Stephen Colbert: American Patriot
By now, you’ve likely heard of Stephen Colbert’s ripping of the President, the Media, the Generals and everyone else at the Correspondent’s dinner. Daily Kos has the transcript.
And maybe you’ve already heard the conservative reaction in our doormat media: “over the top”, “not respectful”, “wasn’t really that funny.” Yes, of course, we really do need to take lessons from the Republicans in how to respect a president, don’t we? Let’s go play some Clinton transcripts again.
Maybe Colbert wasn’t side splittingly funny. But this is the era when humorists are the real commentators, the ones with weight and credibility. And what Colbert did was satire, and he did it well.
Speaking of how his TV character and the President are so much alike he said:
We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book.
Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.
There we have the telling response to Bush’s weird adoption of the postmodern ethic that things can mean what we spin them to mean, that things can be “true for me” and it doesn’t matter what others say.
And reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Ever since that presidential aid dismissed us as living in the “reality based community” it has been clear what is going on. Bush, like the Talaban, or any religious fundamentalist who thinks God has granted him a new revelation that supersedes all the old ones, believes that reality itself is his opponent. I’ve almost never read a conservative screed in these past years where in the first sentence there wasn't some amazing invented ‘fact.’ Conservatism depends on inventing facts. It’s not about making sense of the facts, or adopting a stance to the facts. Now it is about making up the facts.
I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.
Part of the separation from reality is that now we all understand that far too much of our public discourse deals with staged events, what Daniel Boorstin long ago called the pseudo-event. We know the aircraft carrier, the dinner with the troops, the visits to New Orleans, are not expressing some other reality, not capturing a reality that can’t easily be made visual – they are the event itself. The president’s response to the destruction of an American city was first the photo op. The laws, the money, that was the secondary response.
But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!
And now comes the paragraph that earned Colbert all the snide attacks in the press, for the mainstream press will tolerate anything, anything at all except the truth about themselves. And when the history of this era is written, the abject surrender of any integrity from the media in its coverage of the Bush administration will be an obvious theme. Can you just imagine how this would be handled differently if it was a Democratic president who had blown up the budget, suppressed scientific data, lied to start a war?
No, Steven Colbert was not hilarious. He was accurate. He made few if any sexual references. He was intimate in addressing the real issue. He lived up to the highest standard of his calling of satire. And in speaking truth to power, he lived up to the highest standard of American patriotism.