What It Takes
All I can say is, thank God for Jon Stewart. I thought I was going to die when the Daily Show took a week’s vacation just as a natural disaster struck the Gulf and a national disgrace continued it. But this week, my favorite asthmatic Jewish comedian is back, and for brief half-hour segments the truth doesn’t hurt quite so bad. If anyone hasn’t yet seen the Beleaguered Bush segment with Ed Helms’s chart featuring “Osama and Jenna”, that is really a must-see. (The fact that their internet clips only play in Windows Media Player, however, sucks.)
Al Franken also made me laugh today, bless his bones, with his “interview” of the old woman teaching 20,000 3rd graders in the Houston Astrodome. I remember him and Tom Davis on the early days of Saturday Night Live, and their “Franken & Davis” routine. It wasn’t that good; I would say they succeeded in being funny about half the time — on par with the show as a whole most nights. But he has definitely gotten funnier with time; his “Finding or Looting” game show today was absolutely hilarious.
Other than that, not much worth laughing about is going on.
Three years ago, as 9/11 segued into the drumbeats of war and we were doing everything we could to prevent a war from happening but it happened anyway, I read an email post from an American Pagan ex-pat in the UK that has stayed with me. I can’t remember who it was, maybe Michael York, but it was someone on the Nature and Religion Scholars e-list, an occasionally fascinating, sometimes contentious, often obscure and/or irrelevant forum. Anyway, I remember him deriding the Orwellian nature of our national discourse, with mindless hordes of Americans going along with the lies we were being fed about the war, and he made the comment that he was never going to live in the US again because this war was “the final nail in the coffin of American democracy.” I just looked at that post and shook my head, thinking, “he must have a pretty low tolerance for pain if he thinks this is the final nail of anything.”
We as a nation have sunk pretty low. The FEMA fiasco sinks us below sea level, I think. Al Franken is right, the neo-cons and their religious fundamentalist backers have no ethics, just a lust for power and a willingness to do anything to keep it. Social justice is a penniless term in America right now. But even this current crisis is not the final nail in democracy’s coffin. Not while there’s a shred of power left in Roe v. Wade, not while people are still fighting for universal health care, not while there’s still hope that honest, independent journalism will rise from the ashes of the media monopoly.
I take comfort in the fact that we are a revolutionary country — that was how we began, at least. When push comes to shove, we value rebellion and independence above most things, and we have vast stores of ingenuity just waiting to be tapped when opportunity arises. I hope and pray that, as Jon Stewart says, Hurricane Katrina is Bush’s Monica Lewinsky. I hope more Kanye West moments keep happening, that American unrest reaches a boiling point and takes up permanent residence on the front pages of every newspaper. I hope the midterm elections bring in ethical people from both parties who are genuinely ready to eradicate poverty in this country. (As opposed to eradicating the impoverished.) And, like Mark Twain, I believe that reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.