Mark Jurkowitz pointed me to a Globe op-ed claiming that Jon Stewart is ruining our political discourse and dooming liberals to isolation and failure. I don’t think I’m exaggerating here. It’s Jedediah Purdyism run amok. If the writer, Michael Kalin, thinks liberals lack earnestness, of all things, he’s not hanging out with the same crowd I am. I get invited to parties where guests are corrected if they say the word "pet"; it’s "human companion" instead.
Of course the primary sin of Kalin’s op-ed is to misrecognize symptom as cause.
Stewart’s daily dose of political parody characterized by asinine alliteration leads to a ‘’holier than art thou" attitude toward our national leaders. People who possess the wit, intelligence, and self-awareness of viewers of ‘’The Daily Show" would never choose to enter the political fray full of ‘’buffoons and idiots."
"Leads to"? He’s getting at something I’ve written about before: the politics of grumpiness, the tendency to think that legitimate policy disputes and battles for political power are as ridiculous as the surface forms those battles take. But the politics of grumpiness cuts across the political spectrum. You have professional cynics on the left, right and center. We can parse and debate the causes for their cultural ascendency (preferably without finding academic "postmodernists" pulling the levers behind the curtain), but surely it exceeds the agency of Jon Stewart.
Besides, while I don’t watch the Daily Show, I do find Stewart funny. What people sometimes overlook is that he and TDS are sending up media cliches as much as the politicians themselves. Jurkowitz’s quote of him at the DNC is a prime example.
UPDATE: Kevin Drum chimes in. One of his commenters points out something I overlooked in a first reading: the anecdote Kalin provides isn’t even a real person, but a "fictional composite." Is this one big piss-take?
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