All morning long, while fertilizing the veggies in the hoophouse, I pondered Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally To Restore Sanity (and/or Fear). Why were so many commentators so moved by Stewart’s closer? It sounded to me like a longer version of Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along?”.
And Stewart’s shopworn mantra that the mainstream media distract us from crafting real solutions by relentless fearmongering not only wears thin but it’s wrong.
We should be scared. The world is going to hell in a uranium-tipped handbasket of trillion-dollar wars, escalating greenhouse gases and a financial system riddled with more holes than someone who mistakenly crosses Blackwater’s path.
As soon as I finish watering the lettuce, I will hunker down at the computer to vent my spleen.
After all, it’s the weekend, so I can take the time to polish my prose and come up with zingers like Hunter S. Thompson (Buy the ticket; take the ride — A word to the wise is infuriating.) or Matt Taibbi (Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer).
But first, I promised Drew I’d clean my closet.
While sorting piles of mismatched shoes (has a one-legged female thief been stealing from me?), I began thinking about writing a piece on the new Rick Snyder administration. Ricky, we hardly know ye. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Get a jump on Wednesday morning commentators by having my analysis ready
Do some research on Snyder’s time at Dell. Remind people that he’s pro-life. Explain why moderate Rick may be unwilling to veto some of his Tea Party/Militia minions craziest new proposals.
Spend the time it takes to nail Snyder before anyone else can . . . but now it’s time to make dinner. (Walnut and brown rice burgers, hoophouse spinach salad with bananas and pineapple-sesame oil dressing.)
OK, so immediately after dinner, I can hit the keyboard hard . . . but wait, what’s that squishy green stuff in the back of the fridge? Am I growing my own bumper crop of salmonella with an e coli appetizer?
It is now after 11 p.m.. The garden is tended, the closet is tidy, dinner is over, the dishes are done and the fridge is clean. And neither of those two great articles has been written.
Maybe next week? But only if I can ignore how sticky my kitchen floor is getting. Will the cats get stuck?
And people wonder why women have never produced as much great literature as men. We’re lucky we can find the time to write anything other than our names on the checks to pay bills.
Although we disagree on some points about the “Rally” I like your piece here.
I just don’t think Stewart IS is attempting to be much more than “can’t we get along,” so I don’t feel inclined to be disappointed. As Arianna Huffington said about him:
“What makes him and Colbert special is the fact that they use satire to speak truth to power, whether that power is liberal, conservative, in the media, in politics. That’s where their power comes from. And people who continue to see it as a sort of left-leaning show are completely missing its appeal.”
I think Hunter S. Thomson spent most Saturday nights smoking weed and living out his LSD soaked fantasies. His run-on sentences and stream-of-thought style seemed to have everyone thinking he was a genius. I think he just said a lot of what everyone else was thinking, and it was radical at the time. His imagination created a persona that seemed larger than life, and maybe it was all true, but I never got it. Jon Stewart disguises his wisdom in the “Gosh I’m just a comedian” cloak, but his passion for the truth and his use of the media is what makes him so compelling. He speaks truth to power and does it in a way that isn’t offensive, that’s genius. Rick Snyder, if he gets in, will find out soon enough that running a company and running a state are worlds apart. He better get a helmet.
Who cares what Stewart said at the rally? The Spectacle’s the thing! How could anything coherent come out of a parody of the funhouse mirror viewpoints that dominate US politics? You act as if facts actually matter. Like the fact that voters outraged over $trillions$ given over to Wall Street in bailouts just voted to massively expand Wall Street’s political Influence? Or that voters furious about Federal deficits voted for the party that more than doubled the deficit under Cheney/Bush, and launched two world wars that have sentenced the domestic federal budget to eternal debt peonage?
Or that Democrats still think all they have to do is tell “the truth” and the people will come around, as they give over economic control of the country to the same Wall Street ciphers (Summers, Geithner, et al) as the last bunch? Democrats are delusional liars. Sad to say, voters prefer their liars without pretense, thus the success of Republicans that just make up their own facts. And they hate many of the same people as a large proportion of voters - bonus! The Democrats might as well come out against puppies and mothers’ milk, they couldn’t do any worse.
And Stewart? When our nation turns its lonely eyes to a fucking comedy network, we might as well wait for Joe Dimaggio. The noise from the echo chambers of people’s MyFace social networks has become the replacement for the sound of feet pounding pavement and the other sounds of people organizing to fight power (instead of speaking to it). So an amorphous message from a comedian from a fake news show who organized a big political rally about sanity in politics? That sounds about perfect to me.