{"id":269,"date":"2010-11-20T11:21:36","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T15:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/?p=269"},"modified":"2010-11-20T11:22:21","modified_gmt":"2010-11-20T15:22:21","slug":"269","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/?p=269","title":{"rendered":"Why Colbert and Stewart Matter to Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<style>@font-face {   font-family: \"Cambria\"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: \"Times New Roman\"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }<\/style>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><strong>Newspin<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">By Christian Piatt<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">(Originally published in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pueblopulp.com\">PULP<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">By the time this goes to press, political satirists John Stewart and Stephen Colbert will have conducted their \u0093March to Restore Sanity\u0094 and the \u0093Rally to Keep Fear Alive,\u0094 respectively, in Washington, D.C. Seen by many as a direct response to Glenn Beck\u0092s rally in the same city on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Junior\u0092s \u0093I Have a Dream\u0094 speech, Stewart explained in a recent interview on National Public Radio, such a mindset gives Beck too much credit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Sure, he\u0092s great fodder for comedy, says Stewart, but Beck\u0092s rhetoric really lacks any more substance than the comedy shows that parody him, though it\u0092s arguable that Beck isn\u0092t in on the joke.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">For those who see the emergence of more vocal conservative pundits and politicians as distressing, figures like Beck, Sarah Palin and the like as fodder for derision and even fear, it seems that the tea ,party movement is giving such people a platform that is bending the public\u0092s ear, and for some, the prospect of someone who listens to Fox News as a legitimate source of \u0093fair and balanced\u0094 information is nothing short of terrifying.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Not so, argues Stewart. He suggests that the worry about a Palin presidency or the like actually is overblown. If we can survive a civil war among other things, he says, we can live through a less-than-capable conservative presidency.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Sounds strangely familiar, in a way, actually.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">In fact, there\u0092s a case to be made that electing someone like Palin or Delaware\u0092s GOP senate candidate Christine O\u0092Donnell might actually be good medicine. If moderates and progressives already are asleep at the wheel after only two years to the point that they\u0092ll let more extreme leaders win political office, perhaps the wakeup call of the 2000-08 Bush presidency wasn\u0092t harsh enough.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">All of this begs the question: Why do the media and those who consume their product seem content to reduce political figures to little more than caricatures, and to establish fear and contempt as the baseline emotions upon which our political system operates?<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Because it\u0092s easier than taking the time and effort to learn about issues of any real importance and substance.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Who wants to read about the latest arbitration over water rights when we can follow the developing story about O\u0092Donnell\u0092s dalliances with witchcraft or her positions, so to speak, on masturbation? Why debate the appropriateness of NAFTA or how to tackle immigration reform when it\u0092s so much more fun to speculate about Barack Obama\u0092s birth certificate or read an e-il about how he\u0092s a closet Muslim?<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">This dumbing down of the American voter would be easy to blame either on politics or the media, but I\u0092d argue it\u0092s only a viable market because we, the end-user, have created such a demand.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">In a culture where <em>People Magazine <\/em>outsells <em>The New Yorker <\/em>four-to-one and there are two <em>Maxim <\/em>subscribers for every <em>U.S. News &amp; World Report <\/em>reader, it\u0092s easier to put analysis and critical thought into its proper perspective. And while the emotional tide of good feeling that helped usher Obama into the White House was heartening in many ways, it\u0092s also discouraging to see how quickly such fickle emotion can fade.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">And, yes, this is an entirely appropriate time to point out the irony of my observations in the pages of an alt-monthly that also contains columns on sex, nightlife and the related fluff that accompanies them. No more ironic, I suppose, than the fact that some of our most poignant contemporary political commentary comes from 30-minute shows on Comedy Central that sandwich their wry observations between fart jokes and hyperbole.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">John Adams, James Madison and other of our political progenitors are no doubt turning in their graves over the dim-witted offspring their revolutionary system of governance, based upon the nobility of human integrity and the value of rigorous intellectual debate, have now produced.<span>\u00a0 <\/span><em><span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><span>\u00a0<\/span><span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">In a culture where substance takes at least second chair to sensational rhetoric and character assassination, those who shout loudest garner the brightest spotlight. Politics has entered the compressed news cycle as one more distraction to be picked from an ever-running stream of detritus when we have a moment. The winners in such a context are those shiny morsels that grab our attention, which helps explain why every political speech now sounds like a string of unrelated sound bytes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">Sometimes, we have to laugh to keep from crying, which is why I\u0092m grateful for people like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Love or hate their take on issues, it\u0092s hopeful to have a pair of comedians who have the nerve to point out that the political emperor has no clothes, or, in this case, no substance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Newspin By Christian Piatt (Originally published in PULP) &nbsp; By the time this goes to press, political satirists John Stewart and Stephen Colbert will have conducted their \u0093March to Restore Sanity\u0094 and the \u0093Rally to Keep Fear Alive,\u0094 respectively, in Washington, D.C. Seen by many as a direct response to Glenn Beck\u0092s rally in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24,13,34,27,33,36,1,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}