And/Or Lame

There’s something soul-crushingly depressing about the faction of people who cooked up and/or went to that comedy-channel ‘Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear’ thing this weekend. It’s as if they’re afraid to make straightforward arguments for the political views they (tacitly) hold, and thus have resorted to comedy, snide/arch sarcasm, and passive-aggressiveness as their only line of political attack.

They now seem recognize their political views are not as popular as they wishfully-thought they were, which is progress, but at the same time they think everyone else is so much stupider than they assume (and have always been told) they themselves are that ladling ten layers of irony and sarcasm overtop of all their boringly straightforward leftist-statist viewpoints like cream on trifle will make the package digest more smoothly. In response to this elaborately cowardly theatricality and posturing the involuntary observer is left thinking ‘Well, maybe it will at least be funny?’, and then when it isn’t, the result is deadeningly sad, like a socially awkward child trying to put on a magic show and not realizing he’s bombing.

The TV news was showing man-on-the-street interviews with some of this crowd. One was a woman who had made a sign that spelled out “ELITE” downward and then had words across like that third-grade exercise. I think the “E” stood for “Education”. Et cetera. Just imagine. This woman actually spent time making that sign. The message she decided to convey on that sign was that she wanted to be ruled by “elites”. The ‘argument’ (such as it was) for the idea that it was good for her and hers to be ruled by “elites” involved explicitly valuing things such as education. And so the irony is, in order to put forth her great belief in and valuing of education, she made this stupid-ass sign.

What am I supposed to walk away thinking I should have been convinced of?, I wonder. “Oh yes, woman, your sign by its very banality has convinced me that elites should, in fact, run everything, contra to the supposedly widespread point of view you think you have argued against.” Ok, actually, maybe there’s a certain logic to it; maybe it was a ‘proof by counterexample’.

How long I wonder are these ‘clever’ empty-headed dullards Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart going to keep capturing the fancy of the self-styled ‘elite’, educated set? I look at them and think ‘soooo 2005′. Actually in Jon Stewart’s case it’s more like ‘soooo 1991′. Yet apparently there’s a hardened, twisted core of folks who see these guys and think, ‘they’re holding an arch, ironic rally? That sounds like just the empty nonsense my empty life needs. I’m taking my family!’