Jon Stewart's legacy
I don't think that anybody will ever more fully represent my generation in public life than Jon Stewart has-- the cynicism, even nihilism; the poorly-disguised idealism; the refusal to claim to be anything other than a comedian, though he is currently the most important and influential leftist personality on American television. The touchstone moment of Stewart's tenure as host of The Daily Show is when Tucker Carlson, with his irony glands engaged exhaustively in mortal combat, accused Stewart of not asking tough enough questions of presidential candidate John Kerry in an interview, as if it was Stewart's duty in today's bleak world to cover for Wolf Blitzer's ass.Depressingly often, however, it has been.
Over the last three decades, television news divisions have surrendered to the lure of info-tainment. This fact, however, is no cause to blame comedians that specialize in political satire. Stewart just happens to be better suited for, and better skilled at, info-tainment than they are. (He also does political satire better than Abby Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.) The distinction between what Stewart does and what Jake Tapper does should be obvious. For heaven's sake, Stephen Colbert is universally-acknowledged to be in the same category as Stewart, and Colbert is expressly playing a character.
X'ers are the children of David Letterman. We inherited Dad's irony, and he's one of us in spirit. Like us, Dave has never acted as if he's trying to change the world. But like the children of his generation, he did.
Stewart carries the gene for us. He's the reigning king of what is certainly the golden age of political satire. At some point during the first half of the last century, Broadway impresario George S. Kaufman described satire as what closes on Saturday night, but today it's what wins the ratings war in the daypart that television advertisers value the most. Stewart knows what X'ers, and those that have come after us, crave the most, and he gifts it to us on a nightly basis: Reality. Reality smothered in black comedy. Plus, there's the part about being a liberal hero-- and to quote Colbert on stage, in character, at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
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Obsequiousness to the military establishment led us, blindfolded, into Iraq, obsequiousness to the military establishment caused Brian Williams to invent a story, and obsequiousness to the military establishment explains the overblown reaction to Williams' admission.
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Kanye West should keep his opinion to himself. He should stop imposing it on the rest of us. And I appreciate everybody that's gone on Facebook to tell me that.
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I don't have a problem with anything Kanye West did at the Grammys. Beck, Beyonce, and West have each won at least six of those trophies so Beck's acceptance speech for Album of the Year on Sunday was not the moment of anybody's lifetime. If you're pissed, you take awards shows too seriously.
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What we really need, though, is for Kanye to walk on stage at the Oscars when Best Picture is awarded and stand up for Selma. That's a movie that got smeared because it told the truth about Lyndon Johnson-- that he agreed with Martin Luther King Jr. on voting rights, disagreed with him about the urgency of the matter, and then presided over a government that fervently hounded King throughout the rest of his public and private life through wiretapping, surveillance, and blackmail. Selma was required to fail this awards season because it was not Schinder's List, Mississippi Burning, Dances with Wolves, The Help, Lincoln, or 12 Years a Slave: It stubbornly refused to give us a white hero.
posted by CM @ 9:57 PM
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