At the very least, it is a fascinating viewing experience. Colbert uses irony and satire to tear apart Bush, Republicans, and the cowed media that cover them on a regular basis. But there Colbert is, face to face with all the self-important people who have insulated themselves from the rest of us, skewering them mercilessly.
Bush would never appear on Colbert's show to endure that abuse. Neither will Colbert's main target on his show, Bill O'Reilly ever appear on the "Colbert Report." Why? Because the truth hurts. When someone uses humor to expose just how ridiculous or incompetent you are, it's hard to respond. That's why bullies in the movies always seem to back down after the nerdy weakling says something witty to put them down. The power of the mind often overcomes the brute strength of physical power. At least, we wish that was the case.
Anyway, I believe Colbert's roasting was heroic. He spoke truth to power in every sense of the phrase. Nothing he said to Bush was untrue, was it? His poll numbers ARE a disaster. Iraq IS in chaos. Cheney DID shoot a man in the face. It's all there in the record. He wasn’t accusing Bush of being a child molester or a Satanist. He was holding a mirror up to Bush's face and forcing him to look at his own miserable failure as a president.
To me, that is a significant moment, given that it happened at this baroque event in front of a crowd of 2,600 members of the political, media and Hollywood elite. Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were there. George Clooney. The Joint Chiefs of Staff. Helen Thomas. Everyone.
And yet, the response to Colbert's moment was, initially at least, total silence.
Elizabeth Bumiller, the New York Times' White House correspondent, the pen that drops her ink on the flagship of our nation's newspaper industry, declined to even mention Colbert's name in her report.
Instead, she made a like a stenographer and gave us a dull blow-by-blow account of Bush's lame shtick at the same event, his "self-deprecating" performance with a Bush impersonator.
I wrote a letter to the New York Times asking why Colbert's 20-minute tour-de-force warranted nary a mention in its esteemed pages. I received no direct response, although a similar letter was published in the Times Tuesday.
But there was some discussion, especially in the blogosphere. Some cable news shows weighed in, especially on Fox News, where some of the usual suspects attacked Colbert for "going over the line." Editor and Publisher, a industry mag for the newspaper industry weighed in with a decent report.
Then in the Times' Arts (????) section, this story appeared. Finally, the New York Times acknowledged that Colbert's speech actually happened. And it actually gave us some juicy details. But the Times also seemed to be excusing itself for why it initially chose to ignore Colbert's performance.
Others chided the so-called mainstream media, including The New York Times, which ignored Mr. Colbert's remarks while writing about the opening act, a self-deprecating bit Mr. Bush did with a Bush impersonator.
Some, though, saw nothing more sinister in the silence of news organizations than a decision to ignore a routine that, to them, just was not funny.
"I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor, and I think the White House press corps has been out to lunch for much of the last five years," Noam Scheiber wrote by way of introduction on the New Republic's Web site. But a few lines later he said: "I laughed out loud maybe twice during Colbert's entire 20-odd minute routine. Colbert's problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn't very entertaining."
And here is where we get to the very heart of the matter. Whether or not Colbert's performance was funny is irrelevant. Humor is generally a matter of personal taste and individual point of view. Some people see an old lady fall down a set of stairs and laugh, others don't. Some people see a drunk guy throw up on the side of the road and chuckle while others are disgusted.
No, this is not about humor. It's about substance. It's about the event itself. It's about one of the president's and the media's most talented and insightful critics have a rare and unheard of opportunity to lambaste them, to point out their hypocrisy, to urge them to wake up and do their jobs right. And they were forced to listen.
The lack of enthusiastic laughter in that YouTube video isn't attributable to a lack of funniness alone.
There are really three reasons why the laughter was sparse at best.
1. Some people honestly didn't find him funny (fair enough).
2. Many were in shock and wincing as they watched Bush take his licks.
And finally:
3. The truth hurts.
Yes, dear media, the truth hurts. While you feed us an endless and steady stream of coverage on Natalie Holloway, Michael Jackson, the Duke Lacrosse rape scandal and so-called serious stories such as Cheney's hunting accident and the furor over a Spanish-language Star-Spangled Banner, more important things are happening: The Constitution has been torn to shreds by the president, Congress is bought and paid for, genocide is ongoing in Sudan, Iraq is in a state of civil war, human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc on the world, and the president is incompetent.
When I wrote for a newspaper, the editors were always looking for ways to write stories that the readers wanted to read. I say enough of that BS. The news media has a responsibility to demand more of the reader and the viewer. Don't give them what they want. That just makes the public fat and stupid. Demand more of the reader. Make them pay attention to what's really important.
That's what Colbert was doing that night. It culminated finally with the image of Helen Thomas marching down an anonymous street, notebook in hand, demanding answers. See for yourself. And then ask yourself, are the 2,600 people in that room, who have more power over our nation's future than the rest of us, truly serving the nation's as well as they should be? Colbert's answer is "no." I agree.
No comments:
Post a Comment