Monday, May 01, 2006
 

The root of The Blackout

[updated below]

I think that a primary cause of the obvious attempt to downplay, or even ignore, the Colbert speech at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, is that the Political and Media Establishments approach the Colbert performance on the assumption that the Correspondents Dinner is a time for light-heartedness, playful ribbing of the powers the be, with the powerful responding in kind, poking fun at themselves -- and that's a legitimate point of view in normal times, when the status quo reigns, there's peace in the land, and people are doing OK for themselves. What the mainstream media (and much of the opposition party as well) seems to be unable to understand is that these are not normal times, these are dire circumstances, and because of that, Colbert's routine was supremely appropriate.

After all, you've got an administration that's relentlessly moving us away from democracy and towards a (semi-elected) dictatorship, you've got one party in control of the entire mechanism of government, the degrading of checks and balances to almost nothing, a war begun on the basis of lies and deceit that's going nowhere except towards inevitable failure, with the specter of another one to be ginned up whenever it's politically expedient to do so, you've got an economy that's been pre-rigged for the benefit of big corporations and the rich and powerful while wages stagnate and gas prices soar, and you've got a government that seems determined to fail as often and as publicly as possible to undermine the public's trust. That's not normal times, in my book that's dire circumstances, and requires an entirely different norm of behavior.

That the media obviously doesn't see that is a very significant part of the problem. That, at this late date, they're still willing to shill for the status quo by covering up inconvenient and unpleasant truths, and can't bring themselves to see the chaos that's been unleashed doesn't bode well to me for things to change anytime soon. You have to wonder what, exactly, it will take for them to see the darkness that surrounds us.

Update: Welcome to those coming over from The Moderate Voice -- please stay a couple of minutes and take a look around unfutz.

Just to be clear about one thing, I don't think there was a deliberate conspiracy of the type where media bosses sit around the table, or talk to each other by phone, and decide to blackout the Colbert routine -- that would be ludicrous. I don't even think there was a "conspiracy" in the narrow and technical legal sense, where one part of the web of conspirators doesn't know what the other part is doing. No, if there was a "conspiracy" it was totally in a metaphorical sense, and it was prompted by the attitudes and beliefs of those who run the mainstream media and shape the Conventional Wisdom. Colbert's routine breached the norms of behavior for those folks who patrol the boundaries of the status quo, and so, as a matter of etiquette as much as anything else, it was ignored.

More thoughts on Colbert here and here.

Addenda: Thank you Stephen Colbert

Update: On his Salon blog, Scott Rosenberg makes the same points I made in my reply to Nathanael's comment:
Evaluating this event on laugh-meter scores is absurd -- it's just one more way of marginalizing and dismissing what actually happened that night. Just for a moment, Colbert brought a heavily sheltered President Bush face to face with the outrage and revulsion that large swathes of the American public feel for him and what he has done to our country. He did so at an event in which a certain level of jovial kidding is sanctioned, but he stepped far beyond. His caricature of a right-wing media toady relied on irony, and irony rarely elicits belly laughs, but at its best, it provokes doubt and incites questions. The ultimate goal of Colbert's routine was not to make you laugh but to make you think; it aimed not to tickle but to puncture.

In that sense, those observers who have criticized Colbert for being rude to the president are absolutely right. As I wrote yesterday, the performance was a deliberate act of lese majeste. That means it was meant to pop the balloon of protective ritual around Bush and let reality in, so we can see him -- along with those in the press who have been complicit with him -- for what he is.

Inside the Beltway, humor is supposed to be disarming, "humanizing." Ever since Richard Nixon appeared on "Laugh-in" and said "Sock it to me!," suggesting that he was not quite the conservative gorgon that he seemed to be, politicians have wanted to use comedy as a prop in their own campaigns of self-promotion. But that's a late-20th-century degradation of comedy. There's an older tradition -- stretching back to the commedia dell'arte and beyond, into the medieval court and its "all-licensed" fools -- in which the comic seeks the discomfiture of the powerful.

[...]

So now we have the sad spectacle of the media desperately puffing air back into the popped balloon of the president's dignity, pretending that nothing happened. The Bush impersonator was funnier! cry the pundits. Colbert bombed! Well, they can sneer all they want about whether or not he slayed 'em in D.C. Out here in the reality-based community that increasingly encompasses the American electorate, Colbert hit his targets. And they will never look quite the same.

[Thanks to Jo Ann]

Ed Fitzgerald | 5/01/2006 09:30:00 PM | | | del.icio.us | GO: TOP OF HOME PAGE







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