Now "Who's Laughing Now?"

This is a response to Jon Stewart: America's Most Trusted Reporter?


Following the death of television legend Walter Cronkite the popular polls placed comedian Jon Stewart as "The Most Trusted Newscaster in America." We should take note of the fact that mockery and satire have moved into the very heart of the media.

As we all know -- as Jon Stewart reminds us every night -- the world of modern newscasting has become a 24hr entertainment business. The networks pretend to address our concerns with professional actors who perform a show called "The News." And we, of course, perform a reciprocal piece of live theater called "Watching & Talking about the News."

Knowing this, we may become cynical. We may become scoffers, mockers and distanced dis-believers who shake their heads at the whole sorry affair of mere performance that masquerades as social information.

Unless... that is also part of the performance?

The idea that ironic scoffer Jon Stewart is the most trusted voice in American News means that we should seriously doubt the idea that ironic scoffing is an alternative to the mainstream. If there is any kind of dominant social ideology into which we are collectively brainwashed it is surely represented by those forces which appear as the most reliable popular sources of opinion.

"They" do a fake show called THE NEWS. And "They" also do a fake show called "TAKING THE NEWS SERIOUSLY." On the other hand, "We" do a fake show called "SHAKING OUR HEADS AT THE NEWS."

And our indoctrinated performance is the dominant one in the nation.

A tricky situation. It resembles the problem of contemporary Communist theory. How so? Well, Marx and Lenin operated on the basic presumption that The People were socially indoctrinated into a system that was not for their benefit. If you could wake them up to the fact of their own brainwashing, their own real condition, then they would mobilize into a force capable of overturning the State and preparing the conditions for the growth of progressive Socialism. Fine for the 19th century -- but what about the 21st? Today if you go to The People and tell them that they are brainwashed automatons they will chuckle and admit you are correct. We all know that we are slaves to a system that is largely indifferent to our plight. Thus we can no longer be shocked into revolt by the revelation of this fact.

You might say that those who know they are socially indoctrinated are even more socially indoctrinated! And all their attempts at maintaining a critical distance of moral mockery amount to an unwitting struggle to remain at the very center of today's Status Quo.

Of course... there are people who claim that Jon Stewart and his critical-sensitive liberal "cronies" are dupes, or the agents of dupes. Are we to join these Right Wing hysterics? Certainly not. After all -- isn't it precisely the threat of the Right Wing hysterics that has created the current center-liberal position which elevates Jon Stewart as a symbol of today mass ideology?

The Right Wing nut-jobs are what I would call the decoy nut-jobs, the manifestations of a decoy ideology which is always part of the functional behavior of a governing ideology. It is not merely a matter of those who Reject the Other in combat against those who Embrace the Other. There is inevitably this situation where our rejections are kept in place by the prominence of hysterical over-rejectors in comparison to whom we are the embracers.

This "shape" of affairs keeps us from going any further...