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Why Jon Stewart's Speech Left Me Cold
Ohanian Comment: I agree with Matthew Rothschild that Jon Stewart's little show was juvenile as well as wrong-headed, but Rothschild goes way too easy on Obama. The main problem with Obama's governing is that he's in the pocket of the corporations. Read Roger Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism. Hodge writes, "That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin is beyond dispute and completely beside the point."
I won't get into the war policy, the rendition, habeus corpus, Wall Street/Banking scams. Let's just consider education. Here's a good summary:
"Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives."
—Dana Milbank, Washington Post, Aug. 15, 2010
There is no way voting will fix this. Nor will polite conversation. Or irony.
By Matthew Rothschild
Because it was stale.
Because it was sappy.
Because it was self-important.
Because it was platitudinous.
Because it minimized the hideousness of some of the tea partiers and it blurred the odiousness of Fox.
Because it was politically meaningless and thereby a diversion at just the wrong time.
Because it was a mix of a high school graduation speech and a bad country western song, with too few jokes tossed in.
When Stewart said, "We can have animus and not be enemies," he was parroting President Obama, who has said, repeatedly, "We can disagree without being disagreeable."
A big part of Obama's problem in governing is he failed to grasp the degree of disagreeableness he was going to face, so it was peculiar to hear Stewart reinvoke this mantra, as though what we need is more niceness in this country—as opposed to better organizing, or better messaging, or better mobilizing for a better vision.
When Stewart said we need to be "able to distinguish between real racists and tea partiers," he conveniently ignored the fact that racists actually do permeate the tea party movement, as a recent report endorsed by the NAACP amply demonstrates.
When Stewart said, "Our country's 24-hour politico pundit panic conflict-onator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder," he was making a false equivalency between Fox on the one hand and CNN and MSNBC on the other, one that lets Rupert Murdoch off the hook way too easily.
When he said cable TV exaggerates the polarization and makes it seem like "we can't work together to get things done, but the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don't is here or on cable TV," he was minimizing the political differences that actually do exist and lapsing into Toby Keith territory.
He acted as though there isn't a meaningful battle going on right now about which way our country should go, or what kind of country we should be.
As Kate Clinton put it so presciently, "At this particular moment in our nation, ironic bonhomie is no substitute for making a stone cold sober decision to turn our political will into greater political power."
But Jon Stewart's message wasn't to fight for political power; it was to play nice.
And in his sappy, self-important ending he said, "You're presence was what I wanted. Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder. To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine. Thank you."
It's still unclear to me what he wanted by people's presence—other than a stunt, which he then scurried to justify with some high-minded rhetoric.
And Jon Stewart wasn't sane before he brought a couple hundred thousand people to DC for no good reason? I don't buy it.
— Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive
2010-10-31
http://progressive.org/wx103110.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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