Print this post.PATRICE GREANVILLE
The canonization of Jon Stewart proves he’s really no threat to the masters of the universe he pretends to skewer.
Jon Stewart is retiring! The long announced departure of this comic is hitting some preternaturally shallow types as if Krakatoa had just blown up again, this time taking a big chunk of Asia, or even something close to a personal tragedy. Starbucks may have to hang crepe for a day or so longer to suitably honor the massive mourning.
As insensitive oafs, forgive us for not joining the procession. In fact, we’ll do the exact opposite: we’ll celebrate Stewart’s retirement by reposting a classic, the hard to surpass analysis by Steve Almond of what Jon Stewart and his protegé Stephen Colbert really represent in the chaotic maelstrom of American culture. As Almond astutely notes, far from actually serving a newsworthy role, let alone consistently educating mass audiences by criticizing the empire…Stewart and Colbert are trivializers of evil, their legacy …one of defanging the truth about systemic evil by hurling toothless parody at it. But the real mark of approval by the power elites is that their media—besides bestowing on these figures global fame and employment at royal salaries—can’t seem to stop hurling bucketfuls of praise in their direction. Goes without saying that, while Stewart and Colbert get drenched in accolades for their antics, real critics of the emperor are confined to obscurity, poverty and often persecution.
The existence of Stewart and Colbert buttresses the empire’s claim to real democracy and freedom
We have stated on a number of occasions that when a system gets to be as monstrously gargantuan as America’s, it can literally have its cake and eat it too. The American edifice of power is so huge that observers are often confused by seeing different branches of the US government apparently doing and saying things that contradict each other, while the lethal and shady business goes on as usual.
In this context, with a machinery of self-justifying propaganda approaching near perfection, the system can boast another quiet triumph for its ability—in reality its having the luxury—to tolerate instances of radical dissent, not to mention the pseudo radical arrows loosed by the likes of Messrs.Stewart and Colbert. The irony in all this is that precisely by brooking a radical but politically impotent and negligible fringe (which has the correct take on reality but suffers from minuscule reach), the system propagandists can crow over the strength and virtues of America’s democracy and freedom, the envy of the world. Aha, the citadel on the hill still shines!
In the case of these two comics, the political payoff is magnified. For while the true left is allowed to operate relatively unmolested due to its sheer obscurity and harmlessness, Stewart and Colbert’s putative radicalism, long classified as ineffectual by the powers that be, can be marshaled around the world as proof conclusive that in America free speech is alive, well and thriving! That’s one helluva gift for a system beginning to be perceived by many as scandalously lacking in legitimacy.
Meanwhile, back at the barn, the media hacks dutifully discharge their duties. Beware of lavish praise by the system’s whores.
Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s founding editor.
FACT TO REMEMBER:
IF THE WESTERN MEDIA HAD ITS PRIORITIES IN ORDER AND ACTUALLY INFORMED, EDUCATED AND UPLIFTED THE MASSES INSTEAD OF SHILLING FOR A GLOBAL EMPIRE OF ENDLESS WARS, OUTRAGEOUS ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, AND DEEPENING DEVASTATION OF NATURE AND THE ANIMAL WORLD, HORRORS LIKE THESE WOULD HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED MANY YEARS, PERHAPS DECADES AGO. EVERY SINGLE DAY SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS COLLECTS ITS OWN INNUMERABLE VICTIMS.
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6 comments
Patrice, I’m not sure that I agree with your condemnation of Stewart for being a false radical. I don’t think he ever claimed to be a radical.
And I don’t think it’s possible to be a radical on any major US commercial television channel. If a news anchor gets up and tells his audience that capitalism is a bad idea, how many auto manufacturers and toothpaste manufacturers will want to sponsor him with commercials? Zero, I would think. If you want real radicalism, you have to go to RT and the internet.
I can see two possible explanations for why Stewart was not more radical. (a) He wanted to be more radical, but he thought to himself “if I go further than this, they’ll fire me, because I won’t be able to get commercials for cars and toothpaste.” Or (b) it never even occurred to Stewart to be more radical, because he has been fooled by the propaganda of capitalism as much as most USers.
And you condemn Stewart and Colbert in the same breath. Actually, Colbert was able to go just a little more radical, because of the different format of his program. Colbert was a liberal actor portraying a conservative character (whose name also happened to be Colbert, but it’s really two different people). As such, he was able to promote all sorts of crazy right-wing policies, and justify them with crazy right-wing ideology, and state the justifications just a little more transparently than the politicians do — so that the craziness would be showing. It was subtle enough that the sponsors and other executives didn’t call him out on it. But perhaps it was too subtle — perhaps much of his audience didn’t see the underlying truths that were being exposed. And it certainly wasn’t direct — e.g., Colbert showed how nasty capitalism is, but I think he rarely or perhaps never used the word “capitalism.”
I don’t know what can be done about this. The plutocracy owns the mass media, and so it’s hard for radicals to capture a large share of an audience that has already been hypnotized. Once in a while someone manages to put some political message into popular entertainment — e.g., the 2009 film “Avatar” or the 2013 film “Elysium.” Once in a while someone manages to get a large audience for a free film on Youtube — e.g., I highly recommend Peter Joseph’s “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward,” and apparently it has had 23 million viewers; I’m looking forward to his next film.
But what Naomi Klein said about think-tanks could also be said of other forms of messaging, including entertainment. She said:
“It’s easy to be discouraged by how much more funding the right wing think tanks have. But … they need that money, because they have a really tough intellectual job: Their job is to convince people that [altruism is bad and selfishness is good]. Crazy talk. Very expensive to convince people of something so deeply counter-intuitive. It is much cheaper to convince people that to do good is good; bad, bad.”
I totally agree with Patrice
Actually, Eric, my commentary on these two guys was just a warmup for the real meal, the article penned by Steve Almond, to which I refer, which lays out the reasons for being critical of Stewart and Colbert in much more nuanced and cogent ways than I was able to present.
Our role as social and political critics cannot be deflected by considerations of whether these people were or are themselves victims of the brainwash afflicting just about everyone in America…or not. In the negative, they then acted cynically and should have realized that they were in reality fortifying the system by —as pointed out in both articles, mine and Almond—trivializing the mind-boggling evil represented by the current corporate-dominated status quo.
As pointed out by Almond, both Stewart and Colbert often welcomed to their shows prominent figures in the MIC establishment—Obama, Hillary, Rumsfeld, military figures, etc., and there was never even a semblance of a confrontation. For a public as ignorant and inured to alternative views as the American, with an attention span in the milliseconds, subtlety is largely a waste. Obviously neither wanted to risk oblivion, and that is a career choice. If you argue that, “incrementally” their mild and non-contextual critiques were going to have an effect of radicalizing the public, I would say you are dreaming. Liberals have been throwing spitballs for decades if not centuries at capitalism with no discernible effect.
Furthermore, the fact that neither Stewart nor Colbert ever declared himself as a “radical” does not exonerate them from the widely-held assumption they were somehow “outside” the normal mainstream in their mouthings, something that Colbert, at least, suggested, at the gathering of notables for Washington’s Press Club roast. Surely they knew they were being perceived by many in America as brave critics of the status quo and irreverent reporters of things left unsaid by the rest of the media. That’s their main claim to fame, at least among the young, who, unfortunately, can be easily misled, too.
In sum, by pointing out the obvious, that they never were anything resembling a true radical, we at least perform a service to those perennially in search of saviours from the system. As you well know, their much ballyhooed rally in DC, which racked a respectable 200,000 souls ended up by admonishing the audience to be “more polite” in their political discourse. No analysis of any kind. Just politeness. Sure, that will get across the river.
Incidentally, I am almost certain that Stephen Colbert, recently crowned the new monarch of nightime tv, inheriting Letterman’s niche, will become even more irrelevant. There is no way he will be able to seriously tackle anything worth tackling in that venue, and if he does, as Eric suggests (and in that I concur) his gig will be cut painfully short.
I would be interested to learn more about the small and dirty details of his deal with CBS, what he was allowed to do, per contractual terms, and not do. How much effective topical independence he retains, etc. These are usually carefully guarded secrets of mainstream celebrities, but they have an impact on the culture.
Colbert may have already sold his soul to the devil for all I know; it certainly seems that way as even the promo ads for his show are banal and ridiculous, bad omens indeed, that whatever substance he had as a comic with some integrity, all of tghat will now be bulldozed out to better “homogenize” his product for the consumption of the late-night audience, a traditionally undemanding crowd happy with crumbs from the table of top-tier entertainment. Plus the slot has a history of very timid politics, except ass-kissing of approved figures, a tradition to which the petty, often mean-spirited Johnny Carson contributed clear standards of hypocrisy and abject conformity.
David Bain 6 August 15:37
I haven’t been following the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shows, but of the little I’ve seen of them, I have come to see them as on my side as a leftist. Therefore your opening comment that “The canonization of Jon Stewart proves he’s really no threat to the masters of the universe he pretends to skewer.” is counterintuitive. Who is canonizing him? How does that prove he is no threat? The answer is not obvious, but unfortunately, it is predictable. If the Greanville Post can be countered on to skewer everybody that the majority of people on the left see as on their side, what information comes from skewering one more of our heroes?
Being a very patient man, I read the whole article through, including Steve Almond’s critique and Stepen Deusner’s reply. Both essays seem to be based on interpretions of facts more than facts. That is not in itself a criticism. The words of John Stewart are facts, the meaning behind them, or what he might have said but didn’t are interpretations. The articles leave me free to make my own interpretations. I just know that I laugh with them and then I don’t say. “I have laughed, now I can go back to sleep.”
Your headline concedes nothing to people like me, who simply agree with him and laugh with him. It starts with the assumption that “we all know” that Jon Stewart, along with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Barack Obama are just evil liberal corporate lackeys with ulterior motives. If that is your message, you can’t just assume that “we all know” that, you have to bridge the gap between what we feel and what you claim to know.
You are right when you say poking fun at the powerful isn’t the same as bluntly confronting them. There are times when poking fun is the best weapon, but that does not sway us from bluntly confronting them. Humor is part of the process of confronting the rich and powerful. For all their flaws, I salute Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert for contributing to the fight in their own way.
People slightly left of center are not “the left” David. They are liberals.
Second, the “canonization” I speak of is evident in the petals thrown at Stewart in the video by CBS This Morning I include in my post, typical of the opinion you see reflected in numerous mentions of Stewart and his retirement. All accolades.
BTW, I am for once—lest I be accused of totally lacking in humour—using the word “canonization” satirically.
Laughing and not laughing with them is irrelevant to the discussion, what Almond and I are pointing out, their less obvious role. Political actors—conscious and unconscious—discharge roles that have social effects that can be often seen and even measured (as in elections, for example).
You are right I cannot say with any certainty what these duo really thinks. Nor do I pretend to. Ditto for what Sanders thinks. But I can tell you, for example, that in the case of the latter, except for a salutary venting of the label “socialism”, his raising of the anti-establishment flag will only serve to shepherd the followers into Hillary’s corner or to support whoever is anointed by the Dems’ top managers as the final candidate for the Democrats. It is in that sense that politically savvy observers are saying Bernie will simply “sheepdog” the masses back to the Democratic party corral.
I would like to be proven wrong by events, but I’m willing to bet I won’t. I will not even attempt to guess where you will place your faith but I sense it will be elsewhere. If so, I hope YOU are proven right for the good of all.