Good take-down of press angst over #rally4sanity. My favorite criticism: "But Stewart appears uninterested in generating enduring change; he wants a day-long party. Then people can go back to the things that matter — lives of domesticity, and watching shows that make jokes about how seriously screwed up things are." Party on, dudes!
Stewart, who's been rationing out details for weeks, would only say, "Let me put it this way — you'll have fun." It's a word that bears repeating — "fun" — and one that Stewart has been repeating, perhaps because a growing number of cultural critics, unlike his fans, refuse to believe that a comedian who hosts a news-satire show on a channel called Comedy Central could possibly aspire only to be entertaining.
"I think that they're all guilty of what jazz musician Charles Mingus called 'mental tardiness,'" Slate's Jack Shafer, who doesn't plan to write a Press Box column about the rally, tells me. "I think these critics aren't really thinking it out all the way."
Or maybe they're thinking too hard. While their conclusions, invariably, are that Stewart and Stephen Colbert should cancel their Oct. 30 rally, the supporting arguments are myriad, ranging from "Stewart is too serious" to "laughing isn't funny."
What strikes me most about the aforementioned critiques is their tone — of admonishment, betrayal, and even anger.
Clearly, the rally is political. Stewart even admitted at Monday night's taping of The Daily Show that he booked the National Mall right after he heard about Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, and surely it's not lost on Stewart that his event falls just three days before the midterm elections. To say the rally isn't political is slightly disingenuous.
What Stewart means to say, of course, is that he's not overtly espousing a particular partisan line. Is he pushing his fans in a leftward direction? Sure — just look at The Daily Show lineup this week, which includes President Obama tonight. But anyone who's watched the show knows where Stewart's political beliefs lie, and many of the critics above are professed fans of his. So why this sudden defection? Because, I think, they felt a certain ownership over, or at least camaraderie with, Stewart. Print and web journalists, generally speaking, are a prickly, defensive, and arrogant bunch. We imagine ourselves superior to TV newscasters, who traffic in sound bites and manufactured controversy and high-decibel alarmism. In our minds, we writers slave away at our desks, composing thoughtful articles that are too nuanced for TV, and yet we remain largely anonymous while all those empty-headed beautiful people soak up the relative fame afforded by television.
As the criticism of Stewart's rally proves, we are delusional: Writers often aren't very thoughtful at all. We're just bitter. We loved Stewart because he voiced that bitterness we felt — about politics, about television, and even about our own careers. Now that his narrative has diverged from our own, we fear he'll become just another media figure — or worse, a politician — about whom we're forced to write articles. Some of us, consequently, reject Stewart in the way we might reject a boyfriend or girlfriend who has left us for something bigger: He or she is already gone, but somehow we convince ourselves that the decision was ours to make.
Read more at www.tbd.com
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