Jon Stewart, who made a career as the caustic host of “The Daily Show,” announced on Monday that he would be introducing the music group Coldplay at the annual London concert, scheduled for Saturday, that benefits the campaign to close the U.S. military base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He will also interview a former detainee at Guantánamo during the concert, called “Citizen Detainee,” and participate in screenings, panels and conversations in London before and after the show.
It is his first appearance on a U.S. awards show since leaving his longtime post on “The Daily Show” in 2015.
In a career that highlights how the naive caricature of political satirists may or may not pertain to this complicated man, Mr. Stewart has already demonstrated that his political impulses run deep.
Mr. Barr wholly disowned a characterization that Mr. Stewart was apolitical once he left the show. In the “Rose Garden” segment last April, Mr. Stewart’s follow-up show after “The Daily Show,” Mr. Stewart was just as bitingly funny as ever, only on steroids. He was humoring himself more than any audience when he pointed out that the man occupying the Oval Office has “a face like a doughnut hole.”
Mr. Stewart also promptly reached out to Harry Connick Jr., who told him about his organization, the Boys and Men of Venice, on behalf of the ridiculed “Red Rover, Red Rover” bus driver, who was the beneficiary of a hoary trick played on him by a network deluded in its assumption that if it is covered as news, it is news. The subsequent campaign dawned up an unwitting champion of a campaign that is looking up at rousing numbers outside the fishbowl of Campaign 2016: Advocating for the shutting down of Guantánamo. Closing Guantánamo is one of Mr. Stewart’s life missions. In the 2013 documentary “Dirty Wars,” the filmmaker Dana Rozycki asks in disbelief whether Mr. Stewart thinks of Guantánamo “as much as your wife thinks of your wedding day.”
Now Mr. Stewart is occupying a natural place: Not only is he taking up his slingshot at the leaders of the right, but he’s taking up his sword against those on the left.
Mr. Stewart is known mainly for his justly renowned attack on stupidity. It’s no mistake that he is introducing the entertainment, which the director Peter Sellars calls “an anti-war work.”
How does a take-no-prisoners aversion to intellectual vacuity translate into freedom for a political prisoner who was never convicted of a crime by an attorney trained in the very principles our leaders celebrated on Thursday, where an espionage-oriented “feel-good” was the motto — if you were allowed to feel bad? If you have doubts that a democratic leader would welsh on the principles of freedom articulated at the Obama White House on Thursday, fine — it would be a good time to laugh and dance. But it’s also an appropriate time to look further afield and assess where things are.
And if taking down PS238, via his recent campaign on behalf of a New York State senator, was merely an empty echo of the one product the Democratic candidate has marketed as his mosaic of shattered glass ideas, he could rest his muskets at groves of apples, and might find the right tree to take out with his tricked-up squirt gun – if he’s going to go down that street. In a one-on-one conversation with Andrew Drummann, the editor of London Review of Books, a brilliant British writer, Jonathan Franzen called the technologically savvy culture of free technology “a disaster for the humanities,” while suggesting that there’s not a “future in massively failing the younger generation.”
There is another way of slicing “entertainment,” one that might even be more persuasive because it would include the participation of everyone, not just those who masterfully echo the thoughts of people already converted to the organization’s captivating views. And its focus might help Terry Jones, the director of “God Hates Us All,” cast about for an idea more lasting than burning the Quran. Projects that attempt to incorporate multiple perspectives on a single perspective — like this one, intended to incorporate marketing strategies with strong content ideas — are innovative because they can attract audiences to the cause.
A public that is involved in making entertainment rather than buying it allows more leeway. Alan Moore‘s graphic novel “V for Vendetta” presents an after-the-ballot-box idea – a concept as worthy of its origins as it is for the kids among its book-buying audience that has the music group Coldplay releasing music that London’s Mayor Boris Johnson considered so worthy that he invited his lead singer to become a “Citizen of London.” It’s a community he’s in. Like Stewart, he has abandoned his post on British public television. While the program was still under the helm of Sir Piers Morgan, the British forceful supporter of an idea to ban guns – a supporter of a noble idea that allows people to announce their dissent from the culture of thought like a “Greenpeace Pirate” – Morgan maneuvered Coldplay past naive caricatures and gave the band wings. More.
In the same spirit, the Canadian band Rush has already demonstrated that the band could storm the gates of the stars in their galaxy. They were not a product cobbled by an intellectually vacuous announcer upset about having had his privates fingers. Neil Peart, the band’s lyricist and drummer, redeems other like-minded outcasts, such as Jon Stewart, a man tormented by the patriarchs on the Right who named him a loser when he accepted a lucrative deal to liven up the mindless chatter of global TV anchors.
A campaign to exile an outcast like Harry Connick Jr. from the music world would be a felony worthy of punishment – worse than the silly idea that ridicules the “Red Rover, Red Rover” bus driver, because the music world would be made better because of him.
← What is network deluded in its assumption that if it is covered as news, it is news?
Leave a Reply