Stewart, Santelli And Sarcasm

by Dan Gifford

Something didn’t sound quite right when I listened to Jon Stewart’s set-up for his sarcastic blast of CNBC’s Rick Santelli as a hypocrite who thinks federal bailout money for corporate America is just fine while a helping hand from Uncle Sam (a bailout by another name) for strapped mortgage holders isn’t. So I reverted to the method I’d come to rely on while an investigative reporter when I could not follow what a fast talking con artist was actually saying: I transcribed what he said. And sure enough, the words on paper revealed Stewart’s sophistry that my ears could not pinpoint:

Actually, our guest tonight was supposed to be this guy. His name is Rick Santelli. He’s an analyst for CNBC and he’s a former derivatives trader. The reason he became famous was because of a sort of Howard Beale moment on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He had done some critical reporting on the hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout money going to failed banks, failed auto makers and insurers of failed banks and auto makers (laughter). But when it looked like the president wanted a small percentage of that money to go to actual homeowners, whu ho!!!!! (laughter). David Banner became The Incredible Santelli.

As you can plainly see, Stewart admits Santelli was critical of the federal bailout money that went to fat cats. Why that got a laugh makes me wonder whether Stewart’s audience warm-up includes nitrous oxide. But Stewart could not continue with that acknowledgment and still expect to rip Santelli for being a hypocrite, the most dastardly of demons in the pop pantheon of evil (except for those hypocrites on the political left, of course), because he would then be left without the necessary hypocrisy peg on which to hang Santelli for derision. So Stewart did the only thing he could do, he did a quick trick of the tongue to make the listener forget what he just said.

Stewart did that by quickly implying through his energy and tone of voice that Santelli was for big corporate bailouts but against little homeowners in dire straits being given some tax dollar help. The actual switch is obfuscated within the emotional context of Stewart’s transition. It’s a verbal illusion common to con men, comedians, politicians (which covers both) and some others who make their living manipulating people with spoken words. Some have to learn it, others do it naturally. I’ve no idea which category Stewart falls in, but I first had the technique defined to me and demonstrated while working at a carny side show in Ocean City, Maryland one summer. In it, a pitchman would regularly shame hundreds of people at a time for being greedy, dishonest victimizers of his good nature when they would expect to be given a prize he had offered them earlier for free. Call it an oral bait and switch. Some caught on and walked, but enough actually paid for the item to assuage the guilt the pitchman had tricked them into feeling for him and the show to keep a nice cash flow going.

Whether Stewart is good enough to pull off that pitchman’s trick in front of a cold audience I can’t say, but he was certainly good enough to manipulate his warmed studio audience, his predisposed home audience and the national media’s perception (ok, it’s generally predisposed to Stewart’s side too) of what Santelli actually said to what he wanted them to believe he said. He had to in this case because without creating the impression that Santelli was talking out of both sides of his mouth, Stewart’s whole rip would have made no more sense than his mixed Beale and Banner metaphors except in that alternate sophomoric universe where facts and form don’t matter. But isn’t that where we have been culturally stalled for some time? You know (residuals to Caroline Kennedy), the cosmos where even if something isn’t true, it’s still the truth (more on that line later) because the lie validates the biases generally held by most, in this case, who watch Stewart’s show?

But that’s OK — to a point.

Stewart isn’t doing real news and both he and those behind the scenes are candid about that. Comedy Central Network describes “The Daily Show” as the top name in fake news while its writers say “they do not have any journalistic responsibility and that as comedians their only duty is to provide entertainment.” All literally true. So is one wag’s alternate title for Stewart’s show: “We Pander to Liberals & Attack Conservatives without Scruple,” a rather self evident fact. Even so, Stewart is doing satires on the news which means that, like Michael Moore’s “documentaries,” he cannot be hamstrung by fact, because satire is comedy and, as Moore says, “how can comedy be factual?” even if it’s packaged within a form that is by definition supposed to be a documentation of fact?

What is bothersome about Stewart’s “Daily Show” in that respect is that those who watch it, by my observation at least, tend to be some of America’s brightest in terms of an SAT score. My anecdotal conclusion is buttressed somewhat in a 2004 presidential election study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. According to Annenberg researchers, “Daily Show” viewers “know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news.” Those sampled were asked things like “Who favors allowing workers to invest some of their Social Security contributions in the stock market?” Answer: Bush. And “Who urges Congress to extend the federal law banning assault weapons?” Answer: Kerry. If those two questions are indicative of the rest and set the current bar for being well informed, we have dumbed down as a people much farther than I ever thought.

But if Stewart’s viewers are the best informed, I must also note that most of those viewers I have contact with also qualify as some of this country’s most arrogant, angry and intellectually dishonest. All are traits of successful sarcasm just as they tend to be endemic to those who are the most sarcastic. I await correction if wrong, but my recollection of Stewart’s vicious, cheap shots (another element of sarcasm) at Tucker Carlson’s expense when he tried to do a friendly interview of Stewart causes me to believe I’m spot on. I’m not a fan of Carlson’s dancing or bow ties either, but he appears to be a genuinely nice man who did nothing to provoke the nastiness that Stewart hit him with. If that behavior was the real Stewart, it reveals a repugnant characteristic I have also found among Stewart’s biggest fans. In short, they are often the luminaries of a dark matter, Parkeresque universe in which an ideological whore can be led to knowledge, but not made to think, even within my own family.

A number of those members are past or present top academics at such schools as Johns Hopkins, Duke, UCLA, Stanford and Harvard. They are different people at different universities but they all have one thing in common: their main TV “news” source is Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show.” Same for most of their faculty friends and students from what I have seen. The reason seems to be that they tend to be angry souls who find vicarious release in Stewart’s attacks on people and ideas they consider “bad” (aka conservative) without having to worry that he will gore their own liberal oxen except as an exercise in tokenism. That is especially disturbing because these are the very people that claim to be learned and open minded, but in fact, often do nothing more than perpetuate long disproved beliefs and even outright academic frauds. There are many examples, but two among the college smorgasbord of deceit will do.

RIGOBERTA MENCHU

When “I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala” won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her book, Menchu’s first person, personally written account of the evils of capitalism and the brutality of the US financed Guatemalan military against her and other Guatemalan indigenous peoples became required reading in many college classrooms. Still is, even after the book was exposed as a fraud. According to those who checked out her story, Menchu did not write the book, a French Marxist did. Neither did the events in the book happen to her as claimed. They were fabricated along Marxist narrative lines to sell that ideology. So why is an academic fraud still being taught as fact? When I asked Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish department at Wellesley College that question many years ago, she said, “Even if it isn’t true, it is still the truth.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (”Many professors say they will stand by Rigoberta Menchu’s memoir”) quotes Agosin as saying, “Whether her book is true or not, I don’t care.” Other professors told me the same thing in different words.

MICHAEL BELLESILES:

When Emory University professor Michael A. Bellesiles published “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture,” he was roundly hailed for having proven the National Rifle Association and its affiliated “gun nuts” had been lying about historical evidence that the Second Amendment was a guarantee of an individual’s right to own a gun. Bellesiles was
awarded Columbia University’s prestigious Bancroft Prize, among others. That was until a researcher named Clayton Cramer discovered that Bellesiles made it all up. Bellesilles was forced to resign from Emory, his publisher pulled the book and Columbia took back its prize. No matter, Oxford University hired Bellesiles as a distinguished professor and put his book back on the market where it continues to spread an academic fraud.

True to the origin of the term, sarcasm is an especially appropriate form of humor to attack those one hates because of the way it shreds its targets when done well. Stewart certainly does that. But if all humor is redirected hostility and those who tell jokes for a living are inflicting their own inner pain via words that they would like to inflict by physical force if they had the nerve to do it, as I am told, how many comedians besides Ray Romano would dare admit that they would be accountants if their fathers had told them they loved them? More to the point, do we really want to have a comedian’s personal demons setting the standard for national discourse?


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Posted Mar 12th 2009 at 6:27 am in Celebrity News, Political Humor, Politics | 198 Comments