Sunday night I tweeted, as Jon Stewart won his I’m-not-even-making-this-up ninth consecutive Emmy for Best Variety Show or whatever, that “Jon Stewart is like 63% of the way to being the guy he started out mocking. Maybe 64%.” And then today I stumbled across this, a Tom Junod profile of Stewart from next month’s Esquire that makes the case far better than I possibly could.
The thing is full of great lines, including the one I quoted this morning, and the one about how
even when Stewart’s a dick, he is never the dick. It is Stewart’s unique talent for coming across as decent and well-meaning when he’s bullying and hectoring and self-righteous. And this is because his talent is not just for comedy and not just for media criticism or truth-telling; it’s for being — for remaining — likable.
The bit about why nobody ever does a Jon Stewart impression is right on the money too. Read the whole piece, but the takeaway is this: Jon Stewart’s public persona is profoundly disingenuous, and ultimately toxic to American political discourse.
But there’s one part of the piece that I’d quibble with, and it’s the passage on Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, held in DC on the weekend before the 2010 midterm elections:
Three days before a crucial election, Jon Stewart had stood in America’s most symbolic public space and given a speech to two hundred thousand people. The speech wasn’t about his need to be a player or his need for power or his need for influence. It wasn’t about getting out the vote or telling people to vote in a certain way. It was about Jon Stewart — about his need for another kind of out. For years, his out had been his comedy. Now it was his sincerity — his evenhandedness, his ability to rise above politics, his goodness. And three days later, when the side he didn’t even say was his side was routed in the midterms, he pretty much proved his point. He was no player. He had no political power. He’d proven he was beyond all that by presiding over the biggest celebration of political powerlessness in American history.
There’s nothing incorrect here, but there’s one pair of dots that Junod doesn’t quite connect, and it’s this:
By holding that rally on that day, Stewart took two hundred thousand of his most political fans out of the game on electoral fieldwork’s biggest weekend. The kind of folks who would show up to a Jon Stewart rally are pretty much exactly the kind of folks who would knock on doors for local candidates in the run-up to an off-year election. And what did Stewart do? He gave them a reason not to.
If you believe in the political process, if you believe in civic engagement, if you believe in local communities, if you believe in reforming America from the ground up, the last thing you do is hold a huge fake rally for politics dorks in Washington DC on the weekend before the midterms. I mean, come on.
I used to love Jon Stewart. But that’s when he really lost me.
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September 20, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Chris
I’m not sure I agree. I think Jon Stewart is the face of active apathy in America. His self-appointed role is to point out political absurdity in whatever form it comes in. If his rally had been a flop, it would have been a credit to American’s level of political engagement and the sense of stewardship they feel for their country.
I don’t think you can blame Jon Stewart. I think you need to point the finger at a political system that is unable or unwilling to engage a whole population of people who have the energy and willingness to involve themselves politically, but just not in the traditional system.
September 20, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Kevin R. Guidry
Angus, this is yet another post I’ve read where my foremost question is “What does this have to do with student activism?” You’re certainly free to express yourself and use your blog however you see fit. But I’m interested in your views and news related to student activism, the purported topic of this blog. I’m not interested in your views of and opinions about Jon Stewart, Michelle Bachman, or sexual assault and rape, unless you can actively tie those subjects into student activism.
I don’t have any strong anger or animosity toward you, of course, but I thought you might like to know the view of one of your readers and my frustration when you drift off topic like this. Of course, this is your platform and you get decide the real topic. But if you’re going to spend much of your time discussing issues other than student activism then that seems a bit misleading and you should consider changing URLs and the label of this blog.
September 20, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Angus Johnston
Kevin, this was a post about civic engagement and electoral organizing. The Michele Bachmann post was about her deployment of imagery of youth sexuality and the politics of a vaccine whose primary consumer base is adolescents.
But even if you don’t count this post or the Bachmann one as relating to student and youth issues — as I absolutely do — seventeen of my last twenty posts have been explicitly about student organizing, higher education, or youth rights. (And you have to go all the way back to July — when there wasn’t a lot happening on the student protest beat — to find a post from me about sexual assault that wasn’t explicitly related to campus policies on the issue.)
If you don’t like the focus of the blog, feel free to click through to another site. But honestly, I’m not sure what you’re complaining about.
September 20, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Angus Johnston
And Chris, I’m pretty sure I disagree. Jon Stewart’s core audience isn’t the alienated and the disenfranchised. I bet if you looked at stats, you’d find his viewers ranking high on electoral participation, campaign donations, voluntarism, civic engagement, etc.
And that’s a big chunk of the problem, as I see it. His audience IS engaged, but the stuff he’s feeding them (us!) is largely counter-productive.
September 20, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Sam
Angus, did you actually attend the rally? If you think it was attended by people who would normally have been door-knocking for the Democrats you are very much mistaken. I was part of a large group who traveled from the West Coast to attend and the reason we went was precisely because this seemed like an event for people who wanted to express their frustration with politics WITHOUT resorting to conventional campaigning methods. As I recall, pretty much everyone we met at the rally had similar views. It was clear not only from the atmosphere and attitude of the attendees, but from what was said on stage, that this was a rally for people who didn’t feel comfortable participating in politics in the usual ways (e.g. volunteering for a campaign).
And another thing, I wonder whether you are too quick to dismiss any connection between political activism and fun. For young people at least, I believe that making activism fun is an important objective.
September 20, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Angus Johnston
I didn’t attend the rally, but I know a bunch of people who did, and they don’t fit your description of the people you knew and met. But even granting what you’re saying, it’s not obvious to me what benefit there was to holding the event on the most important grassroots campaigning weekend of the year — couldn’t the same purpose have been served on a date that didn’t force people to choose?
As for fun and activism, I absolutely agree that they can and should be joined. My objection to Stewart has nothing to do with a dislike of fun. If anything, it’s the opposite — that he has a tremendous soapbox from which to mix fun and activism, and he’s mostly not using it (and in fact undermining the very idea).
September 20, 2011 at 8:31 pm
maurer88
Is it his job to be an activist though? He’s more of a media satirist than anything hence his lambasting of News Shows. I agree the rally to restore sanity was flawed,but most political comedians except for Dick Gregory perhaps, aren’t on the activist level.
September 20, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Angus Johnston
I’m not saying that he has a responsibility to be an activist, quite — though if he’s going to hold a giant rally on the Washington Mall three days before a crucial election, it’s at least worth considering the question.
He can’t have it both ways, though. He can’t keep intervening in the political discourse and the political process while continually denying that he’s anything more than a comedian. He’s a player. He’s a force. And right now I don’t see him as a force for good.
September 21, 2011 at 11:40 pm
maurer88
Yes, but I don’t think you can call him evil either, he’s not doing it out of maliciousness, it’s more that he’s unhelpful.
October 18, 2011 at 6:20 pm
Jacob Littler
If the weekend before the election is your most important organizing weekend, you’ve probably already lost anyway… Just ask former congressman Jim Oberstar.