The Daily Show has been on vacation since Occupy Wall Street broke big in the media, so last night’s show was their chance to play catch-up. And they made some … well … odd choices.
Stewart led off the four-minute segment by calling OWS “the Hard Rock Cafe of leftist movements” before doing a gag about OWS’s fundraising prowess and another snarking on Mitt Romney’s opportunism. But the segment’s last — and longest — bit was this one:
“Of course it hasn’t been all good news for the movement. For all their popularity, for all the participants with thoughtful critiques of our power structure, there’s also this: A guy taking a shit [bleeped] on a police car.
“You know what? Guy shitting [bleeped] on a police car? Meet me at camera three.
“NO! NO! BAD! [mimes spraying with water bottle, whacking with rolled up newspaper] NO! NAUGHTY! NAUGHTY!
” ‘Cause here’s the problem. Unfortunately, protests are often as much about optics as they are about substance. And you do not want this [photoshopped photo of Chinese democracy protester shitting on row of tanks] to be your Tiananmen Square. You have tapped into a real injustice that people feel about the global financial markets. Nothing can derail your movement faster than someone who is unable to derail their movements.”
Now, I get it. It’s hard to resist a poop joke. I get that.
But here’s the thing.
In a grassroots movement like this, individual people are going to do stupid things on occasion. It’s unfortunate, but there’s no way to stop it. And as long as everyone recognizes that fact, and is attentive to the distinction between bad acts that reflect movement culture and bad acts that don’t, the those occasional moments of jackassery aren’t a huge deal.
Which is to say that no, Jon Stewart, some idiot taking a dump on a cop car (ten days ago!) isn’t going to “derail the movement.”
No. What derails movements isn’t random acts of jackassery. What derails movements is the disproportionate attention such acts sometimes draw, and the endless hand-wringing that sometimes ensues.
Luckily, that hasn’t happened here. A Google search on the cop car story returns nearly half a million hits, but that’s less than a tenth of a percent of the half a billion hits that “occupy wall street” gets on its own. The incident got a bit of attention when it happened, then mostly sank under the waves as actual news kept happening and folks moved on.
But not everyone is able to resist a poop joke, and not everyone is able to resist an opportunity to lecture activists about “optics.”
And so last night Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers pulled down their pants and squatted.
Naughty, naughty.
studentactivism.net 
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October 18, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Darla
The movement is not grassroots.
October 18, 2011 at 3:45 pm
permaculturefirst
Even if the movement started as a grassroots effort, (an advertised movement in adbusters hardly qualifies) it is not grassroots now. Enter Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Matthews, and Zbiegnew Bresnski.
Did you follow the Tea Party from it’s inception? It started with Ron Paul in 2007. Oh yeah, you didn’t hear about it until 2009 when Perry, Palin, and Beck got their grimy hands on it.
If you want to change the system, you’re gonna have to let it collapse completely. Asking the government to change the system is laughable at best. Learn from the past, don’t be ignorant, and learn how consensus really works- you fools.
October 18, 2011 at 4:36 pm
tarynhart
I gotta say, I barely watch Jon Stewart these days. His “Rally to Restore Sanity” so missed what the problem really is and openly derided activism (specifically calling for non-activists to participate). And his coverage of OWS has been, at best, weak. Honestly, I think he’s out of touch and he sounds like it.
October 18, 2011 at 6:04 pm
guest
I agree–Stewart is a centrist douche, and not that funny anymore. His show jumped the shark a while back.
October 18, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Prodigal
The time he spent talking about the guy shitting on the police car came across as a setup for how, when his guest talked about how corporate America has been stealing from its pension funds to enrich the heads of corporations while cheating their workers out of the money they were owed, Stewart’s response was “I would shit on a police car.”
October 18, 2011 at 9:09 pm
tarynhart
“Even if the movement started as a grassroots effort, (an advertised movement in adbusters hardly qualifies) it is not grassroots now.”
Huh? So a call to action in an anti-corporatist magazine makes it not grassroots? Why? Do people have to spontaneously congregate at the same place ala Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
“Enter Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Matthews, and Zbiegnew Bresnski.”
Did you say Chris Matthews? That’s one of the most hilarious, out of touch statements I’ve ever heard.
“Did you follow the Tea Party from it’s inception? It started with Ron Paul in 2007. Oh yeah, you didn’t hear about it until 2009 when Perry, Palin, and Beck got their grimy hands on it.”
I heard about it just after Santelli’s astroturfed rant in response to the HAMP program (which provided relief to home owners). I think I have heard others suggest something about Ron Paul before – do you have any cites regarding this proto Tea Party?
“If you want to change the system, you’re gonna have to let it collapse completely. Well, it has kind of collapsed, no? We are in the Lesser Depression. Asking the government to change the system is laughable at best. Learn from the past, don’t be ignorant, and learn how consensus really works- you fools.”
Not sure what you’re getting at here. It’s pretty clear that you’re not really referring to history – so, I assume by “history” you’re referring to the Tea Party? Are you saying that the mistake of the Tea Party was trying to reform the system before it totally collapsed? If so, what constitutes collapse in your book? I mean we are dealing with a pretty serious financial collapse.
October 18, 2011 at 9:34 pm
raph
I think you have to keep in mind that this is a comedy show. A.K.A. A show that is unafraid and all too glad to use poop jokes.
People have come to think of shows like the Daily Show and The Colbert Report almost as some sort of news station, but in the end… they’re about poop jokes. They’re on Comedy Central, damn it. They’re not to be taken seriously, but for some reason people do. If anything, the Daily Show should be taken as a way to aggregate popular news stories in an entertaining way before doing in depth research on them.
Personally, I’m in both agreement and disagreement with Stewart, if I feel compelled to take him seriously after reading this post. I’ve heard a few different stories of people doing stupid things at the different protests (or on the Internet, in some way related to the protests) and find it discouraging. It makes me wonder how serious people are about the issues. And they’re important issues. They should be taken seriously, and discussed and debated and thought deeply about, since they can and will affect the future of literally everybody on this planet in some way, shape or form.
That’s not to say that there aren’t people who are serious about it, or that that’s not obvious. When a movement like this spreads all over the globe, it’s extremely clear that to the majority of people participating, it’s serious. But it makes me wonder how many people are just there for the fun of it. To do stupid things with the public’s attention. To join in on a movement simply for the sake of saying “Yeah! Let’s protest things! What’s this about, anyway?!”
October 18, 2011 at 10:11 pm
ripley
Angus, you’re right. And it’s not enough, I think, Raph, to say “he’s a comedian” – he could have been funny about any number of things. But he chose to fixate on a pretty insignificant fragment of what’s going on. I mean half the things they say OWS people are doing I’ve seen random people doing on the streets of new york any time of the year. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not really the responsibility of OWS.
And actually I think the “yeah! let’s protest things” is a pretty healthy response to the society we live in – recognizing that things are pretty deeply messed up can ytake a while, and outrage is the right reaction. So, sometimes it takes a while to hammer out the specifics, and that is best done in dialogue.. which is one of the things that is actually happening in the occupations. Remember they are not protests, they are encampments at which people are doing a lot of things including protesting.
October 19, 2011 at 3:36 pm
raph
Some good point, ripley. And maybe you’re right. Maybe saying “he’s a comedian” isn’t enough to justify that episode. But it’s just one episode, of a show that airs more often than most, where he hasn’t actually talked about OWS a whole lot, compared to his cracks about… say… the republican party on numerous levels.
His writers happened to have found something entertaining and he put it out there. That’s his job. We could go into a philosophical debate about whether or not that truly is his job and how, being a person with influence over certain (hopefully very limited) viewers’ thoughts, he should stay on a strict path of presenting only the “bad” funny things in the world, to ridicule them and force the people who allow themselves to be influenced by comedic television to take a stand against what’s “wrong” in the world. But by his own definition and the definition of Comedy Central’s network, it’s comedy. And I don’t think we should make a huge deal out of it, trying to demonize everybody and anybody who says anything remotely negative about OWS. (by the way, I use the quotation marks around “bad” and “wrong” simply because even though I personally believe they are “bad” and “wrong,” I don’t hold myself or anybody else on this planet to be able to judge anything with complete certainty and truth)
As far as the “Yeah! Let’s protest things!” it is my opinion that that is a horrible, horrible way to go about one’s life. To judge without questioning and act without thinking is the best way to screw things up. It’s probably one of the reasons the world’s economy is in the state it’s in: people taking action without thinking of the consequences. Like people who join protests purely because their religion tells them something is wrong, without thinking and trying to understand whether it truly is. People who go and join one of these occupations simply because they see people protesting and assume it must be good because “we’ve gotta fight the power,” are probably people I’d get along with on a certain level, but on a deeper level I’d probably just think of them the same way I think of the people who join a rally against homosexuality because a book and a preacher convinced them it was good to join such a protest. Basically, I wouldn’t have a very high opinion of them.
Hopefully there is (as you say there is) a dialogue, and it’s not just people there for the sake of being there. And I know a few people over at OWS and I think they’re bright, committed people, but I also know people who would join without really caring. Just to be part of something. Which I’m against.
October 19, 2011 at 3:43 pm
Jason
I normally like Jon Stewart but something is amiss with his OWS coverage. I wonder if it has to do with his older brother, Lawrence Leibowitz, being the COO of the NYSE.
October 19, 2011 at 9:59 pm
ripley
raph, I don’t think “joining without caring” is what I read you as decrying. I agree that that would be bad, but I also don’t see that happening. It seems likely to me that whatever motivates the majority of people to protest is that they care, on some level. It isn’t easier to protest than it is to not protest, so there must be something behind it.
But I thought you were saying you don’t want people to “join without a clear idea of what they should do next except protest.”
Given that, there have been some really interesting studies about how people become involved in movements that suggest that for the big ones with wide participation, the impetus to get involved starts *before* the level of explicit analysis. This is not to stay that people STAY that way (without explicit analysis) once involved. But if you really think a mass movement is good at all, you have to respect the reality of how people come to participate in them and what gives them the energy to stick around. And somewhat inchoate ‘caring’ or ‘being upset about things’ is often the first step.
I think it’s only a particular temperament that is going to get involved in a protest or a movement only after studying the theoretical issues underpinning it, or the various philosophies which inform the various people in the space. And that temperament is necessarily a minority, and also one with the time and wherewithal to study before having made a commitment. And in fact that temperament can often ALWAYS find a reason to do more studying before they feel ‘ready’ to actually get out of the damn chair.
In terms of people getting involved, I have found this true in teaching as well – if you are teaching practical skills, it’s extremely off-putting to start with theory before you let people get their hands dirty. It’s much better to get people involved in doing, and then their own interests draw them to become more engaged with the various theories behind it, because they can see which ones matter in practice. And they feel ownership of what they are doing, because they have made decisions about which theories make sense based at least partly on their own experiences.
October 23, 2011 at 11:02 am
jeff
I am SOO glad I’m not the only one who has been wondering this! Oct 18th show really sealed the case for me that John Stewart is against the OWS movement. He made it look like the majority of the protesters were weirdos and that the human mic system was volentary, which it’s not, it’s there because the cops won’t let them use a bullhorn.
And the “It’s a comedy show” excuse only goes so far. There are a lot of ways to be funny, but when you start to manipulate truth to make these guys look bad, you show your cards, and Jon Stewart is not with the Occypy Wall Street movement.
January 13, 2012 at 12:36 am
Burkey
“The Movement Is Not Grassroots!”
People, please give me an everlovin’ break.
I like the piece, it’s on target, but looks like most of the readers here are boneheads. Ripley and Jeff I like. Permaculturefools “learn how consensus really works!” apparently hasn’t even been to one G.A. where everything is consensus. Oh how it must feel to be above it all!! :eye rolls up to heaven: