Is it time? Can we all stop pretending now? Can everyone from stunned ESPN reporters to alarmed feminist writers stop feigning bewilderment over the fact that most thuggish and unsophisticated, devoutly sexist, multibillion-dollar pro sport in the western world, one that spends every minute and every advertising dollar making its displays of cartoon violence appear even more amusingly vulgar and outrageous (and hence, lucrative), is catastrophically lacking in dignity and respect WRT women, child abuse, domestic violence and modern social functioning overall?
Let’s say it like this: Expecting the NFL to emerge from all its terrible scandals of late as a smart, respectable bastion of cultural dignity – as opposed to the flamboyant, screaming temple of cash, cover-up, corruption and brain damage it is now – is like asking the NRA to swap bullets for flowers. You must be, like, high.
He speaks, she stays quiet, downcast, meek. Just the way the NFL (and conservatives, and organized religion) like it
You don’t have to watch much professional football or read about the general foulness of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, a guy with all the charm of a tire iron and all the numb sense to hire Frank Luntz, a nasty Fox News shill to write his lines at a recent press conference, to be struck by just how incredibly tone deaf and out of touch is the NFL, a famously insensitive megacorporation currently rivaling congress and the Catholic church combined for everyday stabs to your better nature. And they just keep coming.
But who, really, was expecting something different? This is how the NFL has always been, no? At its core, modern pro football is a glitzy, crude, ultraviolent game of increasingly brain-damaged gladiators, highly trained in administering bursts of barely controlled violence as intensely as possible, all fueled by exceedingly wealthy, white male team owners who care as much for issues of feminism, child-rearing or social good as the Koch brothers care about the Ebola crisis. This isn’t really news.
But all the cover-ups and lies certainly are. Did you get the big takeaway from last fall’s Frontline special, League of Denial, on brain trauma in the NFL? It wasn’t how little the league (and Goodell) gave a damn about the problem for all those decades, or how a career spent bashing your massive, 300-pound frame into other equally massive humans with enough force to move a city bus will cause all sorts of irreparable harm to brain tissue. That’s obvious.
Did you know casinos had cameras in their elevators? The NFL sure wishes they didn’t.
The most disturbing finding was, in part, how brain damage starts appearing almost immediately when you take up the sport, all the way back in high school (playing full-contact sports any younger than that is even more dangerous and irresponsible, they say, and should be banned outright).
You might say football is to the brain what smoking is to the lungs. Except it’s even worse: the lungs can recover. Mental impairment is forever.
Until recently, Goodell’s lies, diversions and denials have helped make the league billions, largely by doing the impossible: turning the sport’s violent inelegance into a marketable asset, a massive, Vegas-grade megaspectacle full of big-name sponsors, snazzy sky-cams and the Blue Angel at halftime. U-S-A!
But then you get the ugly insights, one after another. Then you realize the NFL would have completely buried the Ray Rice domestic violence problem, for example, had it not been for that appalling video. How many more are there? How many abuses never reported? Dozens? Too many to count? Goodell isn’t paid $44 million a year by the team owners for his noble moral conscience, after all.
For an even more sobering take, head over to Mother Jones and read what Tracy Treu, wife of former Oakland Raider Adam Treu, has to say about what it’s really like to be a woman in the NFL’s inner circle, and what she imagines Janay Rice is feeling right about now.
The NFL is a culture that values secrecy. When you’re with an NFL team, the message to you is clear: Don’t f—k anything up for your partner, and don’t f–k anything up for the team. Don’t be controversial. Don’t talk to the media. Stay out of the way. Support the player and be quiet.
This is what Janay Rice was risking [by pressing domestic violence charges]: embarrassing the Ravens, embarrassing her family, screwing his teammates out of their prized running back, losing money, losing security.
In other words, it’s a man’s game, honey. Always has been. Keep your mouth closed and don’t screw up the cash flow.
But I found the most disheartening aspect to be Treu’s conclusion, tragic in its bizarre irony:
I wonder, with the league’s new, stiffer penalties for domestic violence, how many abused women will stay quiet—because that means the end of a career, the end of the insurance, the end of it all.
Wait, what? Did you get that? The league’s new penalties will allow it to appear like it’s addressing the issue of domestic violence, even though, in so doing, abused women are now less likely to come forward for fear of harming their husband’s career, and their own livelihood. Wow.
Meanwhile, the real values the NFL espouses – all of them aimed squarely, as always, at lopsided young males – remain unchanged: loyalty at all costs, keep lots of secrets, be suspicious of outsiders, hide your pain, keep your woman in check, don’t upset the money boys, walk off your brain damage and whatever you do, don’t get caught on video knocking your wife unconscious or whipping your child with a stick. Ah, music to Goodell’s ears.
America! You know what you need? Besides better bourbon, less Jesus and fewer conservatives? That’s right: A good whoopin’. A serious spanking. Maybe even one of those terrifying, NFL-grade spankings so vicious it raises welts and yelps and not a little blood, all administered with a belt, or a tree branch, or the backhand of wrathful ol’ Almighty himself.
But don’t worry! It’s all out of love. Isn’t it always?
Besides! Americans love spankings. We relish inducing fear, pain, smacking each other around to impart some sort of life lesson. Especially foreigners, or gays, or women, or dogs or nature or, well, pretty much anything we can get away with, really.
Smacks his kids, hard. Then again, so do millions of other parents. How sad.
But the creature we love to hit most of all? Those small, defenseless humans, the ones who weigh less than 50 pounds and have barely learned to walk or form complete sentences, much less understand that smacking each other out of some warped concept of “love” is, you know, just what we do.
Have you heard? In the wake of NFL running back Adrian Petersen’s indictment on child abuse charges, resulting from bloodying his 4-year-old son with a stick (and yes, calling it “love”) comes the startling factoid than fully two-thirds of Americans believe in spanking their kids. Upwards of 70 percent (down from 85 percent 30 years ago)! How utterly sad.
This, despite numerous studies proving that spanking one’s children does not fix bad behavior, does not make the child a better human (just the opposite) and only dramatically degrades the parent-child relationship, pretty much forever. In short, hitting your kid causes nothing but pain and bitterness – and, of course, more of the same down the road, as they grow up to beat their own kids. And wives. And dogs. Yay tradition!
Parents, of course, don’t want to hear it. After all, violence is easy. Spanking, flogging and whipping is a goddamn American institution, from the deep South to the grass-chompin’ Midwest, from angry Catholic nuns to the nasty school principal – beating children is as patriotic as apple pie, gun violence and bad reality TV. Surely, despite all those hippie studies, spanking must teach kids some tough life lessons, right? Set boundaries? Show who’s boss?
What idiots believe
Sure it does. After all, life is full of violence and pain, so it makes sense to teach kids early on that if someone does something you don’t like, the appropriate response is… to cause them physical harm, and spread that pain and violence around even more. God bless America.
Oh, the savage irony. You know what? Life is full of violence and pain. And do you know why? Because we make it that way. And we make it that way, in part, by beating our kids, by normalizing violence at the earliest developmental stages, and then calling it “love.” What lost, distorted creatures we are.
Nevertheless, this is why Adrian Petersen, along with millions of parents, have no problem spanking their kids. “I’m hitting you because I love you,” they say. Got that, children? Pain equals love. And love equals fear, humiliation, maybe a little blood. It means giant humans beating you with bare hands, paddles or sticks, often in a confused rage. You know, just like Jesus intended.
Funny thing! America itself is no stranger to a good whoopin.’ You might say our entire country has been smacked around. How do you think we responded? Did we learn anything valuable? Gain some new insights, respect, discipline? Or did we only get more violent, resentful, fearful of the world? One guess.
This works MUCH better naked, consensual, and soaked in bourbon
Oh, we’ve been hit hard. Eight years of the Bush administration, and we could barely walk for three solid years. Thousands killed every year due to gun violence (many of them children) and… sales of bullets skyrocket. And how about 9/11 itself, the biggest thrashing we’ve endured to date? That brought us a full decade of useless wars, a dire economic tailspin and tens of thousands dead, along with widespread intolerance, isolationism, the TSA, the Patriot Act, enough dread and suspicion to last generations.
Leaving us where, exactly? Oh yes: “If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven. We will degrade and destroy you.” Excellent.
Let’s not forget Obama. Gotta admit, these past six years have been the strangest kind of spanking so far. We liberals keep wanting to believe it’s all been a big, loving cuddle, but then there’s all these whipped aspirations and bloodied ideals laying about. Tough love it ain’t.
It’s as obvious as it is furiously denied: Spankings, whoopings, undue violence teach exactly the wrong things. So why do we do it? Why spank kids at all? After all, as Will Saletan points out, children learn nothing from a spanking, except about the spanking. They also pick up tons of residual fear, anger, even outright hatred. Good lesson.
Do you know how many adults who were spanked and abused as children go on to beat their own kids? That’s right – nearly all of them. Do you know how many adults who weren’t spanked as kids go on to beat their own children (or wives, or dogs)? Just about zero. Can you guess which group turns out smarter, healthier, happier, more stable in life overall?
Have you ever struck a dog? Screamed in its perplexed face and smacked it hard for chewing up the rug, until it whimpered and hid? Dogs do not love you more because of it. They might learn not to chew the rug, but what they really learn is far sadder: they learn to hide. They learn to cower and tremble when you raise your voice. They learn to see you as a source of the worst, basest human energy imaginable.
Of course, some people (mostly men, alas) relish exactly this response – the cowering, the fear, the please-don’t-kill-me. This is power. This is a perverse, disgusting sort of control. And this leads to the other reason people strike their kids: Because they can’t control their own tempers. Because they have so much anger and pent-up frustration. And what’s the one thing you can control in a world gone mad? That’s right: Your own kid. Or (if you’re an angry, abusive male), maybe your wife or girlfriend, too.
Just be sure to hit her where the bruises won’t show. Just be sure to tweet how much you love your kid after you smack him into the hospital. And always, always check for video cameras.
But most of all, don’t worry! You did nothing wrong. Your conscience is shiny and clear, right? It was all out of love, right?
That limp hacker imp who swiped all those female celebrity photos from private iCloud accounts, then gloated about it all over the Net and, in so doing, promoted a particularly insidious type of ideological rape of women?
I’d be OK if that guy were publicly shamed. I’d be fine with hearing that, after a bit of jail time, his (or their) photo was plastered all over Facebook, a red circle of “do not date” slashed across his face, a portion of his personal appendages compared, unfavorably, to raisins.
Does that sound cruel? Inhumane? I’m not so sure.
How about the scolds? The trolls? The savage bullies and malicious homophobes who stalk and threaten writers, gays, women all over the Net, now more than ever? Would public shaming of the nastiest and most potentially violent among them do any good?
It might be worth a try. I’ve become increasingly horrified of late by the attacks I’ve seen on some of my female colleagues, particularly those who cover some of the most provocative feminist issues of the day (YesAllWomen, rape culture, sexism in the media, tech, pop culture) – writers like the Guardian’s always-terrific Jessica Valenti, or Slate’s Amanda Marcotte, or feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, or longtime author Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me), et al.
I’ve never seen anything quite like the savagery these women endure – which is saying a lot, given how I’ve received literally thousands of pieces of appalling, vicious hate mail over the years from the hardcore conservative Right, the best/nastiest of which I published in my first book.
Like this. Only for trolls. And misogynists. And Ray Rice.
But even I’m unfamiliar with the level of brutal misogyny, threats and outright harassment these women receive at the hands of so many cowardly, hateful males, simply because they dare to write with progressive wit, intelligence and grace about the myriad issues facing modern women. It’s sort of heartbreaking. I wish I knew how to apologize for my entire gender.
I have no idea if it would do any good – and it is, at present, technically impossible to ‘out’ them – but I think a rough justice would indeed be served in seeing these contemptible humans shamed in public for spewing as they do, for threatening these writers’ friends and families, for a dangerous, hurtful kind of harassment you and I simply cannot fathom.
But here’s where it gets a little weird. Do you know who probably should not be publicly shamed? Who doesn’t really deserve to have their scruffy, dumb-guy mug shots plastered all over a public Facebook page in a sad attempt to embarrass them into pseudo-moral compliance – but who are, in fact, being thusly publicly shamed, right now, anyway?
Guys who patronize prostitutes.
I know! But it’s not as contradictory as it sounds. I was bemused to see the story about Bay Area cops resorting to public shaming (via Facebook) to “embarrass” a bunch of hapless-looking johns for soliciting hookers, women who turned out to be female cops in disguise. (Fun gig! Good use of police time and resources!)
What a silly waste. What a stupendously misguided, inept way to use this most valuable and underutilized shaming tool.
What’s that you say? Yes, yes, I realize some of these guys might very well be cheating jerks. I realize a few might be contributing, somehow, to the problem of human trafficking, though the amount to which they are and to which the cops’ silly shaming tactic addresses it seems negligible at best.
And yes, it’s true that these guys (and the sex workers they patronize) are, technically, breaking a very old, useless law that has no place in the modern era and which, like drug law, does absolutely nothing to stem the cash-flow coursing, quite healthily, through the world’s oldest profession.
But, see, this is 2014. This is San Francisco, home of kink.com and Grindr and Tindr and more fetish/sex/poly/orgy parties per square block than Caligula-era Rome. This is an era when sex work (and sex workers) strive toward legitimacy, when porn stars are writing for the New York Times and Stoya has more Twitter followers than the US Senate. In other words: Sex work ain’t what it used to be. And it never was.
Not going to work. Maybe try Instagram?
Clearly the police don’t read Dan Savage. Clearly the cops aren’t aware that, for many, turning to a professional sex worker can be valuable solution to a wide array of woes – personal, psychological and marital. Dan’s column and my sex-worker friends frequently confirm: Patronizing a skilled pro can, in the right circumstance and with the correct agreements, be a terrifically helpful tonic indeed.
Do not misunderstand. Abusive men who patronize risky street prostitutes, not to mention their violent pimps, can create an ugly scenario. The illegality of sex work creates a nasty underbelly indeed.
But this isn’t about adultery. This isn’t about drug abuse, human trafficking or broken families. These guys aren’t being shamed for that. Just look at them – they’re being shamed over a dumb, lingering remnant of Puritanism that declares sex for money to be grossly immoral no matter what.
How unutterably silly. Particularly as, meanwhile, 1,000 other far more deserving atrocities dance right by, barely scathed and unashamed.
Hey look, there goes the NFL’s Ray Rice, the Baltimore Raven who punched his fiancé in the face in a casino elevator and knocked her out cold. Ray should be in jail. Ray should be publicly shamed for a long, long time, as should his coach and assorted NFL apologists. Instead, CNN reports Ray is in “good spirits” (seriously, CNN?) And no wonder! Despite his wife-beating ways, Ray will be keeping about $25 million. Good job, NFL!
Look over here. It’s fundamentalist Christian homophobe and godly sexist Mark Driscoll, the infamous Seattle-area “bad boy” pastor who, among other theological delights, calls women “penis homes.”
Mark is, apparently, having a little trouble keeping his churches open, now that word is getting out about his alleged abuses and moral psychosis. But is Mark being sufficiently publicly shamed? Do you see his face on a police “shame page” due to insidious ignorance? Not quite.
Vivian and Alice! There they go, ruining the social fabric.
Which brings me to perhaps the most heartwarming tale I’ve read in ages. It’s the story of Vivian and Alice, both just over 90 years old, who’ve been together as a couple for – get this – 72 years.
The best part? Vivian and Alice just got married. In Iowa. Because Iowa was one of the first states to legalize gay marriage, back in 2009. “This is a celebration of something that should have happened a very long time ago,” said the happy presiding reverend, who was most certainly not Mark Driscoll.
Can you imagine? Do you wonder how many years these amazing women had to lie, pretend to be something they’re not, hide their true emotions?
Do you know what I’d like to see publicly shamed, embarrassed, humiliated beyond recognition? The ethos, the toxic social mores, the God, the church-sanctioned homophobia, the cruel and ugly fundamentalism that kept these women from expressing their love for all those decades. That made them hide and cower. That perhaps made them feel less than human.
Paying for sex? Big deal. Violence, threats, abuse, harassment, centuries of fear and guilt? For shame.
Fun fact: Violence fetishizes itself. Worships. Adores itself with psychotic levels of megalomania and self-aggrandizement – sociopathic and chilling and face-slappingly obvious throughout all of human history. You know?
Of course you know. Like attracts like. Antagonism and hate, fear and panic feed off each other like combustible parasites; as soon as one ignites it’s often only a quick leap until everything explodes and people are dead and no one knows what the hell just happened.
Is it possible
That weapons somehow create
The urge to use them? (via NYT)
Peace and calm, on the other hand, are a little more… challenging. Because they are not loud, abrasive, screaming for attention and headlines, vomiting up from the ugly depths of Fox News and hate radio, because they do not offer the falsely satisfying rush of adrenaline and bloodshed, cultivating calm requires a deeper level of patience, intelligence and heart.
Don’t think this could happen to you? Think again.
This is also, of course, terribly ironic. Because when brought forth correctly (or even awkwardly, or clumsily, or in any way at all) peace and calm spread even more quickly, and with far better, longer-lasting results, than violence. Peace grows, evolves, inspires tolerance and love and hope. Violence never learns. It only corrodes.
Do you already know all this? Of course you already know all this.
Or maybe you don’t. Maybe we as a species will never fully learn this lesson, this obvious spiritual truth. This is tragic. This is hopefully terribly incorrect. But this is what history appears to be bearing out.
Just look at the disturbing, brutal events happening in the working-class, mostly black suburb of Ferguson, Missouri right now. The situation offers the perfect trifecta of savage, 21st-century American bleakness: It reinforces the draconian truth that violence begets violence; it currently offers zero solutions; and, like gun violence, like rape culture, like racism itself, if something doesn’t change, it will just keep happening.
Are you tracking this at all? The re-ignited racial tensions, the shockingly militarized police force, the white governor, white city council and white police force – in a town that’s 67% black – panicking like animals and handling it all so terribly, first by defending the white cop who shot an unarmed black teenager six times (twice in the head) from 35 feet away without the slightest direct provocation, and then claiming the resultant outcry and (ignorance-ignited, police-provoked) violence is all the town’s fault?
You probably saw some of it. You probably also saw that the stunned community rallied peacefully at first, with only a few scattered outbreaks of lootings, only to be met by abizarre and terrifying spectacle: tanks, snipers, tear gas, gangs of heavily armored, dumbfounded-looking Missouri cops who looked more ready to invade Afghanistan than to amble around the local McDonald’s and make sure no more windows were broken.
That was the moment, really. That’s when the turn occurred, when history collapsed into itself, when violence once again held a knife to the throat of peace, and spit in its face.
Fear immolates. Give a largely untrained (from a military perspective), stupefied police force a bunch of military-grade weapons, tanks, tear gas, sound cannons and other horrific tools of war, set them loose in an already tense situation, and guess what happens? They act like they’re at war. They act like their (mostly) peaceful neighbors and fellow citizens are potential threats, terrorists bent on bombing the town and raping the American flag.
As Glenn Greenwald points out, quoting a suddenly hotly popular book by libertarian scribe Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: “There is no vital trend in American society more overlooked than the militarization of our domestic police forces.” Echoed by the ACLU: “The militarizing of policing encourages officers to adopt a ‘warrior’ mentality and think of the people they are supposed to serve as enemies.”
Worthy reads indeed. But does it matter? The scene these cops presented to the town – and the world – after one of their own killed an unarmed poor kid, verily begged for escalation. Even the world’s most oppressive regimes like China and Iran are delighting in our ugly Ferguson mess. Bring in the tanks and the guns and fear, amp up the arrests and the tear gassing of citizens, journalists and politicians alike, and suddenly the peaceful protesters are displaced by the exact element the police were ostensibly there to quell: More violence. More fear and hate, gunfire and looting. What a surprise.
Why did these elements show up? Because they were invited. Because this is how it works.
Surely you recognize this insidious human equation? Hell, give any group unchecked authority and power (and lots of terrifying weaponry), and watch the dynamic tilt toward the abusive and the hostile in a matter of minutes. Doesn’t matter if it’s police, politicians, the NRA, the prison system, gender dynamics or organized religion’s all-powerful popes and bishops and priests getting away with murder, pedophilia, sexism and calls to war for, well, pretty much forever. The dynamic is the same. So is the result.
Let’s ask it this way: Does anyone honestly believe that if you give every adult a gun – as the NRA wet dreams about doing – they will suddenly be nicer to each other, more peaceful and loving, help each other’s kids, look out for one another’s best interests, form a sincere and caring community?
Or do you think the exact opposite will happen, and they will look at one another with ever-increasing suspicion and dread, a lowly stench of violence and death slowly permeating everything like foul perfume?
The answer is as obvious as it is (seems) impossible to resolve. Guns are everywhere, so we just dumbly accept America’s staggering death toll. The gross militarization of America’s police has been going on for decades, exploded with particular force just after 9/11, and even Obama has done nothing to slow it, and isn’t going to. Meanwhile, as pointed out here and here and here and here and here and here and here, the consequences are far more dire than you might imagine.
Don’t feel much of it? Not particularly worried about tanks rolling through yourneighborhood anytime soon? You must be an entitled white person. After all, the vast majority of abuse and extreme police force to date has been targeted at minorities and the poor. Same as it ever was, really. Only getting worse.
But don’t worry, they’ll eventually come for you (and me) soon enough. Just the nature of the beast, really.
After all, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is a tank – and 100,000 machine guns, 800 other armored vehicles, countless M-16s, grenade launchers and night goggles and sound cannons and more than $4 billion worth of military gear sent to America’s dumbfounded, mistrusted cops since ’97 – everyone’s a potential enemy.
“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” – Robin Williams
Very much did not want to write about Robin Williams.
Because futility. Because senselessness. Because it feels, at its core, utterly inadequate to attempt to unpack any potential meanings in Williams’ suicide, given how, like war, like disease, like abuse and ultraviolence and the endless slaughter of innocents worldwide, it requires going dark, digging into the bleak, shadowy regions of the human psyche, when all we ever really find there is phantasms, demons, glooms.
No meanings anywhere. No place to land. Just void.
Is it not true? To delve into the particularly gnarled portions of modern existence is to tacitly acknowledge that most of them are, by nature, quite thoroughly intractable, illusory, impossible to fully understand or process? Psychology and psychiatry are just elaborate educated guesses. Neuroscience is still shockingly primitive. Technically speaking, we really don’t know much of anything about the strange, divine kaleidoscope that is the human soul.
Nevertheless, we have to try? We have to at least look? This is important? These are not statements.
Jesus, it’s not like we’re lacking in other opportunities, you know? It’s not like we have insufficient examples of suffering, savagery and loss in the world, such that our karma requires someone as gloriously gifted – and apparently, quietly tormented – as Robin Williams to exit this world in the way he did, so we may more thoroughly examine our psychosis and our frayed pathways.
But there it is. It happens anyway, and we can only entreaty to the Fates, God, the infuriating ambivalence of the universe: Was this really necessary?
No answer comes. This is the beautiful, brutal secret of the universe. No answer ever comes. It just keeps dancing.
So we try something else. Instead of endless processing, instead of failed attempts to define the indefinable and make sense of our various demons – in Williams’ case, depression, addiction and suicide – we instead try the next best thing: we ponder. We discuss. We reflect. Maybe we even make a few changes. Just to see.
At the very least, we open ours hearts a tiny bit more to those around us, as we realize Williams was far from alone in his torment, and even as we understand that there is no easy solution to any of it. Because this is life, stupid. There’s never an easy solution. There’s never a safe place to land. Just not how it’s built.
There is, however, some possibility. More love. More offerings of support and kindness. And, to my mind, more work to be done to see just how many of our beloved demons exist as a result of our own money-crazed, power-mad culture, our fetishes for violence and teardown, our cruel addictions to celebrity, perfection and the false gods of fame.
Really now, do we not invent many of our own demons, feed and coddle them, manufacture and amplify and make them into unstoppable armies? Given the size of the population, our rapacious rates of consumption, the dazzling reach of the Internet and the speed at which suffering can now gain traction and travel, we have more potential threats to the stability of our psyche – both personal and collective – than we’ve ever had before.
Old SF Chronicle shot, circa 1987, by Fred Larson
What do you think? Do you feel the modern world is more fraught with relentless messages of hatred, odium, self-destruction than ever? It would certainly seem so. It’s a bit like environmental toxins. A hundred years ago they barely existed. Now? We swim in an inescapable chemical stew, our very air, water, food and furniture and technology and even cancerous toys loaded with so many freakish artificial compounds, we can’t even keep track anymore.
I digress. But only a little. Because most of what I’ve seen so far in the wake of Williams’ death is lots of powerful, informative outpourings about the illness of depression itself, its anguish and its savage mystery. Personal stories, anecdotes, shocking glimpses into the pain.
It’s all in turns hugely illuminating, frightening and sad, even as it remains impossible to locate exactly. Hell, even the late, hyper-articulate David Foster Wallace, prior to his own depression-induced suicide, couldn’t explain his illness’ source or its significance, only the staggering agony it induced.
But then, what of the popular Jungian notion that the dark side, the shadow is ever-present and ever lurking? What do we make of the idea that we are ever at the mercy of our own treacherous temptations and inherent flaws? What of the fear that whatever took down Williams is ever breathing at all our doors?
I’m not so sure of this. I’ve recoiled hard at the notion that the darkness is somehow built in, hard wired, that everyone has a shadow side and it’s only the thinnest veil of morals, laws, guilt, silly notions of God that keep everyone from murdering each other, and then themselves.
I’m much more taken of the Tantric notion of stuckness. Of dangerously stagnating energy, all those emotions, beliefs, convictions, patterns, traumas, memories that somehow take hold of us so deeply they actually begin to calcify, turn poisonous, convince us they’ve been there all along and that’s just the way we are and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I think even Williams would call bulls–t on that one. No way are we hard-wired for doom. No way are we darkly predisposed to wipe ourselves out, to steal and murder and destroy like dumb zombies. As Williams’ own genius proved, we’re far more predisposed to laugh, to find joy, to relish the wonder and irresistible humor of existence itself, even amidst the pain and anguish. When all is said and done, isn’t that the best lesson of all?
Did you hear the one about Rusty Rockets – AKA Russell Brand – taking down Fox News’ ultra-doltish Sean Hannity, for the latter’s insufferable, bullying interview style and awesomely insulting treatment of particular guests who won’t say what he wants them to say – not to mention Hannity/Fox’s own corrosive, intellectually offensive comprehension of the issues of the day?
Did you see how Brand’s homespun video, part of the lanky British comic’s low-key “The Trews” YouTube series, went viral to the tune of 2.5 million hits (and counting) and not just because of the obvious moronics of its target, but also because Brand was somehow able, in a few short minutes, to meaningfully synopsize the current Gaza nightmare in ways no journalist or newspaper has yet quite had the nerve to do? Astonishing, really.
Russell Brand, getting more brilliant by the casual, offhand post. Click to watch him take down Hannity
How about John Oliver, former Daily Show correspondent and HBO’s new and ultra-likable, sardonic Brit with a thing for arcane data points and long diatribes about global economics, who recently slapped major media outlets (NYT, The Atlantic, all of BuzzFeed) upside the head for their increasingly shameless dependence on “native ads,” those sneaky, destructive articles that look, smell and read like actual journalism but are actually sponsored content – giant ads masquerading as articles – and fully 50 percent of readers can’t really tell the difference?
Oliver is fresh out of HBO’s gate with his new show, Last Week Tonight, but he’s already gaining fast traction for his affable-but-piercing tirades – all sorts of surprisingly gratifying rants that are, somehow, even lengthier and cover even more wonderfully arcane topics than Jon Stewart magically converts, four nights a week, into comic gold.
Oliver is merely the latest in what’s become a hugely impressive, heartening line of whip-smart satirists tackling complex political and socioeconomic topics, when no one else seems willing or able, not merely by making them entertaining and funny as hell, but also by doing the impossible: making them relevant and accessible.
And here’s the best part: they all seem to do it while largely not sucking up to any corporate parent, or by pretending to be beholden to decaying notions of “journalistic independence.” What a thing.
Don’t forget Bill Maher, who’s been doing his “McLaughlin Group on acid” round-table shtick – first on Politically Incorrect, then later on Real Time – for more than 20 years. Maher is, by far, the most smarmy and crass of the bunch. But, like Stewart, he’s also smart as hell, surprisingly insightful and wickedly funny; no one does a better job of skewering the absurdities of God and country with a sly grin and a rogue’s banter.
Funny thing is, Maher doesn’t even call himself a liberal. Or a libertarian. What he is, is hyper intelligent, informed, world wary, savvy to all shallow political gamesmanship. This is why most people – especially conservatives – think he must be a liberal. Because if there’s one thing Republicans hate, it’s a shrewd, biting intelligence that thinks major pharmcos are criminals, Christianity is a cruel joke and congress is full of intellectual cowards.
It’s a hell of a thing, this comic-as-truth-teller phenom, this trend of popular shows satirizing not only politics and the news, but how the news is covered, by what sort of blowhards and journalistic incompetents. Mark Twain would be proud.
Stephen Colbert, of course, made the right-wing blowhard persona into an art form, pitch perfect and savagely indistinguishable – save for the dazzling humor – from the bloviated spew of the king of all right-wing demagoguery, Bill “Papa Bear” O’Reilly.
It’s Stewart who almost singlehandedly reinvented the culturally astute, satiric news show and made into something absolutely vibrant and essential
But really, all true props for this phenomenon belong to Jon Stewart. It’s Stewart who almost singlehandedly reinvented the culturally astute, satiric news show and made into something absolutely vibrant and essential, the thing you simply must watch if you want to be truly informed in the relentlessly crammed Information Age.
It’s been 15 years since Stewart took over the Daily Show and immediately swapped out Craig Kilborn’s cute news parodies with a format few imagined would ever hook millions of apathetic Millennials – a razor-sharp, wildly entertaining, news-driven comedy show that, despite Stewart’s claims to the contrary, is actually more informative and engaging (and well researched) than nearly any straight news outlet you can name.
(BTW, I’m very much looking forward to the day a female joins this tragically all-male list. At the moment, my vote goes to Amy Schumer, genius-level funny with acting chops to match, in possession of a seriously fierce understanding of cultural trends and sexual politics. Her current sketch show doesn’t much tackle politics or media, but give her a few more seasons. She could be a fantastic hostess).
The master
Have you noticed something? How there exists no openly conservative, right-wing equivalent to any of these progressive, brainy comedy creations? How there is no show anywhere on the planet, including on Fox News, that features a dedicated right-winger slinging whip-smart blasts of irony to gleeful audiences with fearless abandon – someone willing, as Stewart et al most certainly are, to tackle all political ineptitude, left, right and center?
Why do you think? Why are Republicans, by and large, not the slightest bit funny beyond flagrant sexism, dick jokes and “You know you must be a redneck” inbred gags? Why do they largely avoid all satire, nuanced humor, self-deprecation and savage irony like a plague of scary locusts?
I think I just answered my own question. The conservative worldview is simply far too black/white, good/evil simplistic, polarizing, limited, antagonistic. It is generally anti-science, anti-nuance, anti-intelligence, anti higher-education, anti-humanitarian, and anti self-reflection. All of which makes true satire not merely anathema to the conservative mindset, but also completely incomprehensible. And largely terrifying. No wonder.
But I think there’s another reason these shows – and brilliant comics like Russell Brand (his Morning Joe appearance from June of last year remains essential viewing, btw) – are so successful at appealing to Generation Facebook (and at winning 18 Emmys, 2 Peabodys and a Grammy, as the Daily Show has done), and it was Oliver himself who pointed it out in the episode mentioned above.
Here’s why: Thanks to Fox News’ “truthiness,” “native ads” and grossly sponsored infotainment like BuzzFeed, major media is increasingly seen as duplicitous, untrustworthy, unable to deliver an honest story without bias or corporate corruption. It’s a Catch-22, really – no one wants to pay for real journalism anymore, so media is forced to whore out its newsroom to brands and sponsors, which results in even more mistrust and defection, as the sacred, long-standing wall separating the news division from marketing vanishes and corporations increasingly take over the medium and the message.
What’s a smart, jaded, intellectually curious Millennial (or aging liberal, or educated human) to do? Who can you trust to tell you the reasonably unvarnished truth, in a way that’s not only informative and accurate, but appeals to your bleak, sardonic, the zombies-are-coming world-wary fatalism?
That’s right: to the satirists. To the badass, fearless comics, the only people not driven by policy, corporate sponsor or political agenda, but simply by a desperate need to highlight the most barefaced ironies, joys and scandals of life so as to make you laugh. And think. And maybe, just maybe get a little more engaged.
Not a bad trend at all, really.
