Parody and its discontents

With a Congressional fight over the debt ceiling looming once more, an idea for how to sidestep Republican opposition to raising it a second time has been making the rounds: Have the Treasury mint a $1 trillion platinum coin. Deposit it at the Fed. Pay some bills. Job done.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart made a joke about it…and Team Blue erupted. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the bit a “crushing disappointment.” The Washington Monthly’s Ryan Cooper called it “possibly the laziest and most irresponsible segment” ever.

Why the vitriol? Stewart apparently missed the fact that the idea itself is satirical, meant to highlight the absurdity of a loophole in federal law that would allow such a scheme, as well as show the outrageousness of what another liberal luminary, Paul Krugman, calls the “extortion” on the part Republican lawmakers.

Isn’t this all just a bit too humorless? Undoubtedly. But they’re also sort of right.

I’ve always liked Jon Stewart. For a time, he embodied a certain East Coast, ruggedly left-of-center political sensibility familiar to me from my childhood in New York: a politics of the underdog and of the average Joe and Jane, one as antagonistic to the powerful as it is wary of (inevitably oppressive) utopian excess.

Like moderate Republicanism, this working-class liberalism is one of those low-lying territories on the American civic landscape, long imperiled by political climate change, by now virtually vanished beneath the ever-rising tide of…malarkey, to put it delicately.

As retail politics in general seems to have collapsed into discrete, diametrically opposed states, so too has Stewart’s satire, once supple, ossified into schtick.

Ironically, this schtick has taken the form of a misleading rhetoric of “balance”—one that gives the impression that both parties are equally to blame for the dysfunction in Washington—precisely the feature of “respectable” news outlets that Stewart once parodied.

Rachel Maddow, high priestess of MSNBC liberalism, has called Stewart out on this—in their 2010 debate before his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” she accused him of attempting to draw a “false equivalence” between the parties.

The episode was unpleasant for many. As a friend told me at the time, “It was traumatic. Like watching Mom and Dad fighting each other. Who do I side with?”

Better book your therapist.

This time it’s the Prophet Paul (Krugman) with the harshest words, calling Stewart “lazy.” Stewart, he says, not only “flunked econ,” but also “flunked law, politics and just plain professional [sic].”

Stewart would surely counter, as he always has, that his job is that of comedian, not pundit. This is a cop-out. Regardless of his intent or aspirations, Stewart has the same kind and degree of influence as any political pundit.

For a generation of young people weaned on The Daily Show, Stewart’s political satire has been formative—it’s been received, interpreted and appreciated more as news and commentary than for its humor.

So it’s not just sad but symptomatic of a broader trend when a parody of shallow, commercially driven news itself succumbs to the depth-averse imperatives of commerce, for at the heart of satire is sincerity: Every joke is a kind of argument. Shallow thinking and cheap jokes are close kin.

The typical Daily Show joke, when it doesn’t amount to merely pointing and laughing, is something like a reductio ad absurdum wrapped in potty humor: Jon invites me to assume some claim is true, we together derive an absurd implication, and, concluding that the original claim is false, I pat myself on the back for being so much more enlightened than my benighted political adversaries (and, in theory at least, compatriots).

Top it all off with a facile even-handedness so I can tune out politics altogether in righteous disgust, and call it a show.

But still I’m left, on some level, unsatisfied. Why all this supposed radicalism? What motivates its proponents? Is radicalism justified? If so, how, and to what extent? Satire can engage with such questions, provoking thought and perhaps even empathy. Cheap satire merely assumes them away and sates the curiosity with convenient answers.

Democracy, as a form of collective problem solving, works because (and insofar as) it brings into contact the full spectrum of diverse perspectives and aggregates them in a way that brings us, collectively, as close to the truth as is feasible. The capital-T truth may be unobtainable, but the democratic truth is good enough, as it were, for government work.

“Parody,” novelist Adam Mars-Jones notes, “can tell you everything about its target, except how people could have taken it seriously in the first place.”

Can democracy function properly when politics and parody become indistinguishable, when all politics is parody and all parody political?

Look around.