{"id":4041,"date":"2016-10-28T06:30:18","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T11:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=4041"},"modified":"2018-10-28T15:56:42","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T19:56:42","slug":"that-old-darkness-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=4041","title":{"rendered":"That Old Darkness Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Jon Stewart left The Daily Show<\/em>, I was a happy man. I\u2019d been surrounded for so long by armchair, crypto-Yuppie liberals who worshiped the ground Stewart walked on. They\u2019d freely admit that they got all their news from The Daily Show<\/em> and would even be proud of that fact and try to recruit others to follow suit. Even while Stewart himself stressed, again and again, that it\u2019s just a comedy show and it wasn\u2019t intended to be the primary news source for millions of Americans.
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These armchair liberals would go on and on about how brilliant Stewart was. Googly-eyed and sighing that \u201che\u2019s so smart,\u201d they\u2019d say how outraged they were at the small nuggets of information that outraged Stewart. I\u2019d ask them if these soundbyte stories inspired them to research the problems in greater detail and they\u2019d stare blankly back at me. But\u2026why? Stewart told them everything they needed to know in a 90 second segment.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s exactly that soundbyte culture that must have sickened Stewart, and inspired The Daily Show<\/em> to mock the public. In the end, though, the show became a sort of patient zero for the wider proliferation of that soundbyte culture. Now John Oliver, Sam Bee, and others are all spinning off. We\u2019ve come to expect a brief news digest delivered by a biased commentator who, if called out on their role, sidesteps and says, \u201cBut we\u2019re just a comedy show.\u201d<\/p>\n

But now the \u201ccomedy show as the only news I need\u201d syndrome has become confused by the seething anger of the presenters. That was a hallmark of Stewart\u2019s final years \u2013 the comedy started to give way to true outrage. But it was kept in check. Stewart left at a good time, I think, or else he would have hit the same tipping point his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s are now encountering. Sam Bee, in the face of outlandish evil playing out on her screens, has more than once simply stared at the camera come the end of a segment and said: \u201cI don\u2019t have a joke for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Oliver has to resort to vaudeville dance routines to get himself out of the angry groove.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve started to feel it myself. I used to mock everything and everyone but, more and more, I\u2019m finding myself the quiet one at the dinner party. Sorry, kids, I just don\u2019t have a joke for this.<\/p>\n

Maybe those armchair Yuppies were right. Maybe the only healthy way to approach life was to have a comedian tell you everything you needed to know in 22 minutes and then stop thinking about it when the credits rolled. The world may be burning, but wasn\u2019t that man on the street interview about who the president of Croatia is funny? Yes, it was. And we\u2019ll hold onto it, and cherish it, and talk about it at the water cooler, and just try\u2026try, try, try\u2026to breathe. Inhale, one-two-three, exhale. The world will be okay. The dogs will bark and the kids will play and the paychecks will keep coming.<\/p>\n

In which case, Jon Stewart\u2019s retirement was a major loss since, now, the 22-minute comedy routine is starting to fail us. The kids are horrified, the paychecks aren\u2019t such a sure thing, the barking dogs may be sounding an alert: Robbers approaching. Soldiers approaching. Rebels approaching.<\/p>\n

What happens when we all wake up from this nightmare that has consumed us since 9\/11? What happens when, in They Live<\/em> parlance, we start to see<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Long ago, when I started this blog, I cried out for a new social revolution. What I\u2019m going to get, eventually, won\u2019t be as Time\/Life<\/em> as the 60s. I see something visceral coming. It\u2019s not as simple as this election, or Trump, or what Trump will do, or whatever the outrage du jour is. Honestly, I\u2019ve felt something very bad coming for a long time. In 2003, Hunter Thompson said:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026we have lost the respect of the world \u2026 Iraq is a permanent war zone \u2026 the national economy is crashing all around us \u2026 the Pentagon\u2019s \u201cwar strategy\u201d has failed miserably \u2026 our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security\u2026has been looted and neglected and destroyed \u2026 The stock market will never come back, our armies will never again be #1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve since lost Thompson, but those words from a throw-away article at ESPN come from 13 years in our past. Yet we could utter them today and still be correct. We really have Rip Van Winkled our way through the last 15 years. We all trudged to work on September 12th, 2001 and sat by in a numb shock as the world around us was dismantled. Here we are today. Still numb. Still in shock.<\/p>\n

Do you ask yourself why everything is getting remade and rebooted? If you\u2019re nostalgic for it, then have I got a reboot for you! Whatever it is\u2026 Jesus Christ, they\u2019re rebooting fucking M.A.S.K.<\/em>. That\u2019s all a symptom of our dream. The further we fall into the numb shock, the more we want to wrap ourselves in our childhood blankets.<\/p>\n

But you can\u2019t stay in shock forever. You can\u2019t stay asleep forever. You\u2019ll die. Yet you can\u2019t survive suddenly waking up into a world gone mad, either. A world where there\u2019s no choice but to stop, turn to the camera, and say, \u201cI don\u2019t have a joke for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson ended that article by predicting \u201cBig Darkness, soon come.\u201d<\/p>\n

It came, alright. It\u2019s right there in the corner of the bedroom. It\u2019s waiting for you to wake up. And there\u2019s no fooling it. It knows you\u2019re waking up. You\u2019re going to have to fight your way out of this bedroom or join the Darkness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Jon Stewart left The Daily Show, I was a happy man. I\u2019d been surrounded for so long by armchair, crypto-Yuppie liberals who worshiped the ground Stewart walked on. They\u2019d freely admit that they got all their news from The …<\/p>\n

That Old Darkness Again<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-4041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bangs-whimpers","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4042,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4041\/revisions\/4042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}