I’ve read a few comments today from liberals all too happy to piss on the Colbert Stewart Parade because it’s not political enough or not the right kind of politics.
Bullshit. The show matters. It matters a great deal. Whether it’s the Miracle on Ice at the 1980 Winter Olympics or the Fireside Chats of the Great Depression, the medium is part of the message – the way we talk to each other and about each other has everything to do with what we are able to accomplish with one another.
The penny ante falangists and frustrated Maoists of the American Right and their far fewer counterparts in the American Left may have everything to gain from keeping comedy out of the conversation but the American public does not.
Comedy is how culture corrects itself. It is not a substitute for politics but neither is it the enemy of politics. Consider just this one example of hundreds from Western Civilization: “After 1835, when the government banned political caricature, Le Charivari began publishing satires of everyday life.”
Here’s the bumper sticker for those who need to boil politics – i.e., human nature – into a catch-phrase: we need phone banks and telecasts, door drops and stand up’s, inspiring speeches and withering satire.
If tactical, goal-oriented political groups didn’t descend on D.C. this past weekend to enlist new members from an audience of 250,000 voters, shame on those tacticians, not the event organizers – and certainly not those who schlepped all the way to the nation’s capital to convene as rational Americans.