{"id":4455,"date":"2010-09-21T09:29:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-21T16:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=4455"},"modified":"2010-09-21T09:29:13","modified_gmt":"2010-09-21T16:29:13","slug":"restore-sanity-wear-your-sarcastic-hat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=4455","title":{"rendered":"Restore Sanity: Wear Your Sarcastic Hat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I didn’t get around to watching Jon Stewart’s September 16th Daily Show until last night.\u00a0 By then I’d already seen some blog reaction to the “Rally to Restore Sanity<\/a>” announcement, so I knew what was coming.<\/p>\n

Even so, I was shocked.\u00a0 A “million moderate march”?\u00a0 I literally squirmed in embarrassment, all the more so as it became apparent Stewart actually meant it.\u00a0 As a rallying cry, “let’s tone down the rhetoric” has all the oomph of “let’s keep it down to a dull roar, kids.”\u00a0 I remember Richard Nixon’s pathetic appeal to the “silent majority” (and all the good it did him).\u00a0 What the hell is Stewart thinking?\u00a0 What pressures are his corporate masters putting on him?<\/p>\n

The people Stewart says he’s trying to rally?\u00a0 Moderates?\u00a0 First, that’s not his audience.\u00a0 Second, moderates are not and never will be agents of change.\u00a0 Moderates go along to get along.\u00a0 If it were up to moderates, schools and lunch counters would still be segregated.\u00a0 There would be no labor unions, no minimum wage.\u00a0 Women would still be in the kitchen.\u00a0 We would not have gone to the moon.<\/p>\n

Moderates won’t go to this rally.\u00a0 Stewart’s fans will, and there are a lot of them, but what will they accomplish?\u00a0 Show that Stewart can draw larger crowds than Beck and Palin?\u00a0 Is that really what this is all about?<\/p>\n

As contemptuous as I am of tea party morons who allow themselves to be manipulated by billionaires who’d press them into indentured servitude if they thought they could get away with it, at least the tea party morons think<\/em> they’re fighting for some kind of change.\u00a0 But this . . . and I don’t doubt it will come off, or that a huge crowd will show up for it . . . will be more like an article in The Onion<\/a>: worth a chuckle, devoid of meaning.<\/p>\n

There’s something wrong here, wrong and off-putting.\u00a0 Not only is the idea behind Stewart’s rally lame, it’s purportedly aimed at a group of lamers who by definition do not attend rallies.\u00a0 I predict the inevitable crowd of Stewart’s fans will be swelled by activists from the left who won’t be there to “take it down a notch” . . . and that Stewart’s going to have real problems if he tries to stifle or control them.<\/p>\n

Personally, the most disturbing thing about all this is the unexpected shift in Stewart’s message.\u00a0 Up to now, Stewart has mercilessly exposed and skewered the racist, corporate, war-mongering agenda of the right.\u00a0 With this announcement his message is compromised, perhaps fatally so.\u00a0 He says . . . quite specifically, if you watch the video<\/a> . . . that moderation lies halfway between the false claim that Obama is a socialist Kenyan grandmother-killing Muslim and the objectively truthful claim that Bush and Cheney committed war crimes.\u00a0 This is not moderation; it’s not even true centrism.\u00a0 This is merely being a chickenshit, and it’s so unlike Stewart I can’t help but wonder who got to him.<\/p>\n

The title of this post comes from a memorable line by Colin Covert in his review<\/a> of The Brothers Bloom: “The leads have zero comedic skills, but you can tell they’re being funny because they all wear sarcastic hats.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t get around to watching Jon Stewart’s September 16th Daily Show until last night.\u00a0 By then I’d already seen some blog reaction to the “Rally to Restore Sanity” announcement, so I knew what was coming. Even so, I was shocked.\u00a0 A “million moderate march”?\u00a0 I literally squirmed in embarrassment, all the more so as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7,10,16,27,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-culture","category-current-events","category-media","category-memes","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4455"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4466,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4455\/revisions\/4466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}