You know that as you and your kids get older, they serve an increasingly crucial role in keeping your old-fart-self in touch with what’s hip and trendy so that you can actually talk to one’s students without sounding like a complete fossil. My students have been talking about The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for quite a while, but (while intrigued) we never actually watched an episode until Sub-Evil Boy came home from space camp all enthused. (Apparently they stayed up late in the TV lounge a time or two.) So we’ve been watching steadily for several weeks now, and when they’re hot they’re about as funny and clever an analysis of current events as I’ve heard since I discovered my Dad’s Mort Sahl LPs back in high school. (This was the late 70’s and I didn’t have a clue who all these people were – I thought Dulles was just an airport – but it was amazing what I managed to learn about the Eisenhower years just from listening to Sahl freestyle on two LPs.)
We just watched yesterday’s broadcast, and it was definitely one for the books, with a great interview and some truly classic pieces. One big fave of both WeatherGirl and I was about the recent crash of Air France flight 358. Jon Stewart:
Within 2 minutes all 309 passengars and crew got out alive. A remarkable testament to the training of the crew and the emergency personnel and their competence.
They followed that summary with numerous clips of people calling it “The miracle by the highway”. We cut back to Stewart who goes through a flurry of his trademark facial pyrotechnics and announces (in reference to an earlier piece about Novak swearing on air on CNN) “That is bullshit”:
A miracle, defined in my dictionary, is ‘a marvelous event manifesting a supernatural act of God’. To me the only thing that was a miracle in that situation was the lighting that hit the plane. That was the act of God. If anything, God was trying to kill these people. His plan was foiled by the crew’s satanic competance! Can’t someone take someone take some human credit for a job well done?!?
I really loved that. I’ve always found it really frustrating when people are unwilling to give humans credit for human accomplishments. If our lives are going to have purpose and intent, we have to believe that we can create goals that give our lives meaning and that we as individuals, groups, and societies can make progress towards those goals. In a key way this is a central part of our “growing up”. A crucial part of kids’ development is the transition from external goals (doing what their parents and teachers tell them) to the ability to set and work towards their own internal goals. Why in the world can’t we seem to get that sorted out as a species?
Another wonderful moment (in a depressingly icky way) came on their new segment “The less you know”. This segment focusses on the (all too many) ways that Our Fearless Leader and his Many Minions are working to keep us in the dark. One of the issues they looked at this time were the problems people like the ACLU have had getting information on what exactly was happening in Abu Ghraib (where some U.S. service personnel were torturing Iraqi prisoners). Luckily The Daily Show brings clarity to the issue by providing us with a clip of Bill O’Reilly saying (and I quote)
Clearly more pictures of Abu Ghraib help the terrorists, as do Geneva Convention protections and civilian lawyers. So there’s no question the ACLU and judges that side with them are terror allies.
What an incredibly stupid comment. If that’s O’Reilly’s idea of democracy then there’s no democracy left in the U.S. worth defending. Luckily Stewart has a sense of democracy worth fighting for and still manages to be on national television, so there’s hope.
The happy thing about O’Reilly’s quote is that it’s always nice when fools are so transparently foolish in public, but one has to wonder how his bosses can continue to pay to be associated with that idiot.
