This Week's Short Takes • 6/11

The Whole 'Nuther — Vol. 2021, No. 3

Doughnut Poetry

A friend of mine, the writer, editor, and writing teacher Marjorie Hudson, sends along this link to the internet humor site McSweeney’s, which, in honor of National Doughnut Day (June 4 of this year), imagined that famous poets had written about doughnuts. It begins with Dylan Thomas, “Donut, go gentle into that good night . . . ,” and I leave the rest to your imagination.

I humbly offer my own contribution, with apologies to T. S. Eliot:

April is the crullers month, breeding 
Lumpy batter from large eggs, mixing
Memory with confectioner’s sugar, stirring
Dough rings with whole milk. 

And now I’m hungry.

Why I Miss Fake News

Before there was “Fake News,” there was fake news. And I miss it.

The Aughts were in some ways a more innocent time: news was news, and comedy was comedy. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” Donald Rumsfeld ruminated on the difference between “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” Dick Cheney shot a rich hunting pal in the face, Al Gore went to ground and grew a beard after losing the 2000 election, Osama bin Laden emerged as an actual villian, Billie Eilish was born during the same year that George Harrison died, and . . . making fun of it all, was Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

Stewart didn’t much like the term “fake news,” choosing instead to call The Daily Show “a fake show.” But we knew what he meant. Its actors and comedians pretended to be serious journalists reporting real events, then slathered on irony and obvious absurdity until reality became farce, and added a punchline. The audience was in on the joke. It was satire. His message: bad things happen, but the absurdity and hypocrisy behind them is even worse, and the only way to stay sane in this insane world is to laugh at it.

During a famous October 2004 confrontation with Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on their CNN debate show, Crossfire, Carlson attacked Stewart for being too soft on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in a Daily Show interview.

“You know, it's interesting to hear you talk about my responsibility,” Stewart responded. “I didn't realize that . . . the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity.”

“If your idea of confronting me is that I don't ask hard-hitting enough news questions, we're in bad shape, fellows,” he continued. “You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.”

Crossfire never really recovered from the humiliation of Stewart’s takedown, and was cancelled three month later. His criticism was pretty damning: Crossfire presented as entertainment opposing spins on the news, making prevarication and propaganda a spectator sport and never questioning the practice of twisting reality to fit ideology. In the process, it made politics seem trivial, unconnected to the joys, sorrows, and trials of its viewers in their daily lives. In contrast, though Stewart’ show satirized the conventions of news broadcasts, horror and outrage always flowed just beneath all the wit. He was laughing to keep from screaming.

Stewart’s successor, Trevor Noah, has basically maintained the “fake news” format of The Daily Show, but it has never had the impact it did when Stewart hosted it. The reason, sadly, is that fake news isn’t much of a joke anymore.

Part of Donald Trump’s political genius was that he saw that if he could do what Stewart did but take it one step further, and discredit serious journalism as “fake” entertainment offered by biased messengers aimed at garnering ratings and making money rather than objective reporting about the real world, it didn’t really matter how horrible his own actions were. He could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he famously said, and no one would call him to account. His supporters wouldn’t believe reports about anything they couldn’t verify with their own eyes. And, as we saw in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, even that could be called into question. The “fake news” gambit made Trump, in a sense, accountable to no one. Our democratic system almost collapsed from it and allowed him to steal the election.

Tucker Carlson, now at Fox News, has learned the same lesson. He realized that he could be Jon Stewart, but without putting on Stewart’s mask of the satirist, and without grounding his pose of outrage in the idea that real things happen to real people, or that they matter. The only thing that matters to Carlson is getting people angry enough to do what he wants, angry enough to overlook inconvenient things like facts, truth, and reality.

Will we ever again be horrified by what our leaders do? Or are we condemned forever to cynically writing off reports of their actions and inactions as just more showbiz?

Memes and Policy

There’s a good article in Mother Jones, by Tim Murray, which casts a lot of right-wing messaging as attempts at creating liberal-owning memes that bypass actual debate, and (in the process) generate dollars for themselves and companies that underwrite them.

In the modern, Trump-worshiping GOP, Murray writes, “the grind of governance [has become] secondary to the responsibilities of posting.” High-profile congressional Trumpists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and North Carolina’s own Madison Cawthorn become “influencers,” like the stars on social media paid to attract attention and shill for products. Consequently, they get media attention all out of proportion to their actual legislative work.

Of course, American politicians have sold popular versions of themselves since before the days of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom campaigned as “men of the people.” That’s nothing new; marketing has characterized every modern presidential campaign, with slogans and TV ads selling the candidate. But this is different.

It’s hard to debate a meme—on the floor of the Capitol, or elsewhere. As media consumers, we like memes that confirm our feelings and entertain us. If we feel strongly about something, a meme can intensify that to the point we can’t be bothered with facts. That’s one of the reasons the policies supported by the Republican Party, which polls show are consistently out of favor with most voters who are asked to consider particular issues, haven’t stopped the GOP from dominating elections in many local legislatures and competing fiercely on a national level for control of the House, Senate, and Presidency. Memes (and identity) speak louder than policy.

Alarmingly, even some Democrats seem to prefer this approach, which helps explain why red-state Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin avoid engaging with underlying policy issues by stressing the need for “bipartisanship.” Bipartisanship has been turned into a kind of meme—a brand, a thing unto itself—that exists independently of the traditional give and take that produces legislative action. Rather than risk losing their association with the brand, Sinema and Manchin seem happy to let their party’s legislative priorities founder.