When the empire’s comics are not so funny.

Commentary by Patrice Greanville

Michelle Wolf borrows the stage to tell a few uncomfortable truths. But it is our Ramin Mazaheri who really hits the nail on the head.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n a recent piece on GQ (Michelle Wolf Just Dunked on All of Late-Night Comedy’s Viral Takedown Segments), Evelyn Wang paid a sort of homage to this iconoclastic comedian for her spot on, acerbic flogging of America's official court jesters, more often than not shills for the liberal/Deep State establishment (has it ever been so tightly joined at the sternum as now?), while wearing the mask of comedy and political integrity.

Said Wang:

As you may have noticed, it's pretty much impossible to have a comedy show under the Trump administration that doesn't get political. These days, it would be weird if a late-night hostdidn't take a break from comparing the president to an assortment of orange fruits to burst into a self-serious monologue about doing one's civic duty. Unfortunately, these segments are starting to get a little predictable, a fact that did not escape the notice of Michelle Wolf. In a new clip from her Netflix show The Break, the star of this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner expertly satirized the formula of comedians like John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and Trevor Noah in a meta segment of her own.

Wang curiously left out the two worst offenders: Stephen Colbet and Bill Maher, literally Democrat party apparatchiks, and both prominent members of the Hollywood-for-empire echo chamber. Trevor Noah, of course, an example of racialism in action (even if Noah is several cuts above most of his peers in intelligence), is heir to Jon Stewart's throne, the handpicked successor to that profitable venue, the place that virtually spawned this new silliness in US culture, especially among the young, the idea of getting your news about the world in headline bursts interspersed with punch lines and the inevitable laugh tracks, calculated to render everything, oh, so non-urgent.

Of course such a travesty of serious information would have never happened if America had had all along a serious press, but that, as anyone half awake already knows, would have required a very different history and culture. As things stand and have stood pretty much since the nation's inception, the fabric of America has always been heavily marinated in savage commercialism. And the US media in most of the 20th century has never risen above mediocrity, even in the supposedly golden days of Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. All of those things are just myths, self-reinforcing myths like the Big Lie about the Russian Threat we live under: if you repeat it enough, with unanimity, it becomes unchallengeable truth. Can anyone believe that any of the great crimes committed by the US with total impunity (just since the end of World War 2) could have been perpetrated if the press had been doing its job? If the American media had been telling the truth—or even something close to it—doggedly, all along, with half the dedication they assign to covering Madonna, Beyonce or the British Royals, Korea, Vietnam, the coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, and scores of other nations, with victims in the millions and horrors that remain largely unimagined on the American psyche (not to mention the post-Vietnam uber crimes and policies under the new universal pretext, "the War on Terror", crimes that have devastated the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, and currently threaten new and bigger conflagrations...) well, none of those would have happened. Why? Because a well informed citizenry would have stopped them. Which is exactly why Americans are not well informed, in fact they are dumbed down, actively so, by design and on orders from above, from the guys who own the media, and just about evertything else worth owning, including the entire native political class, a model of filth, corruption, criminality, and hypocrisy with few equals in the annals of history, no matter how far back you care to go.

Emerging from this cultural miasma is not easy. Since being dumb is a form of progressive debilitation, a sort of "negative feedback loop" as really brainy guys like to put it, each round of lies, each assault on reality, is less likely to be resisted or even remotely detected by the beaten down, pacified populace. A huge part of this is simply the organic result of living under unrestricted capitalism, with few USAers ready to disinherit themselves from their birthright, the American Dream. For in one of the greatest triumphs of mass programming, in the US capitalism has been sold to the people as indistinguishable from their own identity, their nationality. This is simply unique, part of that hugely toxic construct, American Exceptionalim. You don't see that in any other country, that degree of high-handed ridiculousness enforced by what appears to be common consent. Thus the catechism is clear: To be an American is to be a capitalist. Anything else is, well, unimaginable, heretical, and "un-American"—and the penalties are real. The "American Way of Life" is supposed to stand for freedom, democracy and rugged individualism, whatever that means ( a rare boast considering that most Americans break records for social docility), but it invariably delivers a population imprisoned and ruled by corporate hierarchies, virtual tyrannies, as Chomsky correctly calls them. Obviously, most Americans never encountered real rugged individualists, a stubborn Spanish anarchist for example.

What's more, propaganda in support of a plutocratic regime never found a friendler soil. In a recent comment, our friend Peter Pavimentov zeroed in on this peculiar trait of the American personality:

“The US is a petty-bourgeois society of the poor and downtrodden from other lands who through hard work and dedication succeeded in reaching a modicum of living which is indeed envied elsewhere and living by the standards and economically driven determination of that class. Little can they care about social equalization as they are trained to be competitive and of necessity self-seeking. That principle is being reflected in the ads, in print, in movies and on the television screen. No indoctrination needed…”

No indoctrination needed. Indeed! Although let's say, a little indoctrination is needed, these days like 24/7, to keep the latest Big Lie momentum going.  Again, it's always far easier to deepen existing indoctrination than to dismantle it. But I digress.

In any case, the last word on this topic goes to my colleague Ramin Mazaheri, half American, half Iranian, who, while normally residing overseas, enjoys an uncannily astute perspective on American society.

I've never seen this lady but she really hits the nail on the head: "This IS comedy!" Very funny video.

LOL! Been going on for so long. Jon Stewart's bullplop sanctimony really made me want to throw up - I was always amazed he made it so long and got so big. But that's America - comedians are political leaders.

A society which can only joke about serious issues and not actually talk about them has major problems...I've said that for years and years. Certainly, satirize us journalists but come down off your high horse, you clowns - your political ideology is only "get a laugh".

Brave exceptions have occurred, George Carlin, for example, and now Lee Camp. But they are a different breed. They embody that glorious oxymoron, a really serious comic.

Meantime, Ramin's observation stands: A society which can only joke about serious issues and not actually talk about them has major problems.

—PG