographic compliance: “Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.”
Stewart would make the same joke on his show, pretty much, but he would immediately walk it back to the mode of earnestness and be super clear about what he meant: CNN et al. had behaved like a bag of dicks and that was really a shame. Colbert, on the other hand, vividly demonstrated Socrates’ principle that the destabilizing and disorienting effect of irony depends upon the “aneiron,” the person who doesn’t get the joke. In this case, everyone at that dinner understood that Colbert meant the opposite of what he said, which is why none of them were laughing. What they had not understood, because it seemed inconceivable, was that a TV comic’s joke persona contained a radical critique of the nature of politics and the news media, and that Colbert was not going to observe the cozy, chummy conventions of a Beltway event whose sole purpose is to make the subservient Washington press corps feel like special snowflakes.
Stewart is not comfortable in that mode, and has never pursued that kind of confrontation. His on-air rhetoric slid perceptibly leftward over the course of the Bush administration, as he vigorously went after the bankers, the Iraq war apologists and the torture defenders. But even after his show hit a demographic sweet spot somewhere around the Democratic center-left – the position of the 2008 Obama voter – he struggled to avoid the impression of pure partisanship. As recently as 2010, although it feels like a lifetime ago, Stewart was calling for an end to partisan vitriol with his Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall. Even he must have thought the immediate aftermath was pretty funny: A few days later, Tea Party Republicans swept to victory from coast to coast in the midterm election that pretty much paralyzed Obama’s presidency. So that was the end of that.
Salon columnist Bill Curry has suggested that Stewart belongs to the Pragmatist tradition of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and seeks to draw a distinction between Stewart’s faith in reason and usefulness and Obama’s penchant for back-room political compromise. It’s a fascinating argument, but that might be an overly fine way to parse a TV comedian – often a very funny one, with a delightful ability to mock others and mock himself in the same moment – who has insisted on walking the narrow plank of reasonableness in times of rampant unreason, and now finds himself alone at the end of the plank above an ocean of hungry sharks.
I understand why it bothers Stewart that Fox News is depicting him, during his last days on the air, as a shameless Obama sock-puppet. He feels that it’s not quite fair and he feels more than a little vulnerable on that front. Both perceptions are justified. (Stewart himself said on the air that he has been much harder on Obama than Fox ever was on Bush, which is what you might call an invidious comparison.) But Stewart’s role as Obama’s stealth strategic defender, who has criticized the administration on several key issues while consistently seeking to channel progressive anger and disappointment toward the crazy and intransigent opposition, wouldn’t bother me at all if I felt convinced that it reflected underlying convictions. (I am not counting the nonideological relativism that drives the 21st-century Democratic Party as a conviction.)
As with Stewart’s pal in the White House, that question has only grown murkier over the years. All the contradictions of political satire in the Obama years would exhaust anyone, but Stewart’s performance of sincerity, the factor that gave his comedy its force and also limited its scope, has pretty much come unraveled. You can see that in his recent interview with Tom Cruise, which barely differed from a boot-licking celebrity appearance with Oprah or Ellen, and in which (as filmmaker Alex Gibney has observed), Stewart never mentioned Cruise’s central role in the noxious Church of Scientology. You see it in Stewart’s increasingly tedious feud with Bill O’Reilly, where they play the roles of media commentators with profound ideological differences and pretend to dislike each other, coming dangerously close to the kind of masturbatory media-insider banter Colbert mocked so mercilessly a decade ago.
Jon Stewart has had a great run as the host of a comedy show, the kind of longevity that has become nearly impossible in American pop culture. In political terms, his mission has either been fulfilled – if he was really sent here by Putin to bewilder us and destroy democracy – or was never possible in the first place. As I said earlier, we want to be permanently in on the joke and we want to believe in something. But what if the things we want to believe in are just a joke?
I believe I can see the future, ‘Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose, Then again, that might have been a dream
I think I used to have a voice, Now I never make a sound
I just do what I’m been told
I really don’t want them to come around, oh no
I can feel their eyes are watching, In case I lose myself again
Sometimes I think I’m happy here
Sometimes, yet I still pretend
I can’t remember how this got started
But I can tell you exactly how it will end
I’m writing on a paper, I’m hoping someday I might find
Well I’ll hide it behind something, They won’t look behind
I am still inside, A little bit comes bleeding through
I wish this could’ve been any other way, But I just don’t know, I don’t know
What else I can do?
You may think this is the future, you may think that it’s the end.
I won’t give up the struggle.
Some times, sometimes you take a stand.
Every day is exactly the same. Every day is exactly the same. There is no love here and there is no pain. Every day is exactly the same.
Future Directions
Jon Stewart is not dying. The Daily Show is not dying. The Sausage Grinder of Snark is not dying and neither am I (well, in the normal course of things. I’m 120+ years old!).
I’ve been a huge supporter of Larry Wilmore ever since he took over from Stephen. His Nightly Show has gotten better and better since it’s found its format (Daily Show + panel instead of interview, duh). That will not change.
I’m totally willing to get behind Trevor and expect to feature his efforts at the helm as well. I’ve watched a number of his comedy sets and he really is as bright and funny as Jon thinks he is. He’s more international than anyone since Oliver so he gets the class thing and he’s also an expert on racism (South Africa?).
However.
While Jon is retiring to raise bees in Sussex, Stephen is taking up the sword again on Late Night. I will certainly give him a fair shot too.
So while it’s easy enough to track the guests (which I intend to do) I have a serious viewing overlap at 11:35 and frankly the repeats of Larry are easier to access (1:30 am ET) or tape (30 minutes) than Late Night (1 hour and who knows?).
Well, it’s something to think about instead of silently weeping.
Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host. It will take up the whole hour.
This is probably not the piece you expect. You see, for as much time and pixels I’ve spent writing about The Daily Show, I’ve never had the emotional connection with it that some have had.
On the positive side, and this is really the best and noblest thing I can say about it, it has replaced and supplanted Cable news. Under Keith MSNBC showed some signs of sanity, but that was short lived and the rest of it is simply a roiling cesspit of D.C. elite conventional wisdom (and I’m looking right at you Rachel and Chris).
Jon is better than that, but for me, except in his interview with Jim Cramer (and maybe a few other times), he never showed the killer instinct of a Carlin except in the correspondent reports and scripted work. Lewis Black calls Stewart ‘the Cronkite of his generation‘ and that’s true enough I suppose if you remember Uncle Walter was a moderate conservative of whom it was said ‘if you’ve lost Cronkite you’ve lost the nation’.
We’re waaay dow the rabbit hole from there. Our country routinely commits war crimes that Germans and Japanese were hung for. We’ve reached a level of corruption that surpasses the Gilded Age. One writer said that is time for Jon to go because he’s too bitter and strident. Sorry, he’s not nearly bitter and strident enough.
Jon wants to keep his Rolodex and you need to tear up every card and burn it to ashes if you want to be truthful about what is happening in the United States today. But he does know his audience and too many people are willing to pretend that weak tea and a ‘D’ make you something less than a fully bought and paid for corporatist toady. Jon was never willing to go there because he digs the applause.
And so do I, but if there is one thing that being independent has done for me (umm… my blog you know and I don’t care whether you like it or not) is that it has relieved some of the self censorship.
30 bucks a month for freedom is a small price to pay.
It remains to be seen if success spoils Stephen Colbert.
Did I mention Viacom Bites!
Tonighly we’ll be talking about tomorrow’s Republican debate and Planned Parenthood (which we will live blog) and our panel is Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Robinson, and Ricky Valez.
Denis Leary web exclusive extended interview would be below but Viacom Bites! The real news below.
Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.
Did you know Jon smokes? Hope that doesn’t ruin it for you. It’s one of the things that he and Denis Leary share. Denis is the guest Jon invites because they are buds on and off camera. He may pitch something but it’s just an excuse. This will probably be one of Jon’s worst and most sentimental interviews ever.
Trevor is keeping the production team including the writers, but Jon is leaving the building.
Do you know I was a Boy Scout?
I was horrible. The Troop that was school based was not so bad, the Troop that was Church based was virulently homophobic and homoerotic at the same time.
I didn’t leave because I was threatened sexually, I just couldn’t stand the constant bullying. Not me, others. There are things I will not tolerate.
Tonightly the topic is Toy Guns. The panel is Mike Yard (who’s wiki warnings have been removed I note. About damn time, he’s only the head writer for a major Cable network show.), Lennon Parham, and Jessica St. Clair.
Amy Schumer got a web exclusive extended interview! That and the real news below.
Oh yeah, therapy and Oprah. Well, I’m in therapy with a wonderful person who has made me much more positive and less confrontational unlike other bloggers I could name (Armando).
Actually I kind of like him but really, whining about hide rates? Show a little dignity dude. I am permanently and definitively banned, not by some auto hide rate system but by the personal action of Meteor Blades who had to break all the rules (rules? Hah!) to do it.
Denise, you’re still a rapist apologist and Blade- you’re a disappointing sellout, a whore to corporatists and Plutocrats.
Yes, I feel MUCH better now.
Amy is in fact the cousin of Chuck who is probably as embarrassed as can be about the fact she’s perceived as the bluest female comic performing today. Among the things she will be talking about is tighter gun control in the wake of the tragic shootings at her new film Trainwreck.
Oh, it’s not her best work. In the end the damsel gets saved by a guy, rent Frozen instead.
Man Bites Dog
You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.
Oh, and Dirk Benedict is a neighbor and he likes to be remembered for his role as ‘Face’.
Thursday is of course Jon Stewart’s last episode as host.
There is a near certain probability J.J. Abrams will be on to talk about Mission Impossible which if I haven’t mentioned it before I find entirely derivative and uninspired, the acting terrible and wooden, and the action sequences cliched and boring; only some of which was true about the original TV version.
Now I’d be just as happy if J.J. would talk about his uncredited writing for the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode, The Drill, but I suspect most of you would find the topic a little arcane. What I would like to find out about (and I suspect most of you also) is the Disney reboot of Star Wars due for ek’smas, The Force Awakens.
Thinning the Herd
Tonightly we will be talking about Sam DuBose and Plantation Weddings with our panel Robin Thede, Ed Helms, and BIG K.R.I.T..
You stop being racist and I’ll stop talking about it.
Let’s get least favorite part out of the way first. She’s my least favorite because she’s a constantly sycophantic toady to power who has never met a Beltway trope or a piece of Villiager conventional wisdom that she was not willing to parrot or at least let pass unprotested.
Doris is a conservative historian, thoroughly unchallenging and well conected and thus trotted out frequently by talk shows (including Jon unfortunately) as a veneer of respectability.
Is she respectable? Well, more than those idealogues and cretins you see trotted out by the racist and fascist right wing. She might come to decide Barack Obama was a bad President (and he was) but she would never compare him with Hitler where I, a less credible historian, might.
Oh you want to get into it? Torture, assassination by association, Gestapo-like Security State, undeclared wars of aggression. Q.E.D., and don’t bother telling me he had no agency, he and his ‘Just Us’ department actively worked to thwart every effort at accountability. That’s what we call accessory after the fact.
But she’s not totally unhinged from reality and as an example of historical reality and how it plays out over time I give you the underlying causes of the War for Slavery.
There was a time in the mid ’60s when the Civil Rights Movement was peaking and the centenials of this and that were being celebrated. In secondary schools and some colleges the prevailing narrative is that it was the growing economic might of the North and a fear for diminishing political influence that were the prevailing causes of the War of Southern Rebellion.
Some far out historians (probably pot smoking dirty hippies) suggested that the two precipitating forces were the economic value of Black Human Beings as property and flat out racism. Now they had plenty of contemporaneous primary sources that said just that in unmistakable black and white but no said the historical establishment, the North was as fully implicated in the Institution of Slavery as the South and it couldn’t possibly be.
Well, the elite North was (which it would do not to forget) and the average person was just as racist as those in the South, but what they also saw was an economic system that, even if they couldn’t articulate it as directly as we do today, Slave Labor would drive Free Labor out of the marketplace. The resentment against the Fugitive Slave Act wasn’t driven entirely by altruistic sympathy for the poor downtrodden Black.
At the time (the 1960s not the 1860s) most historians denied that Slaves had any economic value at all and argued the South was trapped in a dying system. Modern historians almost universally accept that the South was wealthier than the North and was poised to add to that disparity on the Cotton Trade and expansion of Slavery. The South was not all picking and grinning, many Plantations sported Factories and Ironworks, all staffed by Slaves.
Doris Kearns Goodwin blows with the breeze, neither the best or worst, just another hack but at least a credible one.
The Church of Scientology says that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The thetan has had innumerable past lives and it is observed in advanced Scientology texts that lives preceding the thetan’s arrival on Earth were lived in extraterrestrial cultures.
At least Tom doesn’t believe in any wierd culty things like, oh, say, Mormonism.
Word Blerd
Tonightly the topic is Trump, another fellow with very strange ideas about what does and does not constitute ‘consent’. The panel is Penn Jillette, Brina Milikowsky, and Ricky Velez.
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