The Antisocial Socialist

"I'll pray for you."

(So far okay.)

"Do you believe in...do you, uh, believe?"

(Getting a bit personal here.)

"No."

"Oh. You should."

(Totally. Out. Of. Line. Plus now I have Cher running through my head.)

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by the Committee Against You Getting Punched In Your Smug Face.

---

Here, have a song to get Cher out of your head.

Okay, so I liked seeing Jon Stewart take on Bill O'Reilly as much as the rest of you probably did (hit the link if you didn't catch it last night) but something kept bothering me about it.

Let's break for my basic assumptions. You can debate me on 'em if you want, but they're topics I've posted about before.

1) The American Left is losing to the American Right in large part because the Left aims for balance and compromise and tries to appeal to the other side, whereas the Right does not. Because it does not, it both appears and is stronger and more decisive.

2) The entire notion of having a balanced and objective media is impossible and undesirable. The ideal media ought to be biased but diverse in those biases.

Back to last night's show. I like Jon Stewart, but not as much as many of you do. (It doesn't escape me that the only mainstream left-centre voices in the American media mask their critique in comedy. It's a time-honoured tradition for political criticism. It just pisses me off that there aren't any mainstream left voices, satiric or otherwise.) He was incredibly soft on O'Reilly, though, given how utterly he could have humiliated the guy. What's Stewart's problem with O'Reilly? It's not that he's a racist and a warmonger who sits in his chair and urges working-class Americans to send their children to murder Iraqis. It's not even that he fails to do his job as a journalist, and when someone catches him failing, he yells really loudly. It's that he's "angry." It's that he hasn't identified the real enemy and wastes him time targetting irrelevant countries like France.

Okay, but huh? Can't you get a little sharper than that?

What struck me about the whole conversation -- and American political discourse in general -- was how meta it was. The "enemy" that gets talked about by the Right is not necessarily Iraq, or even Al-Qaeda. It's the Left. Specifically, it's the "liberal media."

The Left, meanwhile, doesn't know what it should go after. Should it be more hawkish on the War on Terrorism? Less? Should it try to criticize the government? Should it play the same game and attack the right-wing media?

The issues that these guys should be debating are quite straightforward. Does the US have a right to bomb and kill whoever it wants? Does the government have a right to chip away at civil liberties? Is America heading towards a fundamentalist dystopia? Instead, the entire thing becomes a war of talking heads who criticize each other's objectivity (which is entirely besides the point. See above.).

Of course, I watched this right after having seen Tell the Truth and Run (hat tip to rohmie), which made me pine for the days of responsible muckrakers and thoughtful media criticism. Imagine a conversation between George Seldes and Bill O'Reilly? I don't think Seldes would have just made a comment under his breath about WMD, and then when O'Reilly couldn't answer it, just let it drop. Yes, that's a pitfall of television as opposed to print media -- you really can't get across serious analysis in a half-hour show.

But hell. Stewart had an influential fascist hawk who uses his power to perpetuate war and death on his stage...and he let him get away almost unscathed.

Sigh.

For reference here's the culprit. Strangely, the same goes for the "O RRY?" variation.

Has anyone else had this problem?